My horrible experiences with Texas horse trainer/instructor Ellen Doughty-Hume

Do we know under what name Stormy Daniels was appearing in court? Her real name is Stephanie, I don’t know her current last name.

I don’t know, but I have no doubt that her stage name was worked into the lawsuit so that everyone would recognize it.

I wonder if the judge saw the name “Stormy Daniels” and went from there. Judicially, not politically, of course.

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Stephanie Clifford

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I think all her names and aliases were named In the lawsuit based on the screenshots Ellen shared. Which is pretty standard on a personal civil suit.

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The statements were made under the alias Stormy Daniel. It was impossible to keep that out of the trial.

Let’s keep in mind that the focus of the trial wasn’t to determine that “Ellen is a horrible person” it was to determine if there were “false statements made for the purpose of harming someone”.

My understanding is that some number of charges were dropped so the ones that were left for the jury to decide were either not defended with evidence or were value heavy statements with grey area.

A other thing to keep in mind, since there is no independent reporting….everything being said about what happened, or didn’t happen, is coming from a biased party. I think the original post made the intent clear when it said she was going to ”end her”. Follow that up with a campaign to harass clients and the malicious element was a no-brainer.

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No charges here. It is a civil suit.

I still have a hard time believing that so many COTH folks think Ellen is OK.

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The elements the jury are to find on are called “charges”, even in a civil suit. It has nothing to do with it being a criminal trial or not.

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I did not know there were people on COTH that think Ellen is OK, let alone 'so many ’ of them.
I must have missed it.

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Haven’t seen a lot of Ellen support on coth, but the FB crowd appears to be going in her favor. In my opinion it doesn’t really help that the only person talking about it is Allie, who I think means well, but comes across as overly hyperbolic on many of her posts.

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I went back and read the first part of this thread…there was a lot of support for Stormy and a lot of people who knew Ellen and agreed with what Stormy posted.
I wonder if those people were allowed to testify in support?

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There were several defense witnesses. Ellen was the only witness for her side. Stormy did not testify because “it was determined that ‘Ellen didn’t prove her case’

And I got the impression it was a quick jury decision. You have to dig into the comments to find some of the admitted missteps that were made.

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What comments are you referring to?

On the FB posts being put out about it.

Comments made by people who were not there and do not really know what happened?
Or are you talking about something else?

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The parties making statements are claiming to have been there. One just has to keep in mind that they were there for one of the sides and that they definitely have a bias they are not even pretending to hide.

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I agree, it’s not COTH as much as FB. But I still don’t get it.

OK. I blew it, but I’ll leave the post up since I don’t try to hide my mistakes or blame them on someone else.

The big issues for me are:

  1. Ellen has shown to have very poor horsemanship skills, and sometimes callous disregard for horses in her care.

  2. The USEA asked for feedback on Ellen, and then betrayed those who responded by forwarding their responses to Ellen.

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Is it possible they were legally required to send the information, through Ellen’s lawsuit?

I don’t know, not a lawyer. Apparently civil lawsuits can subpoena discovery information, even from non-parties who have information relevant to the case. The USEA info was the definition of that part of the case, for Ellen.

I’m guessing that part of the reason for the lawsuit was to view those USEA documents. If they hadn’t been as damaging to Ellen’s business as they were, I wonder if the lawsuit would have been dropped, or at least taken a different turn.

It is a fair point that anyone who sends information requested by the USEA could run the risk that it will be exposed, if someone sues them, or the USEA.

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For what it is worth, not a lawyer, but I do know that there is a big difference in winning a large judgment in a lawsuit and actually collecting on it.

Some big-dollar wins are primarily symbolic because the plaintiffs are not successful in collection.

Don’t know if that will apply to this lawsuit. I suppose an appeal could delay attempts at collection.

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I had a similar line of thinking about USEA being required to send those emails/letters to Ellen’s legal team. It would seem possible…???

And my ponderings went further, USEA maybe did keep the author anonymous (not clue as I’m not a lawyer) but depending on what was said in those emails/letters, Ellen could have just figured it out by the details that were included???

I would love an independent, investigative journalist to do a deep dive on this trial. In every story there are two sides - but the truth is somewhere in the middle.

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This! I’m not nearly legally savvy enough to try to parse through what happened, what was presented and why.

I am by no means an Ellen apologist, and have heard enough first hand that I would never put a horse in her care, but at the same time I am genuinely a believer (for better or worse) of the justice system.

On the USEA emails. I do wonder if Erin was made aware that these wouldn’t be confidential. That’s very likely considering we haven’t heard from Erin directly.

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