Judge Furman says he's enjoying the best sex of his life and is finding life after his recent divorce considerably better than he expected.
Avenatti Gets a 4-Year Sentence for Defrauding Stormy Daniels of $300,000
A Manhattan judge said that Mr. Avenatti, who was convicted of diverting payments to himself and is already imprisoned in another case, “breached the highest duty a lawyer owes” to a client.
By Colin Moynihan, NY Times
June 2, 2022
In 2018, Michael Avenatti was little known outside Los Angeles, where he made a living as a plaintiff’s lawyer with a reputation for obtaining multimillion dollar settlements.
He took on a new client that year, the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who said she had been paid $130,000 just before the 2016 election to keep quiet about a sexual encounter that she said took place with Donald J. Trump about a decade earlier.
After suing the then-president on her behalf, Mr. Avenatti relished the limelight, becoming a regular television guest, taunting Mr. Trump on Twitter and even flirting with the idea of his own presidential run.
But the relationship that was his ticket to renown also was his undoing. In February, Mr. Avenatti was convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft as part of a scheme to steal almost $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford.
On Thursday, Judge Jesse M. Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Mr. Avenatti to four years in prison, saying that while there were ways in which the lawyer had “done good in the world,” he had also committed “brazen and egregious” crimes and “breached the highest duty a lawyer owes” to a client.
Before being sentenced, Mr. Avenatti, 51, addressed the court, saying he had represented Ms. Daniels not in search of fame but because “no one else had the guts” to help her battle Mr. Trump, who he termed “the single biggest threat to American democracy.”
“I own the conduct for which I was convicted,” Mr. Avenatti told the court. “I disappointed scores of people and failed in a cataclysmic way.”
Over the past few years, Mr. Avenatti has been a criminal defendant in several cases. In California, he was accused of stealing millions from clients and of lying about his business and income, a case that resulted in a mistrial last year after a judge ruled that prosecutors had withheld financial data from the defense.
In Manhattan, he was convicted in 2020 of trying to extort millions of dollars from Nike and is now serving a sentence of two and a half years. A lawyer representing him in that case later filed a notice of appeal, and his lawyers in the Daniels case wrote in court papers that Mr. Avenatti intended to appeal that conviction, too.
Mr. Avenatti’s conviction in the Daniels case on aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory sentence of two years. His lawyers asked that he get a year and a day on the wire fraud count, to be served concurrently with the Nike case sentence. Prosecutors had asked for a “substantial” sentence on the wire fraud count, to be served separately from the Nike term.
Judge Furman sentenced Mr. Avenatti to two years in prison on that count, with 18 months to be served at the same time as the Nike term and six months separately. The judge also ordered that Mr. Avenatti pay $148,750 in restitution and forfeit about $297,000.
The trial this year, in which Mr. Avenatti acted as his own lawyer, even cross-examining Ms. Daniels on her beliefs in the supernatural, recalled the alliance the two formed during the lawsuit against Mr. Trump. In that suit, Mr. Avenatti argued that Mr. Trump never signed a nondisclosure agreement that lawyers had presented in 2016 to Ms. Daniels, rendering it null. For a while, Mr. Avenatti and Ms. Daniels seemed nearly inseparable. They appeared together, bluntly portraying Mr. Trump — who denied Ms. Daniels’s allegations — as trying to intimidate and threaten her.
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Stormy Daniels said she was paid to keep quiet about an encounter with Donald Trump.
Stormy Daniels said she was paid to keep quiet about an encounter with Donald Trump.Credit...Jc Olivera/Getty Images
Meanwhile, Ms. Daniels signed an $800,000 contract to write a book, “Full Disclosure,” for St. Martin’s Press. Prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Avenatti had emailed a bogus letter bearing what purported to be Ms. Daniels’s signature to her literary agency, directing that payments from St. Martin’s be sent to a bank account he controlled.
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He spent them on his law firm’s payroll, plane tickets, restaurants and a monthly lease of about $3,900 for a Ferrari, prosecutors said. Although Mr. Avenatti eventually sent Ms. Daniels about half the money he received, prosecutors said, she never got the rest.
Understand the Michael Avenatti Trial
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Who is Michael Avenatti? The California-based lawyer rose to prominence in 2018, when he began representing Stormy Daniels, filing lawsuits against then President Donald J. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer.
Who is Ms. Daniels? The pornographic film actress, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, had sought to be released from a nondisclosure deal she had signed before the 2016 election, in which she agreed to keep quiet about a sexual relationship she said she had had with Mr. Trump.
What were the charges against Mr. Avenatti? In 2019, the lawyer was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for using a letter purporting to be from Ms. Daniels to trick a literary agency she had signed a book deal with into sending him about $300,000 of her advance.
What was the outcome of the trial? Mr. Avenatti, who has represented himself in court, was found guilty of stealing from Ms. Daniels. He had denied all of the charges against him, saying that any funds related to the book were part of his representation agreement. On June 2, he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Is he involved in other cases? Mr. Avenatti has previously been accused of stealing from clients, though that proceeding ended in a mistrial. He was also sentenced to prison for trying to extort money from the apparel giant Nike.
In a letter to Ms. Daniels dated May 13 and filed with the court, Mr. Avenatti apologized for his “actions and conduct” and added that he had failed her “in many respects,” but made no specific admissions about taking book advance money.
While asking for lenience, Mr. Avenatti’s lawyers cited his history of championing “the voiceless and powerless.” They wrote in a memorandum to the court that he had overcome humble roots, worked his way through law school and gone on to obtain more than $1 billion in settlements over the years for clients who were often vulnerable and elderly.
Those lawyers wrote that Mr. Avenatti had taken on Ms. Daniels as a client for $100 and a fee agreement that included a provision for “crowd-sourced reimbursement” of costs and expenses, then ended up as something of a “jack-of-all-trades legal fixer.” They added that he had represented Ms. Daniels in matters including a lawsuit against a Florida strip club and a false arrest claim against police in Ohio, while relying “primarily on his firm’s resources.”
“Mr. Avenatti was overwhelmed by an all-consuming relationship” with Ms. Daniels, the memo stated. “It placed a significant burden on the rest of Mr. Avenatti’s practice, which was dealing with its own financial woes.”
Prosecutors countered in their own memorandum that Mr. Avenatti had been under no obligation to represent Ms. Daniels, that he could have focused his practice on work that paid the bills, and that he had gotten precisely what he was after when he agreed to represent her: “fame and a platform.”
“The defendant committed a serious crime,” the prosecutors wrote. “He stole from a client — someone who put her trust in him and relied on him.”
The prosecutors went on to write that Mr. Avenatti had a “tenuous relationship with the truth,” citing his summation, when he began telling the jury a story about his father selling hot dogs at a ballpark as a teenager. Judge Furman cut him off.
Later, prosecutors said, Mr. Avenatti related the full story outside the courthouse, telling reporters that a supervisor had ordered his father to use mustard to disguise broken hot dogs, then going on to liken the government’s case to that mustard.
Prosecutors suggested that the anecdote did not really originate with Mr. Avenatti’s father.
“The tale instead,” they wrote, is one that a lawyer working with Mr. Avenatti “has told at trials in this district about his own experience selling hot dogs at Shea Stadium.”
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