Michael Avenatti Is In Major Trouble With The Feds For Allegedly Extorting Nike (And Then Some)
I’m beginning to think Stormy Daniels has a bad taste in men – no wonder she quit this one! Michael Avenatti, an attorney who seems to need an hourly cable news appearance in order to live or, as Gloria Allred likely calls him, “amateur hour,” isn’t having the best few weeks. He and Stormy mysteriously ended their attorney-client relationship, and now the FBI is barking up his tree for some shady shit and he was arrested on federal charges. Yeah, the dude who screams at a lot of people for being a crook may end up being one himself: the FBI is investigating his ass for wire and bank fraud AND trying to extort money from Nike. Luckily, Nike proved with their Colin Kaepernick ads they DGAF about screaming banshees, so they called the FBI as soon as Michael started getting lippy with them.
The Blast starts up with the wire and bank fraud mess. Michael was arrested shortly after noon today in Manhattan, and the Department of Justice didn’t say if Donald Trump was there to gloat and put Stormy’s ex-attorney in handcuffs. It DID say why he was now behind bars:
“[Michael allegedly] embezzled a client’s money in order to pay his own expenses and debts — as well as those of his coffee business and law firm — and also defrauded a bank by using phony tax returns to obtain millions of dollars in loans.”
Michael allegedly submitted false documents to a Mississippi bank in order to get loans that added up to $4.1 million for both his law firm and coffee business (??) back in 2014. As someone who grew up down there, this shouldn’t come as a shock. I have cousins who used catfish they caught as collateral for a home loan, so of course they would take good-enough looking forms from a flashy lawyer!
Michael also won a $1.6 million settlement for a client in January of last year but then gave the client a bogus deal three months later. This already comes after even Stormy said Michael was shady when it came to filing lawsuits on her behalf when she didn’t agree to it and that he wasn’t telling her where her crowdsourced funds were going. I guess we can assume it went to his quest to become the next Keurig king!
Michael could go away for as many as 50 years for wire and bank fraud, but the fun doesn’t even stop there. In a separate instance, he allegedly used his public profile as a threat against Nike and tried to get them to cough out $20 million in exchange for him not saying bad shit about their brand. Per that lawsuit, Michael allegedly wrote in an email, “I’ll go take ten billion dollars off your client’s market cap … I’m not f**king around.” Nike wasn’t fucking around, either, and just immediately forwarded that over to the DOJ. Suddenly, uh, I bet he’s regretting Tweeting this right before the FBI came knocking:
Tmrw at 11 am ET, we will be holding a press conference to disclose a major high school/college basketball scandal perpetrated by @Nike that we have uncovered. This criminal conduct reaches the highest levels of Nike and involves some of the biggest names in college basketball.
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) March 25, 2019
Oh, Michael. Ink will always get your crooked ass caught! If I’ve learned one thing from the whacked out tao of Dorinda Medley from Real Housewives of New York City it’s, “Say it, forget it. Write it, regret it.”
Pic: Wenn.com