Conservatives have been calling ex-Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti “Creepy Porn Lawyer” for quite a while now. Yesterday Vanity Fair revealed that Avenatti was even creepier than we thought.
The wins, while lucrative, couldn’t keep up with his ever-burgeoning expenses, which, according to a divorce filing from his second wife, Lisa Storie-Avenatti, had swelled to include a $19 million Newport Beach mansion, several race cars, and monthly family costs, including a staff of nannies, an assistant, and a driver, she estimated at $200,000, along with shares in two private jets. Around the time he met Daniels, Avenatti’s life was essentially unraveling. His second wife had filed for divorce in January. (Avenatti disputes the claims in her filing. “I hardly think that I am the first person to have a batshit-crazy ex-spouse who overstates things to fit their financial demands,” he told me in response.) A month before that, Avenatti’s law firm made a $10 million settlement for back pay with a former partner, who claimed that the firm failed to provide him with copies of its tax returns and had misstated its profits. By March, the coffee chain Tully’s, which he bought through his company Global Baristas with the actor Patrick Dempsey, had closed all its stores. By that time, the I.R.S. had been after him and the company for years, claiming that Global Baristas owed $5 million in federal taxes. And then there was the issue of a $1.6 million settlement for a client in a civil case, which was due to his client on March 10. The settlement had come through to Avenatti. But instead of transferring it to his client, the complaint alleges, he put the money into his own account. When his client repeatedly asked Avenatti when the money would come in, he allegedly lied about the fact that it already had, in fact, been paid to him. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge.
And then Stormy happened.
It was his skill set and his strategy, Avenatti explained, that took her case from what could have been a two-day story and turned it into a case cable-news hosts chewed over night after night, week after week, month after month. “She was known as headlining the Make America Horny Again tour, and I took her to another level,” he said. Daniels denied repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.
On March 6, 2018, he filed a lawsuit against the president of the United States on behalf of Daniels in a California civil court, seeking to void the 2016 non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Daniels from discussing her supposed affair with Trump. The following morning, he appeared solo on Today, kicking off a flurry of interviews that would keep him in green rooms and on cable-news sets and shuttling from one studio to the next in black cars for weeks. From a virtual unknown, Avenatti became one of the most famous people in America, a cable-news pugilist who was actually going toe-to-toe with the president and drawing blood. For a while, it spun faster than anyone, including Avenatti, could control. There were stories written about his body-fat percentage and his suits; odes were written about the color of his eyes, which sit symmetrically above his steep jaw like two infinity pools; women he’d never met before started texting him racy photographs; and of course, television bookers put him as a frequent hitter in their rotation.
Perhaps Avenatti’s most Trumpian quality was the tension between his desire to be talked about incessantly and his crepey thin-skinned-ness if and when that talk turned to criticism, whether in the media or from strangers on Twitter. He would routinely respond to people who e-mailed him comments after he appeared on cable news, calling small-town lawyers who’d written him notes to chew them out for their remarks, according to people familiar with this practice. He berated Time magazine after it published a story quoting him saying that the next Democratic nominee would likely have to be a white man, demanding that the publication release the transcript of his interview. He once threatened The Daily Caller with a defamation suit, messaging the reporter that “this is the last warning.” His girlfriend through much of his year in the spotlight, Mareli Miniutti, recalled that he rarely put his phone down and would scroll through all of his Twitter mentions. “He would say, ‘Oh my god, this asshole said this and you know what I did? I fucking blocked that motherfucker.’ ”
Behind the scenes, his behavior was even more volatile. “He had a terrible temper,” one prime-time anchor told me. “He never lost it with me, or really with any of the talent, as far as I know, because it was mostly for the bookers or the people who were behind the scenes. But he would tell people, ‘I’m going to fucking bury you. Why the fuck would you do that?’ if he didn’t like something.” A number of reporters recalled that he would physically invade their space. “His nose gets millimeters from your face and it’s clear he knows no boundaries,” one broadcast reporter and producer told me.
The MSM made Avenatti a media star and he repaid them by treating their staffers like shit. And yet, did we hear any whiff of what a Grade A asshole Avenatti was before the federal indictments dropped? Of course not. The MSM was, rather than acting like news organizations and verifying things, were all in against President Trump, and any weapon against him, no matter how creepy, sleazy or abusive, was allowed. So instead of hearing about what a raging asshole Avenatti was, they boosted him as a serious Presidential candidate.
Don’t forget the unbelievable fawning Avenatti received:
After the Vanity Fair profile I would love to hear from some of these anchors and hosts if they simply weren’t aware Avenatti was an absolute monster to their coworkers.. or if they saw it she looked past because he was such a reliable Trump attacker.pic.twitter.com/9wTC1zFYgG
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) May 22, 2019
There’s lots more Avenatti sweetheart behavior on display in the story:
No one knew Avenatti’s rage cycle better than Miniutti, a model who moved to the United States from a little town in Estonia on a gap year after high school. She ran into Avenatti in October 2017 at Cecconi’s in Hollywood. She was 23 at the time and out with a girlfriend when the lawyer, then 46, approached her and asked her to have dinner with him. After a few weeks, she was essentially moved into a luxury high-rise in Century City. They traveled in Europe for a few weeks in November and he offered to pay her rent and about a thousand dollars in spending money each month.
Yes, because being asked to be the kept woman of a guy you just met a few weeks ago is totally normal behavior. Is this some Sex in the City thing? Is this something beautiful single woman moving to Manhattan naturally consider as a career option?
(Avenatti said that his financial support far exceeded that amount.) He didn’t want her to work, she told me, sitting in her attorney Michael Bachner’s Manhattan office in early April, within spitting distance of the Charging Bull sculpture down past Wall Street. She turned up in ripped black jeans and dainty silver rings on five of her fingers. She had a mess of blonde hair pulled back by the black sunglasses she kept on her head for much of two hours and Jessica Rabbit lips that quivered as she detailed what she called a year of verbal, psychological, and physical abuse. Avenatti has denied ever physically harming anyone. “Any allegation that I have ever been physical with a woman is complete nonsense,” he told me. By the spring, months into their dating, she told him she was thinking about getting a waitressing job. “I wanted to be more social and earn some money to pay my credit card, but he said, ‘Mareli, really? Do you realize who you’re dating? I could be the next president of the United States. We could celebrate my 50th birthday in the White House. You can’t be a waitress.’ ” (Another woman Avenatti was romantically involved with also told me that Avenatti had asked her if she wanted to be First Lady.) Avenatti denied telling Miniutti that she could not wait tables. He said that he’d perhaps joked with a few women about being First Lady—but many more had approached him asking if they could have the role.
Miniutti rarely knew which Michael she would wake up to, she said. “He has two extremely different personalities,” she explained. “One was this very powerful guy. I saw people who would shake his hand. They respected him. … I was so proud of him [when he first started representing Stormy].” The other, she said, was “very aggressive.” By the summer, when his schedule was busy enough that they would only have a few days together at a time, his temper flared. On their way to dinner one evening, when she opened up to him about an eating disorder she struggled with and started to cry, he turned the car around and told her that she was “fucking the whole night up” by bringing it up on their one night out together, that she was “a fucking idiot to start crying and making drama” on their way out for a nice night. “It was my fault at the end of everything,” she told me. “That was just something I got used to. He would yell at me for bringing something up by asking if that’s really how I wanted to spend what little time we had together. I wanted to be a supportive partner, so I let it slide off … but I felt really scared when I would see one side of him, then the other, within a half-hour period. Up and down, up and down.”
It was not until February, four months into their dating, that she said he became physically abusive. It was his birthday, and he had wanted to spend the night before going out with a friend who was in town. She went out separately with her friends, and when Avenatti returned to his apartment and saw that she was not yet home, he texted her, asking where she was. She said she told him that she would be home in an hour. When she got there, she said she could tell that he was drunk. She had been drinking, too, and he laid into her. “He was upset that I could be so disrespectful and selfish, on his birthday. If he texts me that he’s home, he told me that I should come right away and that that’s how relationships work.” She had gotten into bed before he jumped up and started yelling at her to “get the fuck out. Get the fuck out” of the apartment. “I don’t want you here tonight,” he told her. When she got up to leave, she said, he literally threw her out the door into the hallway, where she hit her head on the wall. “I made excuses after that,” she said. “The excuse that time was that we were both drunk and emotional, and I really did not believe that he would do something like that again.”
He did, though, she said. By early November, she had maxed out her credit card. She’d bought him a $500 limited-edition Yves Saint Laurent cologne (it “smelled so sexy,” she said) for their anniversary, though, she says, he had not gotten her anything. She had asked him for money because her accounts were overdrawn and she didn’t have enough cash to order food or put gas in her car. He had put $2,000 in her account on November 13, just before she went to work on set for a Snoop Dogg music video. It hadn’t yet cleared, so she had to ask one of the other girls to pay for her gas in order to get home at the end of the day. She took a shower, put on a T-shirt and underwear, and got into bed. In a letter to the district attorney’s office Avenatti’s lawyers sent last fall, he claimed that she had been drinking and doing drugs on set, a claim she denied. He also said that she had recently started taking Accutane, an acne medication he said could cause emotional distress. She said she had only been taking the drug for two days and had no problem with it whatsoever.
She was drained by the time Avenatti got home from drinks with a friend, but she told him she thought she needed to work more. She had been embarrassed having to ask for gas money, and she never wanted to feel that way again. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, she said, and he looked her right in the eye. “Goddammit,” she said he yelled, mimicking how he stood up in the bedroom as we sat in her lawyer’s office. “You motherfucking ungrateful bitch.” She went to the guest bedroom. He followed, she said. “Get the fuck out,” she recalled him saying. “You’re just ungrateful and disrespectful.” She started to text a friend to see if she could sleep there that night instead when he grabbed her phone. He put his hands on her shoulders, she said, and tried to force her out of the apartment. Her arms were slick from body oil after the shower and he couldn’t quite grip her. She saw that the window was open and started screaming for help, she says, when he got hold of one of her arms and dragged her first across the carpet and then across a hardwood floor. He opened the door and flung her into the hallway. “I was so shocked and shaking that I couldn’t even stand up. I reached up to ring the doorbell for the apartment across the hallway and he saw me. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he said.” He pulled her back inside and she warned him that if he did not give her phone back and let her go, she would count to three and start screaming. She started to panic when he didn’t budge. “That’s when I really started to freak and I asked him to please not come any closer.” His demeanor immediately changed, she said. “He said, ‘Baby, come here. We’re so much better than this.’ I can’t even describe that moment and what his eyes looked like. Like a psychopath. All I could think was, He is going to hurt you.” She made her way to the guest bedroom, put on pants, and made a break for the door. The elevator did not come fast enough, she said, so she walked toward the service elevators, where she knew there were cameras. He got in with her, pleading with her to not do this. She went down to the security desk in the lobby, where the attendants ultimately called the police.
Despite being larded with “alleged” and “accused,” Avenatti comes off as an out-of-control narcissist, rageholic, thrill-seeking asshole. It’s a pretty devastating piece.
But that’s not the only bad news that dropped on Avenatti yesterday. He was also indicted for stealing Stormy Daniels’ book advance:
Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was indicted by federal prosecutors Wednesday for stealing the identity of his former client, Stormy Daniels, in order to claim more than $300,000 she was owed for a tell-all book about her efforts to expose President Trump.
In the indictment, prosecutors for the Southern District of New York accuse Avenatti of forging Daniels’ signature on a letter instructing her literary agent to wire her book advance money to an account he controlled. Daniels, an adult-film star born Stephanie Clifford, is not identified by name but the timeline and other details laid out in the document make clear that she is
“The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance,” the indictment reads.
And the recap of the federal charges against him:
The new indictment comes as Avenatti is facing separate extortion charges brought by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles in connection with his alleged efforts to blackmail Nike. The charges were brought after Nike lawyers provided a recording to the FBI in which Avenatti demands $25 million in exchange for his silence about illegal payments the company allegedly made to high-school basketball players to induce them to attend Nike-sponsored colleges.
Los Angeles prosecutors also indicted Avenatti last month for embezzling millions of dollars from his clients, one of whom was a mentally-ill paraplegic who won a suit against the city of Los Angeles but never received his settlement because Avenatti allegedly stole it. The charges ending in Los Angeles carry a maximum sentence of up to 300 years in prison.
Even among his supporters, I think very few mistake Donald Trump for a saint. But do you know who he looks like a saint next too? Michael Avenatti.
