Michael Avenatti Allegedly Stole $300,000 by Forging Stormy Daniels’s Signature
In the latest episode of Michael Avenatti's criminal anthology, federal prosecutors in New York have charged America's tannest celebrity lawyer with a slew of new and exciting financial crimes, this time related to his representation of adult film actress and erstwhile Trump paramour Stormy Daniels.
Avenatti, according to the indictment, stole a "significant portion" of Daniels's advance on a tell-all book contract last fall by: (1) forging her signature on a letter to her book agent; and (2) asking said book agent to send that money not to Daniels, but to one of Avenatti's bank accounts instead. I would tell you that this is the weirdest bit of misconduct of which Avenatti now stands accused, but this is the same guy who was arrested in March for trying to extort tens of millions of dollars from Nike, so it seems prudent to hold off on such superlatives for the time being.
After pocketing nearly $300,000 of Daniels's money over the course of several installments, Avenatti merrily set about using it to cover his dry-cleaning bills, make monthly payments on a leased Ferrari, and pay employees of his law firm and of a Tully's coffee franchise he owns. When Daniels began asking her lawyer, as all clients are wont to do eventually, where the hell her damn money was, Avenatti assured her he was working hard on getting the deadbeat publisher to come around, and even told her he was threatening litigation to, again, secure money he already had. After five months of tedious back-and-forth, a fed-up Daniels finally got in touch with the baffled publisher, who told her the company had long ago sent the money—and provided a copy of the letter she'd never seen in her life.
In retrospect, Daniels's cryptic comments after she and Avenatti parted ways two months ago—"Sit tight, ladies, it's about to get real fucking good"—make a bit more sense. So, too, does the other criminal complaint against Avenatti, unveiled in March within hours of the Nike complaint, in which law enforcement officials in California alleged that Avenatti, among many other things, had embezzled a client's $1.6 million settlement to, among many other things, finance his fledging coffee-restaurant empire.
Avenatti, of course, took to social media to tell his side of the story, stating that "no monies relating to Ms. Daniels were ever misappropriated or mishandled." You will note that the word "forgery" appears nowhere in his confidently tweetstormed self-defense.
For those of you keeping track at home, Avenatti is now the subject of three (3) separate federal criminal investigations, or as his onetime nemesis Donald Trump likes to call it, "almost a bingo."
Originally Appeared on GQ
