This Kyle Smith takedown of Running With Beto is too good to save for next week’s Clown Car Update.
Picture you and a couple of buddies spending a long night with a couple of cases of Schlitz and some moderately strong weed, then being told the next day that it was time to watch the film somebody made of your antics. How freaked out would you be to learn that such a film even exists? How mortifying would it be to watch it?
Running with Beto–level mortifying, I think.
Shielding their gaze against the afternoon sunlight, skulls feeling like asphalt getting a light once-over from a jackhammer, Beto fanboys must be watching this HBO documentary about the ex-congressman’s doomed Senate race last fall and asking one another, “Duuuuuude. How was it smart to send $80 million of our money to a billionaire’s son-in-law? Why did we try to pitch Texas on Reality Bites Bobby Kennedy?” A better title for this doc would have been “Beto: After the Bong.”
The speediest bong-rip-to-hangover moment comes when O’Rourke is captured answering a question about the NFL’s national-anthem protesters — posed by a voter who disagrees with them — by supporting them unequivocally and even saying, “I can think of nothing more American.” We watch the Facebook meter excitedly clocking up millions of hits. Beto is viral! Ellen DeGeneres wants to meet up! So does Stephen Colbert! The Washington Post says O’Rourke has conquered the Internet! The morning after arrives with campaign chief David Wysong: “So the Cruz campaign, they’ve got their negative hit. It’s what they wanted. . . . Beto’s favorabilities have gone downward.” Maybe there are some things more American than insulting the American flag.
Campaign field director Zack Malitz, rallying legions of campaign volunteers who have that eerie Children of the Damned glow, is shown announcing that “Tuesday, November 6, is the day the world ends.” (Rrrrrrrrip!) “There is no day after that.” (Exhale.) “Elections are a matter of life and death!” (Rrrrrrip!) “This is possibly the most important thing that most of us will do with our lives.” (Exhale.)
Snip.
O’Rourke’s curious strategy for unseating Ted Cruz in the Senate combined oversharing boring stuff, which made him look vapid, and playing to liberals, which made him look liberal. He mistook Texas for California, and with his curious combination of affectless diction and random pauses, he even sounded like ur-Californian Keanu Reeves: “So thank you, for being part. Of something really. Exciting. That’s taking place in Texas right now.” Siri and Alexa have more lifelike intonations.
The Beto phenomenon was a cult of personality. But where’s the personality? The void at the center of the candidate appears to be the reason his once-substantial support has, in his even-more-Quixotic presidential bid, softened to approximately the state of butter on the El Paso sidewalk in June. Filmmaker David Modigliani enjoyed lots of access to the candidate yet leaves us knowing no more about O’Rourke than we knew coming in. He’s Very Online! He Drives Around a Lot! He Gives Speeches! He has a Wife and Three Kids! That’s . . . about it. We don’t learn much about his politics except the stalest imaginable formulations (“We’ve gotta change the direction of our country”).
Read the whole thing.
From this side of the pond, the EU election results may seem somewhat baffling. Populist parties gained ground at the expense of centrist and traditional parties, but so did the Greens. This doesn’t fit our traditional left-right political schemas.
In the UK, Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party captured the most EU parliamentary seats. “Mr Farage’s party won 29 seats, the Lib Dems 16, Labour 10, the Greens seven, the Tories four, the SNP three, and Plaid Cymru and the DUP one each.” Those are disasterous results for Labour and the Tories. UKIP was wiped out and entirely replaced by the Brexit Party. The Liberal Democrats coming in second was a result I do not think was foreseen by anyone, nor the Greens doing better than the Tories. The colossal stink of the inability to deliver Brexit that clings to the Tories and Labour helped both Liberal Democrats and Greens, both being so far from power and out of the spotlight the last few years. Faced with parties run by Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, “Vote them all out!” must have seemed like a coldly rational choice.
Some interesting results in Scotland:
In Scotland, the pro-Remain SNP won the biggest share of the vote, with just under 38%, giving it three MEPs.
The Brexit Party came in second place with a significantly lower percentage – 14.8% – followed by the Lib Dems with 13.9% and the Tories with 11.6% – meaning each party has one seat.
But Labour only received 9.3% of the vote – a loss in vote share of 16.6% – leaving it with no MEPs in Scotland for the first time.
It’s hard to say what these results indicate for UK domestic politics going forward, as traditionally MEP elections have been very poor indicators of the next general election. But the giant Brexit cockup is hugely hurting both Tories and Labour.
On the results from Europe as a whole:
1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.
2) Where the center retreated, however, the populist Right did not always occupy the abandoned position. National populists (which is the approved non-hostile term for describing them) advanced moderately and consolidated their previous gains substantially in the elections. Victor Orban’s Fidesz won 52 percent of the votes in Hungary. Poland’s Law and Justice party held off a multi-party attack from an organized left-wing coalition and won a majority that suggests it will win the forthcoming national elections. France’s National Rally — the latest name for the populist Right party led by Marine Le Pen — narrowly defeated the populist-centrist party of President Macron in France. (Populist-centrism may be a novel concept, and it may prove to be an unsuccessful one, but it’s the best description yet coined of Macron’s ambiguous politics.) The political success of Italy’s populism we outlined above. And in the United Kingdom, the populist Euroskeptic party, titled with stunning simplicity the Brexit party, went from its foundation five weeks ago to become the largest U.K. party in the European Parliament, with 32 percent of the national vote and 29 MEPs. But it hopes to be leaving Parliament soon.
Populism suffered no major defeats anywhere — unless you count (and you shouldn’t) Denmark, where the People’s Party share of the vote was halved because the more respectable social democrats adopted their tough migration policy. On the other hand, populism didn’t win as many votes as the populists had hoped and as the Left and the media had feared. In particular, populists fell well short of taking control of the European Parliament or, as we shall see, even weakening the control of it exercised by the reigning centrist duopoly of Christian and Social Democrats.
3) If the center retreated and the Right advanced only so far, European Liberals (the ALDE parliamentary group) and Greens occupied the vacant ground. Greens became the second party in Germany and the third party in France; Liberal Democrats became the surprise second-place winners, after Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in Britain; and both parties did well throughout the western half of Europe. Their success is not a mystery. Progressive middle-class voters wanted more idealistic commitments to policies such as combatting climate change and opening borders than the cautious center always provided. In addition, such voters were alarmed by what they saw as the national-populist threat to the European Union — a greatly exaggerated one in reality since none of the populists outside the U.K. want to leave the EU, merely to restrain it. All the same, these voters turned out to support the EU, too, which in the U.K. explains the rise of the Lib Dems as a response to the Brexit party.
As Australian elections proved, green policies are popular right up to the point that someone tries to implement them.
Cutting to the chase:
The moderately conservative EPP will struggle to keep its preeminence within the centrist coalition because the ALDE and the Greens are ideologically closer to the socialists than to themselves; Greens within the European Parliament and Germany itself will want to use their newfound power to phase out fossil fuels, which will be resisted by coal-producing Poland and Eastern Germany; the more progressive Euro-parliamentary majority may want to press sanctions on Viktor Orban for violating “European values,” but the success of populists in half of Europe means that he now has more allies in that conflict; and, above all, President Macron has enthusiastic supporters among the ALDE liberals in the European Parliament for his ambitious integrationist projects that the Germans and other Northern European governments fear they will be asked to finance.
And these projects are indeed formidable: to centralize the power and sovereignty of 27 nation-states in European institutions without solving their existing democracy deficit; to replace their independent budgetary arrangements with a single European fiscal policy without the power of tax collection; to create a common European defense structure separate from NATO without increasing anyone’s defense expenditure; to replace fossil fuels with renewables to solve climate change without massive regulation, and a realistic plan to prevent a huge rise in energy costs for industry and consumers. This is the hubris of government, but its costs always fall on others. It is sometimes said that the error of socialists is not that they have no faith in capitalism but that they have almost boundless faith in it. They think it can bear any burden they place on it and still stagger on delivering the goods. Modern European statesmen feel the same way about their citizens. The populists remind them they’re wrong. And they haven’t gone away.
One moderating effect on an “radical center” is the fact that the structure of the EU leaves very little actual power in the hands of the EU Parliament. My suspicion is that if the EU Parliament wanted to phase out fossil fuels faster than the real rulers of the EU think wise, those policies would just magically not get implemented.
As I’ve stated before, the future of EU politics probably looks a lot like the Northern League-Five Star alliance in Italy: Moderately populist, in favor of both low taxes and a large welfare state, guaranteed to remain popular right up until the inevitable economic crash.
This Memorial Day I’m honoring two Medal of Honor winners that have left us, John N. Reese, Jr. and Cleto Rodriguez, who between them killed 87 Imperial Japanese soldiers in Manila during the Philippines campaign in February of 1945. Rodriguez was a Texan who passed away in 1990, while Reese was an Oklahoma boy killed at age 21 during the action cited.
Their two citations:
REESE, JOHN N., JR.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company B, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division
Place and date: Paco Railroad Station, Manila, Philippine Islands. 9 February 1945
Entered service at: Pryor, Okla.
G.O. No.: 89, 19 October 1945Citation: He was engaged in the attack on the Paco Railroad Station, which was strongly defended by 300 determined enemy soldiers with machineguns and rifles, supported by several pillboxes, 3 20mm. guns, 1 37-mm. gun and heavy mortars. While making a frontal assault across an open field, his platoon was halted 100 yards from the station by intense enemy fire. On his own initiative he left the platoon. accompanied by a comrade, and continued forward to a house 60 yards from the objective. Although under constant enemy observation. the 2 men remained in this position for an hour, firing at targets of opportunity, killing more than 35 Japanese and wounding many more. Moving closer to the station and discovering a group of Japanese replacements attempting to reach pillboxes, they opened heavy fire, killed more than 40 and stopped all subsequent attempts to man the emplacements. Enemy fire became more intense as they advanced to within 20 yards of the station. From that point Pfc. Reese provided effective covering fire and courageously drew enemy fire to himself while his companion killed 7 Japanese and destroyed a 20-mm. gun and heavy machinegun with handgrenades. With their ammunition running low, the 2 men started to return to the American lines, alternately providing covering fire for each other as they withdrew. During this movement, Pfc. Reese was killed by enemy fire as he reloaded his rifle. The intrepid team, in 21/2 hours of fierce fighting, killed more than 82 Japanese, completely disorganized their defense and paved the way for subsequent complete defeat of the enemy at this strong point. By his gallant determination in the face of tremendous odds, aggressive fighting spirit, and extreme heroism at the cost of his life, Pfc. Reese materially aided the advance of our troops in Manila and providing a lasting inspiration to all those with whom he served.
RODRIGUEZ, CLETO
Rank and organization: Technical Sergeant (then Private), U.S. Army, Company B, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division
Place and date: Paco Railroad Station, Manila, Philippine Islands, 9 February 1945
Entered service at: San Antonio, Tex.
G.O. No.: 97, 1 November 1945Citation: He was an automatic rifleman when his unit attacked the strongly defended Paco Railroad Station during the battle for Manila, Philippine Islands. While making a frontal assault across an open field, his platoon was halted 100 yards from the station by intense enemy fire. On his own initiative, he left the platoon, accompanied by a comrade, and continued forward to a house 60 yards from the objective. Although under constant enemy observation, the 2 men remained in this position for an hour, firing at targets of opportunity, killing more than 35 hostile soldiers and wounding many more. Moving closer to the station and discovering a group of Japanese replacements attempting to reach pillboxes, they opened heavy fire, killed more than 40 and stopped all subsequent attempts to man the emplacements. Enemy fire became more intense as they advanced to within 20 yards of the station. Then, covered by his companion, Pvt. Rodriguez boldly moved up to the building and threw 5 grenades through a doorway killing 7 Japanese, destroying a 20-mm. gun and wrecking a heavy machinegun. With their ammunition running low, the 2 men started to return to the American lines, alternately providing covering fire for each other’s withdrawal. During this movement, Pvt. Rodriguez’ companion was killed. In 2 l/2 hours of fierce fighting the intrepid team killed more than 82 Japanese, completely disorganized their defense, and paved the way for the subsequent overwhelming defeat of the enemy at this strongpoint. Two days later, Pvt. Rodriguez again enabled his comrades to advance when he single-handedly killed 6 Japanese and destroyed a well-placed 20-mm. gun by his outstanding skill with his weapons, gallant determination to destroy the enemy, and heroic courage in the face of tremendous odds, Pvt. Rodriguez, on 2 occasions, materially aided the advance of our troops in Manila.
Images via findagrave.com.
Theresa May was hired to do one job and she couldn’t do it, and she managed to screw up a lot of other things along the way. Now that she’s stepping down, the political obituaries are rolling in and they’re not kind.
Madeleine Kearns’ “Theresa May: A Political Obituary”:
Theresa May became the second female prime minister after the Brexit referendum result and David Cameron’s resignation in July 2016. In March 2017, she decided to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, setting the Brexit process into motion and giving the United Kingdom exactly two years to exit the bloc.
In 2017, May then called a snap election, which threw away her party’s majority and propelled Jeremy Corbyn within striking distance of power. Needing support in facing this threat, May was forced into a coalition with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party.
Given the needless and catastrophic damage inflicted by the general election, this was the obvious moment for her to resign. But she didn’t. After insincerely promising a commitment to Brexit (“no deal is better than a bad deal”), May then came up with an unbelievably bad deal: the withdrawal agreement, which was crushed by historic margins in parliament. Again, here she should have resigned. But again, she didn’t. Her deal was then rejected two further times and each time May clung on, only narrowly surviving a vote of no-confidence in December of last year.
So, what to make of this? In her resignation speech May extolled the virtues of compromise. But her mishandling of the Brexit negotiations was never about strategic diplomacy in pursuit of Britain’s best interests, it was about political incompetence in a damage-control exercise gone badly wrong.
By signaling to the European Union that she would not entertain no deal, May allowed the Brussels and the two-thirds Remain majority in Westminster to use secondary issues as bully tactics. After 2017, May began to make concessions that were unthinkable to most Leave voters. The Irish backstop, the regulatory annexation of Northern Ireland, and finally — with her fourth attempt at a deal this month — cross-party talks with the Labour party, which entertained the idea of a second referendum (the precise opposite of Brexit).
Politico: “Inside Theresa May’s Great British Failure”:
It was May 16, 2019 — and no-one in the room could see a way forward. Their only option was to make one last offer to MPs: a chance to vote for a second referendum.
“Are you telling me it’s not going to work?” May asked the assembled aides sitting around her table or on sofas nearby, according one senior official familiar with the discussion that day. Her aides did not sugarcoat it: None thought it would work.
It was the moment May and her team had tried for so long to avoid — the end of the road. From that point it was only a matter of time. But the prime minister was determined to roll the dice anyway.
The scene reveals a prime minister whose commitment, duty and determination crashed up against an almost unprecedented evaporation of authority, power and influence after a series of catastrophic miscalculations. None was more damaging than her decision to call a snap general election in 2017, robbing her of the majority she needed to take Britain out of the EU with a deal acceptable to her Conservative Party.
Snip.
Theresa May had inherited the biggest political challenge for any U.K. prime minister since 1945 — and proved unequal to the task. Personal and political shortcomings met the inescapable reality of parliamentary arithmetic, EU power and the Irish border.
Instead of delivering Brexit and making the country work for provincial Britain, as she promised, she departs leaving an even bigger crisis than the one she inherited, with little — if anything — by way of domestic achievements to show by way of mitigation.
Iain Murray: “Theresa May’s Calamitous Premiership Comes to an End”:
Much of the commentary surrounding her departure will focus on her inept handling of the Brexit negotiations, or her misjudgment in squandering the safe majority bequeathed to her by David Cameron, but I’d like to draw attention to an equally calamitous mistake: her disdain for free-market economics.
At a very early point in her leadership, Mrs. May announced that she rejected the policies of the “libertarian right” and vowed to “repair free markets.” This speech heralded the return of an industrial strategy to Britain, which was watered down somewhat but still displayed a worrying amount of fatal conceit. This conceit was in full display with the manifesto her advisers produced as the platform for the disastrous 2017 election. As Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute pointed out, it contained proposals to reregulate the labor market, cap energy prices, and bash successful CEOs. Unsurprisingly, as the Conservative Party shifted leftwards, so did the electorate, resulting in the loss of David Cameron’s majority.
Yet despite the rebuke, May’s government continued in the paternalist fashion laid out in the manifesto. Perhaps most striking has been the complete capitulation to extreme environmentalist fads — most recently manifesting in bans for plastic straws, cotton buds, and stirrers from 2020. Whenever her government saw a problem, it moved to “clamp down,” legislate, and often exercise a ban.
And if all that’s not enough, The Guardian has a roundup of UK newspaper reactions to May’s resignation.
Theresa May had one job, and she wasted three years not doing it.
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.
