Donald Trump has been ordered by a judge in England to pay more than £620,000 in legal costs after unsuccessfully suing a company over denied allegations he took part in “perverted” sex acts.
The US president brought a data protection claim against Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultancy founded by a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, in 2022.
Steele authored the report known as the Steele dossier, which included allegations – all denied by Trump – that he had been “compromised” by the Russian security service, the FSB, and also included two memos that claimed he had taken part in “sex parties” while in St Petersburg and consorted with sex workers in Moscow.
Mrs Justice Steyn threw out the claim in February last year without ruling on the truth of the allegations, and ordered Trump to pay Orbis’s costs “of the entire claim” including an initial payment of £290,000, which a hearing in January was told Trump had “decided not to pay”.
That led to him being prevented from taking part in a three-day hearing to decide the size of the total legal bill, after which Judge Rowley on Thursday ordered the US president to pay £626,058.98.
The judge said the figure was “both reasonable and proportionate”, with interest accruing daily at 12%.
In a witness statement, Trump said he had brought the case to prove that claims in the Steele dossier, published by the BuzzFeed website in 2017, that he engaged in “perverted sexual acts” in Russia were false.
Many of the claims in the dossier were never substantiated and lawyers for Trump said the report was “egregiously inaccurate” and contained “numerous false, phoney or made-up allegations”.
Steele was paid by Democrats for research that included salacious allegations Russians could use to blackmail Trump. The dossier assembled in 2016 created a political storm just before Trump’s inauguration with rumours and uncorroborated allegations that have since been largely discredited.
Orbis had said the lawsuit should be thrown out because the report had never been meant to be made public and was published by BuzzFeed without the permission of Steele or Orbis. It also said the claim had been filed too late.
