Attorney Michael Avenatti listens to a question during a news conference with Battle Born Progress, a progressive communications organization, on Aug. 31, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Reaching a new nadir for the celebrity lawyer, Michael Avenatti racked up more federal convictions on Friday, as a second Manhattan jury found him guilty — the time of defrauding Stormy Daniels and stealing her identity.
Over the course of a little more than a week, federal prosecutors laid out the case of Avenatti’s rise to prominence and his free fall through the story of his former pornographic film star client. Daniels had been trying to wiggle out of her non-disclosure agreement that kept her from going public with her alleged affair with former President Donald Trump. Avenatti represented her in that fight—and made them both social media and cable TV stars in the process.
For both, fame and notoriety came with other other opportunities, like a book deal that Daniels described as the culmination of a decade-long dream to write a memoir. She scored that deal, with the help of Avenatti and a ghostwriter, for a book ultimately published by St. Martin’s Press under the triple-entendre title “Full Disclosure.”
Prosecutors claimed, and a jury has now found, that Avenatti defrauded Daniels out of nearly $300,000 of her $800,000 advance.
In their unanimous verdict, the jury accepted Daniels’s charge against her former lawyer over the course of two days of grueling testimony: that “he lied to me and stole from me.”
The aggravated identity theft conviction shows the jury also believed Avenatti forged her signature.
For Avenatti, the verdict marks the latest humiliation from a man once rumored to be contemplating a presidential run and esteemed in some corners as a legal superstar of the Twitter-branded #resistance to Trump.
That plummet began nearly three years ago, when federal prosecutors in late March 2019 from coast-to-coast announced three indictments on an array of alleged financial crimes. Though Avenatti described the charges as a payback for his vocal opposition to the Trump administration, two sets of juries in the deep blue state of New York have now ratified the charges leveled there. He was previously sentenced to two and a half years in prison for conspiring to extort Nike. He served only a portion of that term behind bars, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Avenatti faces yet another federal trial in California, where the first attempt to prosecute him ended in a mistrial when the government failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence.
Representing himself in the Daniels case, Avenatti insisted that he was innocent and that he was entitled to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in book advances that landed in her bank account. Prosecutors entered numerous text message exchanges with his former client undermining that defense. Over the course of several months, Avenatti apparently told Daniels that he did not know why the publisher was late on her payments—long after the time prosecutors say he received and spent that money.
Avenatti faces up to 22 years in prison, though the actual term is expected to be lower.
Avenatti must surrender by 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday.
This is a developing story.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
Source: This post first appeared on
