By: Christian Haag
April 5 2023
Bill Clinton's settlement with Paula Jones is not comparable to Donald Trump's ‘hush money’ paid to Stormy Daniels
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Fact-Check
The Verdict False
Clinton and Jones had an out-of-court settlement, but Trump made a hush money payment to Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair.
Claim ID fffb4a3b
Context
Some Twitter users are equating the settlement between former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones to former U.S. President Donald Trump's "hush money" payment to Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford), an adult film actor. Several Twitter accounts have a picture with the caption, "Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850K to go away. I don't remember the FBI raiding his lawyer's office." However, the comparison is a false equivalence.
In Fact
The payment between Trump and Daniels is considered "hush money" – payment made to prevent someone from revealing embarrassing or discrediting information – and is now at the center of his second indictment. Clinton and Jones closed their case with an $850,000 settlement out-of-court in 1998. Jones filed a lawsuit in 1994 accusing Clinton of sexual misconduct at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, in May 1991. This was followed by a more than four-year legal dispute. Clinton denied the allegations but eventually settled to end the dispute.
News of the affair between Trump and Daniels, which occurred during a golf tournament in 2006, first surfaced in 2018. Daniels claimed the two had sex, and that she accepted $130,000 dollars from Trump's lawyer prior to the 2016 election to not disclose the affair. In a 2018 interview on 60 Minutes, Daniels says she took the money to keep her family safe and was legally and physically threatened to remain silent. As a result, Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen was accused of falsifying business records and filing the payment as legal fees through a shell company. Cohen was sentenced to jail after pleading guilty in August 2018 to tax evasion and breaking campaign finance rules. Earlier this year, New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg set up a grand jury to investigate the "hush money" affair further.
The claim has been previously fact-checked by AP, USA Today, and Factcheck.org, reaching the same conclusion.
Conclusion
As the comparison is a false equivalence since the Clinton-Jones affair was a settlement and the Trump-Daniels affair was a "hush money" payment, we have marked this claim as false.