Michael Avenatti. ABC News/Reuters.
A jury has found Michael Avenatti guilty on federal charges of extortion, wire fraud and transmitting an interstate threat. ABC News. Avenatti soared to notability after representing Stormy Daniels and attacking President Trump. However, he was arrested for attempting to extort Nike, threatening to release information harmful to them about their relationship with the NBA and college basketball. He demanded $1.5 million for his client, Gary Franklin, who ran a youth basketball league that Nike stopped sponsoring. This amount was dwarfed by the $22 million that he demanded for himself. Avenatti faces up to 42 years in prison for this case alone but also has two other pending trials. The first one is for defrauding Stormy Daniels who claims that he took $300,000 from her book deal while the second one is for defrauding multiple clients in Los Angeles.
My Comment:
Remember a while back before he got arrested that Avenatti was considered a possible candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential race? Seems like a lifetime ago. It's clear that even with the sorry state of the 2020 candidates, Avenatti isn't even going to be an afterthought since he's likely to be in prison soon.
Avenatti is mostly a media creation and it seems to have gone to his head. He tried to play the Gloria Allred role where he took high profile cases and got very rich in the process. Plus he was savoring his role as anti-Trump political pundit on CNN and other news networks. His plan was to become a media mogul and eventual transfer that success into a presidential run and he almost accomplished that.
I don't think the media ever really vetted Avenatti and just went along with him because they desperately thought the Stormy Daniels story was going to hurt President Trump. It didn't and if anything it made him more popular because it made the President sound like a lady killer. Plus everyone already knew that Donald Trump was a scoundrel when it came to women and everyone had already forgiven him for it.
But it should have been clear that he was a scummy guy. When the lawyer becomes more famous than the client, and I think Avenatti qualified, you know that his main interest isn't serving his client. I thought that right away and it seems that Stormy Daniels would agree with me.
However, it's also clear that Avenatti was a criminal. He defrauded his clients out of their money and did not do much to help them. Daniels got little more than publicity from Avenatti and his other clients got even less.
Had he stuck to defrauding clients he might have been ok but then he decided to take on Nike. Nike, for their part, didn't play along and immediately went to the police after Avenatti threatened them. They figured that whatever costs the damaging info about them was it was worth it to not pay someone who was blackmailing them. I've been very critical of Nike in the past and still am, but I think they handled this situation very well.
The most shocking thing about this is how greedy Avenatti is. It's clear that his client was an afterthought in the Nike case as he only demanded $1.5 million for him, but $22 million for himself. Even if his client had a case, and I really am not sure, it's clear it was never really about the client but all about Avenatti becoming richer.
I do have to say that it was satisfying to see Avenatti go down. I took a personal dislike to him immediately in a way that had nothing to do with what he was doing or his politics. He just screamed "scumbag lawyer" to me from the start. My hope is the judge throws the book at him in this case and he gets convicted in the other two trials as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment