Michael Avenatti arrives at a federal court in Manhattan for a criminal case in which he is accused of stealing money from his former client, adult-film star Stormy Daniels on Jan. 24, 2022 in New York City. The cover of Daniels’s book, entered as an exhibit at the trial, is on the right.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels leveled accusations of fraud and theft against Michael Avenatti, telling a jury that the disgraced celebrity attorney “stole from me and lied to me” during long-anticipated testimony about the disastrous fall of a once-renowned attorney-client relationship.
When she was represented by Avenatti, Daniels’s litigation against former President Donald Trump that made both lawyer and client household names. Before that relationship went south, Daniels said, Avenatti understood she was struggling financially.
“I explained to him that I didn’t have a large deposit or retainer to spend and I was concerned about finding someone I could afford,” Daniels, introduced to the jury under her birth name Stephanie Clifford, said.
Avenatti, who jettisoned his defense attorneys earlier this week, is now representing himself. He told a skeptical federal judge that he wants to subject that his former client to a six-hour cross examination.
“We’ll see about those six hours,” U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman shot back before trial proceedings began.
Before the lunch recess began, Daniels had barely recited the well-known backdrop of her retaining Avenatti for her fight with the 45th president. The government’s direct examination explored how one of the most notorious attorney-client relationships of the early years of the Trump administration devolved into bitter recriminations, accusations and criminal prosecution years later.
In the lead up to the prosecution of Trump’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen, Avenatti represented Daniels in a discovery battle over what she described as Trump’s hush money payments to silence their affair.
Though Trump never has faced charges in connection with those payments, prosecutors said the former president—thinly veiled in court papers as “Individual 1″—instructed Cohen to pay her and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal for their silence before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen later pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in connection with the scheme.
That litigation made Avenatti a fixture across cable news and led interest to a book deal for Daniels, who later published her memoir under the title “Full Disclosure.” She claimed that Avenatti stole almost $300,000 of her $800,000 advance of that book, keeping her in the dark about those payments.
That was far more than the agreement she said she thought she had entered.
“He said it’ll be $100,” Daniels said, of their agreement and his plans for a crowd-funded legal defense fund.
During opening statements, prosecutors said that Avenatti was “desperate for money” when he allegedly swindled Daniels out of her advance.
Before Daniels took the stand, Avenatti’s former lawyer Sean Macias corroborated that portrait of financial desperation. Macias described himself as “shocked” when Avenatti showed up at his office saying that he was “jammed up” and needed $250,000 in the form of a bridge loan.
“He was the top lawyer on TV and everything,” Macias said.
Recalling him as looking “just agitated,” Macias told a jury that Avenatti said he needed the money “now.”
“I just looked at him and said, ‘Seriously? Are you—Seriously?’” Macias recounted, seemingly gobsmacked in the retelling.
Macias said he did not loan Avenatti the money, but Avenatti’s former co-counsel Mark Geragos did. Geragos figured prominently in a different criminal prosecution against Avenatti for conspiring to extort Nike by threatening to expose a corruption scandal unless they paid him more than $20 million. Geragos, who participated in the negotiations with Nike, was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in that case.
Avenatti was ultimately sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for that conviction, but he has served much of that sentence via home confinement in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other than the two New York prosecutions, he was charged with a variety of alleged frauds in California. His first thwarted prosecution there ended in a mistrial after a federal judge found that prosecutors failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence.
Avenatti continues to maintain his innocence over the pending charges against him, from coast to coast. In the Daniels case, Avenatti claims that the alleged fraud is little more than a “fee dispute” that the government should never have treated criminally.
Daniels’s testimony will continue following a lunch recess.
This is a developing story.
(Photo of Avenatti by Spencer Platt/Getty Images; Daniels photo is a trial exhibit)
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