Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who is suing President Trump, was arrested at an Ohio strip club for allegedly letting patrons touch her on stage, which is a violation of state law.
Early Thursday, Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, tweeted that the arrest "was a setup & politically motivated."
"It reeks of desperation. We will fight all bogus charges," Avenatti tweeted.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was performing at Sirens, a strip club in Columbus, when some of the club's patrons touched her in a "non-sexual" way, Avenatti told The Associated Press.
An Ohio law known as the Community Defense Act, passed in 2007, prohibits anyone who is not a family member from touching a nude or semi-nude dancer.
According to an article published last year in The Columbus Dispatch, the law, which also restricts the hours of operation for strip clubs and adult book stores, is rarely enforced.
The article quoted the Franklin County Sheriff's office as saying in the decade since the law was enacted, it had never had "any complaints or reasons to apply" it.
"We have gone back as far as we have records for, and nothing has been found," a spokesman for the sheriff's office, Marc Gofstein, told the Dispatch.
The AP reports that a Columbus police spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment. A person who answered the phone at the strip club declined to comment.
In October 2016 on the eve of the presidential election, reports emerged that Daniels had been paid $130,000 by then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen in "hush money" in exchange for her silence about an alleged 2007 affair.
In April, Daniels filed suit in federal court in New York charging that Trump had defamed her.
The president has denied the affair, but has admitted to reimbursing Cohen for the payment. "The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair," Trump tweeted in May, referring to Daniels.
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