Stormy Daniels Update: Charges Dismissed After Arrest At Ohio Strip Club

Prosecutors in Columbus, Ohio, have dropped criminal charges against Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who is suing President Trump, after she was arrested at an Ohio strip club on Wednesday for allegedly letting patrons touch her on stage.

"I am pleased to report that the charges against my client... have been dismissed in their entirety," Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, said in a tweet around midday on Thursday. He added a photo of the prosecutors' motion to dismiss all three charges against Daniels --- which a judge has granted.

In requesting to dismiss the charges, prosecutors said that the Ohio law that was invoked to arrest Daniels is meant to apply only to a person "who regularly appears nude or seminude on the premises of a sexually oriented business" — and that because Daniels hasn't been a regular at Sirens, the strip club in question, the case wouldn't hold up in court.

Earlier, Avenatti had tweeted that his client's arrest "was a setup & politically motivated."

"It reeks of desperation. We will fight all bogus charges," Avenatti said.

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 that 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.

Daniels' rise to national attention dates to October of 2016, on the eve of the presidential election, when reports emerged that then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen had paid her $130,000 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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