Michael Avenatti is sentenced to 4 years in prison for defrauding Stormy Daniels
Attorney Michael Avenatti was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison on charges related to taking $300,000 from his former client, Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who accused Donald Trump of pressuring her into silence about an alleged 2008 sexual encounter.
The 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 trying to extort Nike Inc., and charges are pending in California in a case in which he’s accused of stealing funds from his law firm.
Avenatti is serving a 30-month prison sentence in the Nike case. His attorneys said Thursday that 30 months of the sentence in the Daniels case will run consecutively to that punishment, meaning that Avenatti’s total sentence in both cases is 60 months, or five years.
Avenatti ascended to national prominence representing Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in her battle against Trump. A ubiquitous presence on cable news and social media, Avenatti frequently denounced the former president’s behavior and briefly explored a 2020 presidential bid of his own before ultimately deciding against it. His arrest and indictment by federal prosecutors in March 2019 set into motion a rapid and stunning fall from grace.
In 2018, Avenatti filed two lawsuits against
Trump on Daniels’s behalf. One was a defamation suit that Daniels says Avenatti filed against her wishes. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge; Daniels also lost her appeal in that case.
The other suit was an attempt to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement Daniels signed when she accepted $130,000 in hush money from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump years earlier. Trump has denied the affair. The hush money was paid by Cohen during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Cohen later pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in connection to it.
That lawsuit was dismissed as well, with a federal judge citing a decision by Trump and Cohen not to enforce the agreement.
Daniels went on to write a memoir, “Full Disclosure,” for which she was to receive an $800,000 advance. But according to federal prosecutors, Avenatti stole $300,000 of that amount by faking Daniels’s signature on a form that rerouted the wire transfers to an account he controlled.
Avenatti then spent months brushing off Daniels’s questions about the missing installments — leading her to believe that the publishing company was failing to pay her, when Avenatti was in fact siphoning payments of her book-deal advance.