Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti who represented Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against former Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen (among other clients) is being charged with trying to extort $20 million dollars from Nike. In addition, Avenatti is also being charged with wire and bank fraud in California.
This news comes not long after Avenatti tweeted today that he’d be holding a press conference Tuesday “to disclose a major high school/college basketball scandal perpetrated by @Nike that we have uncovered.”
It’s not clear how that presser is going to work out for him but it seems like plans regarding that have probably changed.
Anyways, the two separate lawsuits are as follows:
In New York, the Southern District is charging Avenatti with four counts of extortion for “attempting to extract more than $20 million in payments from a publicly traded company [Nike] by threatening to use his ability to garner publicity to inflict substantial financial and reputational harm on the company if his demands were not met.” Furthermore according to the criminal complaint, Avenatti told Nike attorneys on a phone call that he would “go take $10 billion off your client’s market cap … I’m not fucking around.”
In Los Angeles, prosecutors are charging Avenatti with bank and wire fraud which may eventually add up to tax fraud as well given the details of the charges. According to the court filing “Avenatti negotiated a settlement which called for $1.6 million in settlement money to be paid on January 10, 2018, but then gave the client a bogus settlement agreement with a false payment date of March 10, 2018.”
Additionally, “Avenatti also allegedly defrauded a bank in Mississippi by submitting to the lender false tax returns in order to obtain three loans totaling $4.1 million for his law firm and coffee business in 2014.”
Avenatti-Complaint-1
