16 February 20
In fairness it’s a first floor window above a soft landing of wood chips and leaves so it’s a purely symbolic expression. Nonetheless if it will help I’ll give it a try.
Here goes …
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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16 February 20
FOCUS: The Epic, Inconceivable, Totally Predictable Fall of Michael Avenatti
Emily Jane Fox, Vanity Fair
Fox writes: "Three months later, Avenatti was arrested. Four months later, I met him in a common room of the all-glass, all-glitz apartment he was renting for $10,000 a month in Century City. The day earlier, prosecutors in California had handed down a 36-count indictment. I was certain he would cancel the interview, until he texted me that day confirming the address and the time of our meeting."
Emily Jane Fox, Vanity Fair
Fox writes: "Three months later, Avenatti was arrested. Four months later, I met him in a common room of the all-glass, all-glitz apartment he was renting for $10,000 a month in Century City. The day earlier, prosecutors in California had handed down a 36-count indictment. I was certain he would cancel the interview, until he texted me that day confirming the address and the time of our meeting."
From hyperaggressive Trump antagonist, cable-news superstar, and possible presidential candidate to convicted felon (in the current case, he could be sentenced to 40 years in prison) in two years—knowing Avenatti, it makes a weird kind of sense.
ichael Avenatti stood as one of the 12 jurors who’d been seated for the last two and a half weeks in a cavernous courtroom in the Southern District of New York prepared to read his fate. Avenatti, who rose to prominence nearly two years ago for representing adult film star Stormy Daniels in lawsuits surrounding hush money payments made by President Donald Trump to keep their alleged affair quiet, crossed himself, and then the verdict was read. The jury concluded that he was guilty on all three counts of extortion, transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort, and wire fraud, stemming from charges that last year, he tried to extort more than $20 million from Nike by threatening to expose damaging information about the company.
The case grew out of a series of meetings last March, in which Avenatti met with representatives of Nike’s outside law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. As the government argued over the course of the last two weeks, Avenatti claimed at the time that he was representing a client who claimed to have secretly paid off youth basketball players, in an apparent violation of NCAA rules. According to evidence presented in the case, Avenatti demanded two things: that Nike settle with his client, coach Gary Franklin, for $1.5 million; and that Nike hire Avenatti to conduct an internal investigation of its practices, which could pay him around $20 million. If Nike didn’t agree to these demands, Avenatti threatened that he would hold a press conference and conduct a series of media interviews, during which he would say that Nike had committed crimes and had a big problem on its hands, just as the company was set to report quarterly earnings and just as the NCAA March Madness tournament was about to begin.
“I want to be really fucking clear,” Avenatti said on a recording played two weeks earlier in the courtroom. While jurors followed along with a transcript of the call, Avenatti ripped his square glasses off his face and whispered furiously to his team of lawyers. On the tape, the story seemed clear. “I’m not fucking around and not playing games. It’s worth more in exposure to me. A few million dollars doesn’t move the needle for me. If that’s what we’re looking at, then we’re done. I’ll go ahead with a press conference. I’ll call the New York Times, who are awaiting my call. I’ll go ahead and take $10 billion off your market cap.”
A few days after that call, FBI agents arrested Avenatti in Hudson Yards, the new, otherworldly luxury shopping mall on Manhattan’s far West Side, as he got a coffee before a scheduled meeting with Boies Schiller lawyers. They cuffed him under a jacket, so as not to create a scene, and booked him downtown, not far from where he has been held in solitary confinement for the last few weeks. Last spring, Avenatti was charged with three dozen counts in California, related to taxes, personal finances, and his business practices, including allegedly stealing from his clients’ settlement accounts. Last month, he was arrested for violating the terms of his bail. He was transported from California to New York, where his lawyers said he was isolated and freezing in a cell that once belonged to El Chapo. His lawyers had asserted that he was being treated unfairly; Avenatti has asserted that he is innocent and would be vindicated.
Prosecutors spent the last few weeks painting a different picture. “The defendant hadn’t just crossed the line,” an attorney for the government opened, “he leapt over it with a running start.” This case, he added, was about a shakedown. “This is a case about how the defendant sold out his client all to line his own pockets.” Those pockets, the government argued, were empty. The government called a paralegal who had worked for Avenatti’s law firm at the time, who claimed that Avenatti was struggling to cover payroll and the firm was facing eviction without money to pay rent. Around the time of the Nike negotiations, she testified, his spirits lightened, as he talked about plans to “clear the debt.” “It was like he saw the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said in front of the court.
His client, Franklin, testified that he was initially drawn to hiring Avenatti because of his oversized television persona. At the time, Avenatti had spent a year flooding cable-news airwaves promoting himself and threatening to bring down and take on President Trump. Franklin said that he wanted that kind of fighter advocating on his behalf. But the kind of advocacy he sought, he testified, was not the kind of threats he later found out Avenatti presented. “This is not how I wanted things handled,” he told the court. “I didn’t want to make it public because I didn’t want to hurt Nike, I didn’t want to hurt any of the kids or the parents, I didn’t want to hurt my reputation or my program’s reputation.” He was upset, he added. “I thought he’d misrepresented me and betrayed me.”
Last week, there was a moment where Avenatti’s attorneys made it seem as though Avenatti himself would testify in his defense. His lawyers, a team of brothers—one of whom looked like a Malibu surfer who’d turned up in a Manhattan criminal court and the other as though he’d fallen off a subway ad for insurance lawyers from the Five Towns—asked that the government not be able to ask him about his financial situation or any of the allegations made against him in concurring criminal cases. The judge denied the request, and Avenatti remained silent. He will be sentenced in mid-June, after which he faces a trial for the California counts, and another in New York, on charges that he stole Daniels’s book advance. (Avenatti has denied he stole Daniels’s money.) On the Nike case alone, he faces up to 40 years in prison.
On the first day of the trial, the judge gave jurors a lengthy list of instructions. They weren’t to read the news about the case or Google any of the people involved; they were supposed to use their common sense and give the defendant a clean slate. “Frequently,” the judge said, “one person’s descriptions of an event might sound impressive or compelling but what was compelling or impressive may fall apart. There may be another side to a witness’s story.”
I wrote it down in my notebook and underlined it. I am sure that he gives a version of these instructions in every case he presides over. And I am sure that in most of those cases, a defendant has told tales that fall apart and lead to their convictions. But it is hard for me to think of someone who wove a more impressive, compelling tale about himself—his past, his present, his future—than Michael Avenatti, only to see it unravel so swiftly, so publicly, so completely.
A little more than a year earlier, I’d seen Avenatti in a courtroom a few doors down from the one he was sentenced in. It was just after the sentencing of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney who was sentenced to three years in federal prison for tax crimes of his own and, in part, for making the hush money payments to Daniels. Avenatti turned up for most of Cohen’s court appearances. He’d tried to intervene in the case on behalf of Daniels, but he withdrew his request after the judge said that he could either intervene on behalf of his client or he could hold press conferences talking about his own work on the case but not both (he chose the latter). He came to see Cohen get sentenced anyway, so that he could talk to reporters outside and make the cable-news rounds that evening, as he took credit for bringing Cohen down.
When I ran into him after I was leaving, I talked to him about the obvious pain Cohen’s family felt as they heard the judge hand down his sentence. I was rushing to go file a story. He was rushing to go try to make news for himself. “This is what happens,” I remember him saying.
Three months later, Avenatti was arrested. Four months later, I met him in a common room of the all-glass, all-glitz apartment he was renting for $10,000 a month in Century City. The day earlier, prosecutors in California had handed down a 36-count indictment. I was certain he would cancel the interview, until he texted me that day confirming the address and the time of our meeting. In the interview, which we published last spring, Avenatti talked about why he would have made the right candidate to face off against Trump in 2020—a gutter fighter-meets-media-generator fit to handle this particular era and this particular president. A few months earlier, when I interviewed Avenatti on stage at a Vanity Fair conference in Los Angeles, he told me that he was organizing a ground game in Iowa and gearing up for a potential run (in December of 2018, a few months after that interview and a few months before he was indicted, but just after he had been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, which he denied and which he was never formally charged with, he publicly announced he would not be throwing his hat into the ring). He talked about how he felt like the government was going after him because he was “one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat” to Trump. “Anyone who thinks differently is a fool,” he said. We talked about the media attention he got, how he fucking loved it and sought it out and bathed in it. “I couldn’t believe how unbelievably great everything was,” he told me, retelling stories he’d already told me, about the cable appearances he’d made and speeches he’d given and crowds he drew and compliments strangers delivered. And we talked about his own hubris or ego or narcissism or the cocktail of all three. It takes a certain type of person to be allegedly defrauding clients, extorting major corporations, failing to pay taxes, stealing money from one of the most public clients in history while contemplating a bid for the presidency and frequenting every greenroom this country has to offer. “I have said many, many times over the last year, this is either going to end really, really well, or really, really badly,” he said. “I am most fearful of the fact that the rate of descent is greater than the rate of ascent. Some would argue at this point that I flew too close to the sun. As I sit here today, yes, absolutely, I know I did. No question. Icarus.”
I thought about all of the things he’d told me for that story as I sat a few rows behind him in court over the last few weeks. He was not happy with the story I wrote; he publicly and privately attacked me for weeks after it was published. When he saw me in that big, wood-paneled room on the first day of the trial, his eyes narrowed. He crossed his arms, folding them tightly across the chest of the gray shirt he wore every day of the trial. His stance hardened and he shook his head. Back and forth, back and forth. He did this every time our eyes met over the course of the case.
What I couldn’t shake was the timing of the trial. It began as the president was facing his own trial, an impeachment in the Senate. The case against Trump was about extortion too, though the stakes were so obviously much higher. It continued through the Iowa caucus—the competition Avenatti not long ago dreamed he would run away with—which played out, disastrously, while he sat in his cell alone. Jurors deliberated while Trump’s Justice Department intervened in the Roger Stone case, in a manner that seemed to be appeasing the president’s desires. It became clear that Trump had a list of enemies and a list of friends, and that he was keen to use the levers of justice to protect and punish whomever he saw fit.
A jury of Avenatti’s peers, though, one completely disconnected from Justice and Trump’s whims, found that he was guilty. He had, in fact, flown too close to the sun. Only this time, there weren’t that many people who cared. News of his trial barely registered. Nothing of his defense broke through the Democratic primary noise and the persistent Trump fire alarms. There were paparazzi outside the courthouses that line Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, where he was on trial. But the reporters who lined the halls and photographers with their flashbulbs poised weren’t there for him. Harvey Weinstein’s case was playing out next door, in a packed courtroom. Most of the 14 rows in Avenatti’s courtroom were empty, but for a few reporters, attorneys, and members of the public. The sun that burned hot enough to pull him in and propel him into stratospheric stardom had set. This one-time leader of the #Resistance, a character perfectly drawn out for the Trump epoch, as a twin image of our president, now faces his fate in darkness. The president himself continues unbound. Only Trump gets to play by Trump’s rules.
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