Michael Avenatti sentenced to four years for cheating Stormy Daniels
The lawyer Michael Avenatti was sentenced on Thursday to four years in prison for cheating his client Stormy Daniels, the adult film-maker and actor who catapulted him to fame, of hundreds of thousands of dollars in book proceeds.
The California lawyer, currently incarcerated, learned his fate in Manhattan federal court, where Judge Jesse M Furman said the sentence will mean Avenatti will spend another two and a half years in prison on top of the two and a half 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”.
Before his sentence was announced, Avenatti, wearing his prison uniform, choked up several times as he delivered a lengthy statement, saying he had “disappointed scores of people and failed in a cataclysmic way”.
At trial earlier this year, Avenatti represented himself, cross-examining Daniels for hours about their experiences in early 2018, when she signed a book deal for $800,000. Prosecutors said Avenatti illegally pocketed about $300,000 of her advance on Full Disclosure, which was published in fall 2018.
The book came at a time when Avenatti’s law practice was failing financially even as he appeared regularly on television.
In such appearances, he attacked Donald Trump as he represented Daniels in lawsuits meant to free her from a $130,000 hush payment she received shortly before the 2016 election to remain silent about a sexual affair she said she had with Trump a decade earlier. Trump denied it.
Daniels was not in court on Thursday. A lawyer spoke on her behalf, saying it was “truly shocking” that Avenatti tried to portray himself as a champion of his clients during his statement.
Avenatti’s conviction for aggravated identity theft requires a mandatory two-year sentence. He is already serving two and a half years for trying to extort Nike and faces a retrial in California on charges he cheated clients and others of millions of dollars.
Avenatti’s lawyers have argued he should face no additional time in prison for a wire fraud conviction in the Daniels case and any sentence should be served at the same time as the sentence in the Nike case. Avenatti was convicted of threatening to ruin the shoemaker’s reputation if it did not pay him up to $25m.
Lawyers cited a letter Avenatti recently wrote to Daniels in which he said: “I am truly sorry.”
Prosecutors said in a sentencing submission Avenatti should face “substantial” additional time in prison for the wire fraud conviction and criticized his apology letter, saying the 51-year-old failed to apologize for his actual crime.
They also recalled that during “an extremely lengthy” cross-examination, he “berated his victim for lewd language and being a difficult client, questioned her invasively about marital and familial difficulties and sought to cast her as crazy, much as he did during the course of his fraud to prevent her own agent and publisher from responding to her pleas for help.
“The defendant certainly had every right to defend himself at trial. But he is not entitled to a benefit for showing remorse, having done so only when convenient and only after seeking to humiliate his victim at a public trial, and denigrating and insulting her for months to her agent and publisher while holding himself out as taking up her cause against the powerful who might have taken advantage of her.”