Avenatti gets 4 years for theft from client
NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison for stealing book proceeds from Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who catapulted him to fame as he represented her in courtrooms and cable news programs during her legal battles with then-President Donald Trump.
The California lawyer, currently incarcerated, learned his fate in Manhattan federal court, where Judge Jesse Furman said the sentence will mean that Avenatti will spend another 2½ years in prison on top of the 2½ years he is already serving after another fraud conviction.
The judge said Avenatti’s crime against Daniels was made “out of desperation” when his law firm was struggling. He called Avenatti’s behavior “craven and egregious” and blamed it on “blind ambition.” He also required Avenatti to pay $148,000 in restitution and forfeit the roughly $297,000 that prosecutors say he stole from Daniels.
Avenatti, wearing a drab beige prison uniform, choked up several times as he delivered a lengthy statement before the sentence was announced, saying he had “disappointed scores of people and failed in a cataclysmic way.”
“I have destroyed my career, my relationships and my reputation and have done collateral damage to my family and my life,” he said. “There is serious doubt as to how or if I will ever recover any semblance of a normal life.”
Avenatti, 51, said he chose to represent Daniels beginning in February 2018 because she was an underdog and no one else would.
“Nobody could have predicted the success we would have and the notoriety that would follow,” he said.
At trial earlier this year, Avenatti represented himself, cross-examining his former client for hours about their experiences in early 2018, when she signed a book deal that provided an $800,000 payout. Prosecutors said he illegally pocketed about $300,000 of her advance on “Full Disclosure,” published in fall 2018.
The book’s publication came at a time when Avenatti’s law practice was failing financially even as he appeared regularly on cable television news channels, attacking Trump. Avenatti represented Daniels in lawsuits meant to free her from a $130,000 nondisclosure deal she made shortly before the 2016 presidential election to remain silent about a tryst she said she had with Trump a decade earlier. Trump denied it.
Daniels was not in court. Her current attorney, Clark Brewster, spoke on her behalf, saying it was “truly shocking” that Avenatti tried to portray himself as a champion of his clients during his statement.
In a statement after the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Avenatti violated the duty of lawyers to be loyal advocates for their clients when he “stole his client’s identity and her money in order to line his own pockets.”
His conviction for aggravated identity theft required a mandatory two-year prison sentence. He was also convicted of wire fraud. He’s already serving a 2½-year sentence for trying to extort Nike. Avenatti was convicted in 2020 of threatening to ruin the shoemaker’s reputation if it did not pay him up to $25 million.
And he faces a retrial in California on charges that he cheated clients and others of millions of dollars there.