Charges Against Stormy Daniels Dismissed After Arrest at Strip Club

In the end, the arrest at an Ohio strip club of Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star who said she had an affair with Donald Trump before he became president, was quickly resolved because of one fact: She was not a regular employee of the club.

Clifford, who performs under the name Stormy Daniels, simply had a two-night gig at the Sirens Gentlemen’s Club in Columbus.

That distinction resulted in the three misdemeanor charges of illegal sexual activity that were brought against Clifford after her Wednesday night arrest being dropped Thursday afternoon. The Columbus police later said that they had made a mistake in making the arrest.

But in the less than 24 hours that Clifford was arrested, charged, bailed out and released, the episode, widely reported in the national media, generated questions.

Was the arrest of Clifford — who has gained nationwide prominence for her accusations against Trump — politically motivated? Why was it even a priority to send four detectives to a strip club?

The episode began about 10 p.m. Wednesday when four vice detectives from the Columbus Police Department were sent to Sirens in northeastern Columbus to investigate complaints “alleging prostitution and drug activity,” court documents show.

The detectives said in affidavits that while dancing topless, Clifford pressed patrons’ faces into her chest and fondled the breasts of some women in the audience.

She performed similar acts on three officers and grabbed one by the buttocks, according to the affidavits. Clifford was arrested and charged with three counts of illegal sexually oriented activity, a misdemeanor, the arrest report says.

Michael Avenatti, Clifford’s lawyer and a sharp critic of Trump, said early Thursday that he saw political machinations behind the arrest. “This was a setup & politically motivated,” he said on Twitter.

The charges against Clifford stemmed “from an allegation that while performing, she engaged in touching with customers who turned out to be undercover vice officers,” Avenatti said in a later phone interview. “So there are undercover vice officers that came to the club for the purpose of trying to get her to touch them so that they could then arrest her, which is ludicrous.”

“My understanding is that a number of undercover officers were female, which was not unusual to my client, because a huge number of women are turning out to see her shows,” he added. “And a couple of officers asked her to allow them to place their face in between her breasts.”

Early Thursday morning, Clifford was released from the Jackson Pike jail in Columbus after posting $6,054 cash bail, Avenatti said. He said his client would be entering a not guilty plea. She was scheduled to appear in court Friday.

But then, shortly after noon Thursday, Avenatti announced that charges against Clifford had been dropped.

The law under which Clifford was arrested applies to people who “regularly” appear nude or seminude at a particular establishment. But Clifford had not appeared at the club consistently, prosecutors said in a motion dismissing the charges.

She had only two appearances scheduled there — the one Wednesday and a second Thursday.

Calls and emails to the Columbus Police Department and the office of the Columbus city attorney Thursday were not returned.

But in a statement issued late Thursday, the Columbus police chief, Kim Jacobs, acknowledged that while vice officers believed they had probable cause to make an arrest, “one element of the law was missed in error and charges were subsequently dismissed.”

“A mistake was made, and I accept full responsibility,” Jacobs said. She added that while it was “reasonable” for vice officers to have been at the strip club, “the motivations behind the officers’ actions will be reviewed internally.”

Asked about the arrest, a man who answered the phone at Sirens on Thursday declined to comment or provide his name.

Clifford, who was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about her involvement with Trump, has drawn crowds at strip clubs across the country, including in Greenville, South Carolina, Salem, Oregon, and Des Moines, Iowa.

But her arrest Wednesday raised questions about the criminalization of consensual sexual conduct in the United States and about law enforcement priorities, especially in a city that saw a surge in homicides last year.

Michael Probst, a criminal-defense lawyer in Columbus, said that there had recently been some police stings in strip clubs. But he said those have tended to focus “more in the quote-unquote Champagne rooms, where someone might be trying to engage in sexual conduct” with a stripper.

Probst said he doubted it was a coincidence that undercover police were in the club during Clifford’s performance.

“To me, clearly the objective was to be there for Stormy Daniels,” he said.

Had Clifford been convicted, she could have, in theory, faced up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine for each count. In reality, Probst said, the most serious punishment she would likely have faced had she been convicted would have been probation — and perhaps not even that.

Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law who has conducted research on the criminalization of consensual sexual activity, said she was “stunned” to read about Clifford’s arrest.

She said strip club workers are usually classified as independent contractors, which means they lack protections against possible wage theft, nonconsensual touching and sexual harassment while on the job in a club that itself is not illegal and where attendance is by choice.

“It strikes me as one of those moments when you see legislators are hostile to strip club workers in every sense,” she said. “The tendency to not protect workers who work in the sex industry — that is basically across our nation. People want to consume porn, but at the same time we don’t want to protect women who work in that industry.”

Referring to Clifford’s arrest, Franks said: “The law itself, and this particular enforcement of it, raises questions about why now, and why in particular her.”

As for Clifford, Avenatti said on Twitter that she planned to be back at Sirens Gentlemen’s Club on Thursday night.