A day after reports surfaced that Stormy Daniels' former attorney Michael Avenatti was now confined to the same gloomy New York City jail cell that once housed Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the once high-flying lawyer won a significant victory in court—one that involves Daniels.
Avenatti faces a trial starting next week on charges that he attempted to extort the Nike footwear corporation out of $20 million. Prosecutors in that case wanted federal judge Paul Gardephe to forbid Avenatti’s defense lawyers from telling the trial jury about Avenatti’s work representing Daniels in her lawsuit against Donald Trump in 2018 and early 2019.
In a separate case, Avenatti faces charges that he bilked the AVN Hall of Famer out of approximately $300,000 by diverting her publisher’s advance for her 2018 memoir Full Disclosure into a bank account that he controlled, and then spent the cash on himself. But Avenatti has claimed that those charges and other allegations of financial crimes that he now faces are the resulut of “vindictive prosecution,” motivated by his opposition to Trump.
Immediately upon filing the Daniels lawsuit against Trump—seeking to free longtime porn performer from a “hush money” deal with Trump over a sexual encounter in 2006—Avenatti embarked on a seemingly relentless media blitz, appearing almost nightly on various cable news shows, and other outlets. In nearly every appearance, he attacked and ridiculed Trump, and Trump’s now-imprisoned former lawyer Michael Cohen.
But federal prosecutors argued in court Wednesday that “this case has nothing to do with politics in any way, shape or form,” hoping to stifle Avenatti’s expected efforts to claim that he is simply being persecuted by the government for speaking out against Trump.
Gardephe, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2008 by Republican President George W. Bush, admitted that “nothing would please me more” than to bar mention of Daniels and Trump from Avenatti’s upcoming trial, but because the prosecution had cited Avenatti’s large fandom in its indictment of him, he was compelled to allow discussion of the two in the courtroom.
“Let’s be honest, it drove the conduct of everyone involved,” Gardephe said in the New York courtroom. “I can’t pretend there was sort of an immaculate conception here where Mr. Avenatti suddenly became this incredibly public lawyer magically.”
Jury selection in Avenatti’s Nike extortion case is set to begin on January 27.
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