Placeholder while loading article actions
Lawyer Michael Avenatti was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison on charges of taking $ 300,000 from his former client Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who accused Donald Trump of pressuring her to shut up. an alleged sexual encounter in 2008.
Daniels’ trial, which took place in New York, was Avenatti’s third federal criminal case in two years. He was previously convicted in New York of attempting to extort Nike Inc., and in California there are pending charges in a case in which he is accused of stealing funds from his law firm; an earlier judgment on these charges ended in a null judgment on a technical issue.
Avenatti is serving a 30-month prison sentence for the Nike case. His lawyers said on Thursday that 30 months of the sentence in the Daniels case will be executed following this punishment, which means that the combined total sentence of Avenatti for the two cases is 60 months, or five years.
He plans to appeal and is currently in federal prison, his lawyer said.
Avenatti rose to national prominence representing Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in her battle against Trump. A ubiquitous presence on cable news and on social media, Avenatti often denounced Trump’s behavior and briefly explored a 2020 presidential candidacy before finally deciding against it. His arrest and indictment by federal prosecutors in March 2019 set in motion a swift and startling fall into disgrace.
The status of key investigations involving Donald Trump
In 2018, Avenatti filed two lawsuits against Trump on behalf of Daniels. One was a defamation suit that Daniels says Avenatti filed against his wishes. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.
The other lawsuit was an attempt to invalidate the confidentiality agreement signed by Daniels when he accepted $ 130,000 in cash from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in exchange for his silence over an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. years before. Trump has denied the affair. Cohen paid the silence money during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Cohen later pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in connection with it.
This lawsuit was also dismissed, with a federal judge citing a decision by Trump and Cohen not to enforce the agreement.
Daniels wrote a report, “Full Disclosure,” for which he was to receive an advance of $ 800,000. But according to federal prosecutors, Avenatti stole $ 300,000 from that amount by falsifying Daniels’ signature on a form that redirected bank transfers to a controlled account.
Avenatti then spent months clearing Daniels’ questions about lost quotas, leading her to believe that the publisher was not paying her, when in fact Avenatti was diverting payments from her advance book offer.
After representing himself for much of the trial, Avenatti was found guilty of electronic fraud and aggravated identity theft at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan on February 4. The jury deliberated for about two days.
In an interview with Inside Edition that month, Daniels said she was “very happy that the jury made the right decision.”
“They looked at the facts, set aside their personal feelings about who I am and what I do,” he said.
Depp-Heard verdict will have a shocking impact on #MeToo, fear
Avenatti argued that he was entitled to the money from the book advance. His claims were contradicted, however, by an extensive history of WhatsApp messages with Daniels that included repeated assurances that he was working hard to get the publisher to meet the terms of his contract. As he offered daily excuses to Daniels, he hid that he had charged for himself.
Avenatti “did the opposite” of fulfilling his duty as a lawyer with a client on his behalf representing Daniels and “instead of using his law degree as a license to steal,” the U.S. prosecutor said. of Manhattan, Damian Williams, in a statement at the time of the trial.
The trial was sometimes a spectacle. A team of federal public defenders had initially been prepared to try Avenatti’s case, but ended up serving as his advisers after a judge granted Avenatti’s motion to act as his own attorney.
In his summary, Avenatti threw himself into personal anecdotes that were interrupted by the prosecution’s objections, which the judge granted. In an apparent attempt to undermine the credibility of his former client, Avenatti also used his interrogation of Daniels to make him a grid on his belief in the supernatural.