‘Have I Hit Bottom?’: Michael Avenatti and the Fall of a Trump-Era Antihero...The man once seen as a leader of the Trump resistance is fighting prison

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‘Have I Hit Bottom?’: Michael Avenatti and the Fall of a Trump-Era Antihero

The man once seen as a leader of the Trump resistance is now fighting prison — and historical obscurity.

www.politico.com

the bigger you are, the harder you fall. and here are the excerpts:

Avenatti always performed best with others watching, and no one has been watching for a very long time. He has endless days and weeks to think about the downward trajectory of his life, which he doesn’t like to do when he is alone, which, inconveniently, is most of the time. “If I start thinking about the relationships I had that I no longer have, the opportunities I had that I no longer have, the freedom I had that I no longer have, the wealth and things I used to have that I no longer have, the notoriety and the adoration I used to have that I no longer have — I mean, it’ll destroy me,” he says. “I have to push it out of my mind, because it’s been such a gargantuan fall.”

Behind a tall fence in the backyard, he can hear the lilt of brunches on Rose Avenue, laughter and music. There’s an ice cream parlor he likes on the corner, 482 feet away, but to get delivery, as with anything requiring internet access, the order must come from his roommate Jay Manheimer, the childhood friend from St. Louis who took him in almost two years ago when he was released on home confinement. The apartment sits beneath the flight path to the Santa Monica terminal where he used to fly jets. Engines roar overhead. The last time he flew private, in January 2020, he was shackled. Federal marshals chartered a plane to take him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he spent 74 days in solitary confinement, in the high-security cell once occupied by El Chapo, one level above the unit where Jeffrey Epstein was held.

The last time he drove a race car, his most beloved and expensive habit, was 1,411 days ago. The last time he had a Grey Goose martini (up, two olives) and a New York strip at Craig’s, his preferred hangout in West Hollywood, was 709 days ago. The last time he wore his five-figure Patek Philippe Nautilus watch, before it was seized by the government, was 708 days ago. The last time he talked to his former client, Stormy Daniels, was February 2019. The last time a reporter asked him about running for president was March 24, 2019, the Sunday before his arrest. The last time he saw his parents was Thanksgiving 2019. His Twitter account, where he once held the attention of nearly 900,000 followers (now 680,000), sits frozen in September 2018: In the video that plays on loop in his last pinned tweet, he is on MSNBC, attacking the president and his party: “They want to make me the issue.” He’s staring into the camera, eyes level, talking fast.

To ask Michael Avenatti to explain what happened is both vivid and vexing. The details of the last three years come easily — dates, names, locations, tweets, dinners, his thoughts at the time. It’s the big picture that causes difficulty, and certain topics in particular: why he put himself on the nation’s largest stage, when he owed millions in taxes, according to federal prosecutors; when he had financial disputes with his former law partner; when his house (in the most general terms) was not in order, despite assuring informal advisers, two of them told me, that he had no skeletons in his closet. “Not a goddamn thing,” two people remember him saying at dinner in 2018, though he disputes “any suggestion that I led anyone to believe that I led a pristine life.”

Avenatti is now a convicted felon, found guilty of attempting to extort Nike in a scheme the government describes as a desperate shakedown. He is facing two and a half years in prison, pending his appeal. He is juggling three federal indictments, claims of fraud, embezzlement, and attempted extortion, the details of which he commands as if he were representing himself, which he did in the second of the three cases, in California, where federal prosecutors accused him of stealing millions of dollars from his own clients. Remarkably, the case ended in a mistrial after Avenatti successfully argued that federal prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to his defense. He spends his days now filing legal briefs, motions, appeals, letters to the court(s), and reviewing evidence. The second-floor apartment is filled with boxes of files labeled things like “CONTEMPT MOTION,” though they could very well say “BULLSHIT” — boxes and boxes of “It’s Bullshit” and “I Don’t Traffic In Bullshit” and “The Whole Premise Is Complete Bullshit” — which is generally where he lands on the case against him, both legally and in the public eye.

His main contention, his genuine belief, is that he would never have been pursued by federal prosecutors in three separate cases, on two coasts, held in solitary confinement alongside suspected terrorists and national security threats, if his name were not Michael Avenatti.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, served his own house arrest in his “multimillion-dollar luxury apartment,” Avenatti says, “with his Miró f---ing painting on the wall behind him when he does his YouTube interviews and his cable TV hits.”

When I suggest to Avenatti that he could do his own live hits, launch his own podcast, reconnect with his friends at MSNBC and CNN — his old dinner partners in New York — he stops me.

“I don’t think it would be smart. I don’t think it’d be a good look, and, you know, why risk it?” To hear other people bring up his name without being on set to challenge them, to yell like he used to — “it’s not killing me,” he says, “but it’s — it’s infuriating.”

 

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more excerpts and photos from the article:

In 2018, he refused to tell the story of how he and Daniels met, so much so that writers started describing it as “a secret.” He did this, he says, because of (1) attorney-client privilege, and (2) control. “I didn’t want the focus to be on anything other than what I wanted the focus to be on in 2018,” he says. But when he told me the story in Venice this fall, it was clear that their relationship did contain an element of chance. Avenatti only met Daniels, in February 2018, because another lawyer passed on the case. Just before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels had taken a $130,000 payment from Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, to stay quiet about sleeping with Trump in 2006. Now she wanted out of the NDA, upset that Cohen was talking about the agreement in an effort to deny the affair. Avenatti told her they had something bigger on their hands than a simple NDA dispute. He agreed to represent her, immediately taking control of her media strategy. Daniels had been in on a “Make America Horny Again” tour across the country, and was in talks with the Lifetime channel to do a five-part series, Avenatti says. He told her to pull out of everything: “You need to do a solid interview for free, and that’s how you need to tell your story in order to push the reset button,” he remembers saying. “Suburban housewives in middle America aren’t going to identify with the ‘Make America Horny Again’ girl.”

“Ideally, you need to go on ‘60 Minutes.’”

In April, he was invited to a “top 100” media event in New York at the Seagram Building. Gayle King was there, he says, Don Lemon, Anthony Scaramucci, Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity (“he was very complimentary towards me, actually”) — all of them new “friends.” Martha Stewart came running up to him to ask for a picture. “You’re going to be our savior,” he remembers Stewart saying. (A spokesperson for Stewart did not respond to a request for comment.)

At the “top 100” media event that spring, he remembers standing at the bar with MSNBC host Ari Melber, another new friend. As people came up to Avenatti, Melber leaned over and said, “You’re the belle of the ball.” An MSNBC spokesperson confirmed the exchange.

“Yeah,” Avenatti replied.

“I’m going to look back some day and say, ‘This was the peak. It was all downhill from here.’”

 

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more:

If life is about “experiences,” he says, “and all those experiences coming together, almost to create a fabric of someone’s lifetime, then very few people on the planet have had the ride that I have had. I don’t know of anyone else who went from a potential presidential candidate, who I would argue was the greatest threat to Donald Trump — again, my truth, and I will always believe that and I think if some people were honest, they would agree — to El Chapo’s cell.”

Avenatti’s son isn’t old enough to understand what happened, but he will be soon. After his sentencing in the Nike case, he sat down his daughters for the first time to explain what happened. If he is open about one regret, it is as a parent. “I really wish I had been a better father,” he says. “Allowing my kids to be exposed to what they’ve been exposed to as a result of the failings of their father — no child should have to go through what my kids have had to go through because of me.” At his sentencing hearing in the Nike case, his daughters wrote a letter to the judge pleading for leniency. Avenatti says he has still not read it because it is too painful.

On house arrest, Avenatti is able to see his young son, age 7, and his two teenage daughters. Prosecutors asked him to live in the Central District of California for his embezzlement case, according to Avenatti, precluding a stay with his parents in St. Louis. He says prosecutors also stopped him from living with his ex-wife, Christine, with whom Avenatti is still close, because she might be a witness in the California case. “The whole goal here was to cut me off from any potential support — financial, emotional, or otherwise,” he says. “They wanted to cripple me.” When Manheimer took him in at the start of the pandemic, Avenatti was only supposed to stay for 90 days. It’s been almost 20 months, his home confinement extended by the judge in the California case, because of the pandemic, the government’s failure to produce exculpatory evidence, and to enable Avenatti to prepare for the upcoming Daniels trial. “Jay has been like a brother to me.”

For a man in free fall, there are three options.

“I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about this, and there are only three.”

The first two are escape or suicide, neither of which he says he’s considered. The first never works, he says, “and I’ve never run from anything in my life.” And the second would be too painful for his family. “I wouldn’t want to deliberately hurt my kids, my parents, and the people who care about me.”

Back in New York, Avenatti turned on CNN. Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin were discussing his conviction. “So I sat there on Valentine’s Day, as a convicted felon in 10 South, watching AC360 with Jeffrey Toobin, who was relishing the fact that I had just been convicted on multiple felony counts, as I ate my meal out of my plastic tray.”

“Anderson actually pushed back at one point.” Cooper, the “60 Minutes” host, had interviewed Avenatti all three times he appeared on the program.

“At one point Anderson said, ‘Well, you know, I mean, Michael Avenatti was a real attorney with real cases, right?’”