California lawyer Michael Avenatti, who publicly battled with then-President Donald Trump before criminal fraud charges on two coasts interrupted his skyrocketing fame, faces sentencing in one case Thursday.
Over a year after a jury concluded Avenatti tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe will sentence him in Manhattan.
Avenatti was convicted on charges he tried to extort up to $25 million from the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear company while he was representing a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer upset Nike had ended its league sponsorship.
But his legal woes are far from over. He is due to go on trial again next month in California on federal charges accusing him of defrauding clients and ripping off banks.
And next year, he’s set to be back in Manhattan for a federal court trial on charges related to allegedly swindling porn star Stormy Daniels out of $300,000 in proceeds for a book she wrote.
Avenatti has denied any criminal wrongdoing.
The Stormy Daniels case is the one that put Avenatti on the celebrity map; the porn actress, whose real name is Stephanie Gregory Gifford, says she had sex with Trump once, years before he ran for president.
Trump’s then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her allegations shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Trump denies having had sex with Daniels.
After the hush money scheme was exposed, Avenatti was a cable news TV staple, attacking both Trump and Cohen. At one point, he even considered running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020.
But CNBC noted that despite his brash public profile, he was staggering under millions of dollars in debt, a burden that prosecutors have claimed led him to commit a series of serious crimes for which he was charged in early 2019.
In the Nike case, he was convicted at trial of trying to shake down the publicly traded company by threatening in March 2019 to go public with alleged evidence that Nike bribed amateur basketball players and their families.
Avenatti warned Nike’s lawyer his claims could "take ten billion dollars off your client’s" stock market capitalization.
"I’m not f***ing around with this, and I’m not continuing to play games," Avenatti told Nike’s lawyers, shortly before his arrest, CNBC reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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