Avenatti, 50, has pleaded not guilty to the charges in what will be his third criminal trial in two years.
“I am completely innocent of these charges,” Avenatti said in a statement issued through a publicist this weekend. “The government is spending millions of dollars to prosecute me for a case that should never have been filed. In the meantime, they continue to allow Trump and his accomplices to walk free and suffer no consequences for their criminal conduct. That is not justice.”
The attorney-client relationship between Daniels and Avenatti seemed solid in the spring of 2018, when the pair attended a Manhattan court hearing related to raids on the home and office of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney.
Cohen played a pivotal role in a $130,000 payment to Daniels to buy her silence 11 days before the 2016 presidential election about an alleged affair with Trump. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to the charges and served a year behind bars before completing his three-year sentence of house arrest.
With Avenatti’s help, Daniels sued Trump to try to regain her freedom to speak openly about what she says was a brief fling with Trump a decade ago. As a result of the litigation in 2018, a Los Angeles judge ordered Trump to pay Daniels $44,100 in legal fees. Trump has denied the sexual encounter.
With Daniels as a client and his growing reputation as a critic of Trump, Avenatti became so popular in some circles that he considered running for president.
After Daniels signed a book deal, the couple stayed together and Avenatti was enlisted to write the foreword to “Full Disclosure,” which was released in the fall of 2018. In the book, Daniels revealed details about what she described like their sexual encounter. with Trump and subsequent communications.
But half a year after the book’s publication, Avenatti was charged with three criminal cases, including the fraud he allegedly committed against Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford.
After his arrest, Avenatti insisted in Twitter posts that money related to Daniels was never embezzled or embezzled.
–
