Michael Avenatti was found guilty of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, having forged Stormy Daniels’s signature on a fake letter to his former client’s book agent in order to send close to half of the payments for her 2018 memoir to himself
Photo: Corbis via Getty Images Convicted felon and disbarred attorney Michael Avenatti was found guilty of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in federal court in Manhattan on Friday for stealing $300,000 of a book advance from his former client and porn actress Stormy Daniels, who wrote about her brief affair with Donald Trump.
Avenatti, who represented himself in the trial, was found to have forged Daniels’s signature on a fake letter to his former client’s book agent in order to send close to half of the payments for her 2018 memoir to himself. Representing himself in the final days of the trial, he failed to convince jurors that he had not “intended to defraud” or harm Daniels.
Avenatti came to national prominence representing Daniels in her lawsuit to dismiss a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement she signed with Donald Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen. The scandal, which rocked the presidency in 2018, involved an October 2016 payment to Daniels to cover up an alleged affair between the two in 2006.
Michael Cohen was eventually convicted of a campaign finance violation for the payment, and even before Friday’s conviction, Avenatti’s time in the spotlight had ended in permanent damage to his career. Unrelated to the Daniels lawsuit, he was convicted in 2020 of attempted extortion of Nike following his alleged effort to pressure the company to pay him and a client $25 million so he would not disclose bad press about the shoe giant.
As is usual when Avenatti enters a courtroom or speaks at length, there were some fireworks during the trial, in which he represented himself following what he called a “breakdown” in communication with his legal team. During Stormy Daniels’s testimony, Avenatti — who did not testify — grilled his former client about her time as a paranormal investigator. “Do the dead speak back to you?” he asked the plaintiff. “Do they communicate with you?” The answer was yes.
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