Michael 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 million 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.