Michael Avenatti, the disgraced, tough-talking braggart who falsely accused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of masterminding gang rape parties during his high school years, has been convicted of yet another crime.
On Friday a jury found him guilty of stealing $300,000 of a book advance from porn star Stormy Daniels.
It’s the second major felony conviction for Avenatti, who had joined forces with Daniels to bring down President Trump. Daniels had claimed Trump paid her $130,000 to hush up a sexual affair.
Book Deal
The revelation about that $130,000 hush payment, and the supposed affair that Daniels eventually confessed never happened, led to an $800,000 contract with St. Martin’s Press for a book titled Full Disclosure.
When Daniels didn’t receive the second payment, as the New York Post reported, she contacted her then attorney Avenatti, who promised to find out what happened:
“I did not get paid today. I am not f–king happy,” she said in one of the messages about a month after she was due to receive her second payment in 2018.
“The publisher owes me a payment. … This is bulls–t,” she wrote in another.
But St. Martin’s had, in fact, paid the money … to Avenatti. He forged Daniels’ signature in a letter to her literary agent. The letter directed the agent to send two payments to a bank account he controlled.
Daniels only found out in February 2019 when she went directly to her agents and the publisher. Prosecutors indicted the crooked lawyer three months later, the New York Times reported:
Prosecutors said Mr. Avenatti spent the money on his law firm’s payroll, plane tickets, restaurants and a monthly lease payment of about $3,900 for a Ferrari. Although he eventually sent Ms. Daniels about half of the money he received, prosecutors added, she never got the rest.
Ms. Daniels testified that she had not given Mr. Avenatti permission to take any of her payments from St. Martin’s. And she said he had repeatedly lied to her as she asked for his help in obtaining what she believed was money the publisher owed her.
Dozens of text messages between the two were displayed on a courtroom screen. They showed Mr. Avenatti promising to help Ms. Daniels and at one point saying he was “threatening litigation” against St. Martin’s.
Undeterred by the old adage that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, Avenatti mounted his own defense. Strangely, he tried to undermine Daniels credibility by trying to paint her as a kook involved in ghost-hunting and necromancy, the Times reported:
In questioning his former client and comrade, Mr. Avenatti concentrated [on] her interest in supernatural matters, asking whether a “dark entity” had once entered her New Orleans home through a “portal” and about her claim that she could speak with people who had died.
Ms. Daniels testified that a medium told her about the dark entity’s visit and she acknowledged saying she believed she could talk with the dead — although she could not explain exactly how. “It just happens sometimes,” she said.
She also explained her participation in a project called “Spooky Babes,” described on its website as a group of “investigators, occultists, psychics, and healers” that examines paranormal activity including “poltergeist” phenomena, “shadow figures” and physical attacks by invisible assailants.
The tactic failed. The jury convicted him for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He faces 20 years in prison. Sentencing is May 24.
First Conviction
Last year, Avenatti was sentenced to 30 months in prison for trying to extort more than $20 million from Nike.
Another case, in which Avenatti was accused of trying to defraud five clients including a mentally ill paraplegic, ended in a mistrial because prosecutors failed to disclose information to the defense.
The one crime for which Avenatti will never be punished is lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Kavanaugh confirmation.
In September 2018, after leftist professor Christine Blasey Ford falsely accused Kavanaugh of sex assault in high school, Avenatti stepped forward with a woman named Julie Swetnick.
Swetnick and Avenatti concocted a wild tale that Kavanaugh attended high-school parties where he drugged women and joined gang rapes. Swetnick retracted the claim, but Avenatti persisted and produced another “client” whom he said would verify Swetnick’s claims.
That woman denied telling Avenatti any such thing. The fast-talking porn lawyer, she said, “twisted my words.”
Once it became clear that Avenatti manufactured the story, then committee chief Charles Grassley sent two referrals to the FBI to investigate Avenatti’s “fraud” and “materially false statements.”
Avenatti famously said he would run for president in 2020. He has not announced whether he will try a run from prison in 2024.
