An ‘adrenaline junkie’ confronts Donald Trump
NEW YORK: In the small hours on the morning of his 41st birthday, lawyer Michael Avenatti lay restless at his home in Newport Beach, California. He was waiting on an email, and it finally arrived, with brainrattling force, around 5: 30am.
A court in New Jersey had reversed a US$ 41 million verdict he’d won against the accounting giant KPMG in a case involving allegations of massive auditing fraud. Avenatti, who thought of himself as the “KPMG Killer,” had missed the earlier-thanexpected birth of his first daughter while doing depositions in the case on the opposite coast; he’d burned through US$ 3 million in out- of-pocket expenses, and his firm stood to gain somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$16 million in legal fees. Now he would get nothing. “Ninety per cent of lawyers who had taken one on the chin like that, they’d be done,” Avenatti said earlier this week over coffee at a luxury Central Park hotel.
That setback in 2012 now serves as a parable of resilience in the legend Avenatti has been crafting about himself - both with a string of multimilliondollar jury verdicts and with his brash, almost nonstop cable news appearances. Avenatti is locked in a legal throwdown with the president of the United States over porn star Stormy Daniels, who will appear on “60 Minutes” Sunday for a much-hyped interview about her alleged affair with Donald Trump and the hush money she says she received during the 2016 campaign to keep it a secret.
Avenatti, who has heightened anticipation for his client’s television appearance by dribbling out hints about major revelations, has linked his reputation to the Daniels case. It is another big bet for an attorney with an enormous appetite for risk whose roster of courthouse adversaries includes mega- corporations, as well as celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Jim Carrey.
“He is an adrenaline junkie,” says Jonathan Turley, who taught Avenatti at George Washington University’s law school and has stayed in touch since his former student earned his law degree. “I think he needs that adrenaline rush. He lives his life aggressively. In both litigation and in life he shows a certain aggressive style.”
One moment Avenatti is pinballing among courtrooms across the country for highstakes litigation, including last year’s US$ 454 million judgment in a surgical- gown fraud case, one of the largest in California history. The next he’s delving into entrepreneurial pursuits,
He is an adrenaline junkie. I think he needs that adrenaline rush. He lives his life aggressively. In both litigation and in life he shows a certain aggressive style. Jonathan Turley, who taught Avenatti at George Washington University
such as buying Tully’s, a struggling Seattle coffee- shop chain, or blasting around a track while competing as a driver in a professional racecar circuit, sometimes hitting speeds of up to 195 MPH. The main photograph on his website depicts him in a race suit, rather than a business suit.
Avenatti, now 47, won’t say how he ended up representing Daniels beginning about six weeks ago. The porn actress and director, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has claimed that she had an affair with Trump in 2006 while the future president was a reality TV star whose wife, Melania, had recently given birth to their son.
“Initially, I was very sceptical about getting involved because I, much like many Americans, had preconceived notions about Stormy Daniels and her motivations and what she is all about,” Avenatti says.
It took him only about 20 minutes to decide that she was credible, he says, although he won’t reveal what led him to that conclusion. One thing he says he hasn’t done is examine her on- screen appearances. “Have I ever viewed pornography? Yes,” he says. “Have I ever viewed her work? No.”
He goes on to say that “we have in this country this Puritan, hypocritical, nonrealistic view of sex that is entirely different than the view, for instance, in Western Europe.”
Avenatti’s foil in the Daniels melodrama has been Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, as much as the president. Cohen has said he took out a home- equity loan to pay Daniels US$ 130,000 of his own money to keep her story of the affair secret and drafted a nondisclosure agreement. Avenatti has called Cohen’s claim that the president knew nothing of the deal “ridiculous.”
Avenatti has been daring Cohen to appear on television with him to discuss the case. He recently used an enlarged photograph of Cohen as a prop during a contentious appearance on CNN with Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz. (Cohen andSchwartz did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)
“That was fun,” Avenatti says. The legal dispute with Daniels and Trump centres on the particulars of the porn star’s nondisclosure agreement. But Avenatti is arguing a broader case about the integrity of the president and his legal teamand drawing from a wellhoned playbook of using media appearances as an integral part of his strategy.
“Have I ever not been confident or have I ever not acted confident?” says Avenatti, whittling and reframing a question. “I think I’ve always acted confident even at times I haven’t been confident.”
Brian Panish, a prominent plaintiffs attorney who has worked on cases with Avenatti, compares his former colleague to William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s attorney famous for appearing on all the Sunday talk shows on the same day during President Bill Clinton’s White House-intern sex scandal. It spawned the term “the full Ginsburg.”
“Avenatti knows how to deal with the media,” Panish says. “He seems to like it. You’re going to have to rename it - there’s no more full Ginsburg, it’s the full Avenatti.” In the television studio, Avenatti looks right at home. He’s olive- complected, square-jawed and,on the days he doesn’t shave, he seems to have perfected the art of the fashionable five o’clock shadow beard. His tastes are expensive, running to tailored suits and hot rods. He won’t reveal what he drives at home in West Los Angeles, where he now lives, coyly saying he has “a few cars that I can pick from.” On his wrist is a sleek, silver Patek Philippe watch.
Avenatti was born in Sacramento, California, and lived as a young child in Utah and Colorado before the family settled in St. Louis, Missouri, in the midst of a hot 1982 baseball pennant race that turned him into a rabid Cardinals fan. His father worked as a liaison between wholesalers and the Anheuser Busch brewery.
After Avenatti left to attend the University of Pennsylvania, his father was unexpectedly laid off, and the son went to work to earn tuition money by doing opposition political research on Republicans and Democrats for a firm owned by Rahm Emanuel, the future Obama White House chief of staff and current mayor of Chicago. Avenatti says he saw the “soft underbelly of politics,” and left the job with a “significant degree of cynicism.” — WP-Bloomberg