Former US President Donald Trump has sued in Miami his former lawyer Michael Coheninvolved in the case of payments to porn actress Stormy Danielsfor causing him “great damage to his reputation” and demanded 500 million dollars as compensation, national media reported. Trump’s legal team has filed the lawsuit this Wednesday in a federal court in the Southern District of Florida for Cohen’s “multiple breaches” in the attorney-client relationship and illicit enrichment, among other accusations.

The lawsuit is not yet in the US electronic court record, but according to the media that had access to the text, Trump alleges that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship by “spreading falsehoods” about him “with bad intentions and entirely selfish ends” and further engaged in “other misconduct” and breached the contractual terms of a confidentiality agreement. “Such continuing and escalating misconduct has reached a proverbial crescendo and has left no alternative but seek legal redress through this action,” the text of the lawsuit states.

Trump “has suffered great reputational damage as a direct result of the violations,” he stresses. Cohen, a Trump confidant until 2018, is a key witness in the judicial process opened against the former president in New York for the allegedly illegal payments made to Stormy Daniels in 2016 to ensure that he did not speak publicly of a relationship that she says they kept a decade before.

The events occurred in the middle of the 2016 election campaign, in which Trump, the Republican candidate, was the winner. The former president pleaded not guilty to the 34 crimes of falsifying business records that prosecutor Alvin Bragg charged him with two weeks ago. A source close to Trump’s legal team told Fox News that the lawsuit against Michael Cohen “has nothing to do with the lawless case and no facts from the Manhattan district attorney and it’s a totally separate matter.”

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 of organizing those secret paymentsamong other federal charges, against Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, but maintains that Trump directed them, and was sentenced to three years in prison.