Michael Avenatti faces sentence in Nike extortion scheme | Balitang Pambansa

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New YORK (AP) Michael Avenatti, the brash California lawyer who publicly battled former President Donald Trump before criminal fraud charges on the two coasts interrupted his rapid rise to fame, facing sentence in one of those cases on Thursday.

More than a year after a jury concluded that Avenatti tried to lure millions of dollars from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity, U.S. Judge Paul G. Gardephe will punish him with Manhattan. Avenatti was convicted on charges that he tried to extort up to $ 25 million from Beaverton, the Oregon-based sports giant while he represented a Los Angeles basketball league organizer that angered Nike that the sponsor had terminated of the league.

Whatever the outcome, Avenatti faces trials in Los Angeles last year on fraud charges and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating on his former client the porn star Stormy Daniels of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avenatti, 50, represented Daniels in 2018 on lawsuits against Trump, which often appear on cable news programs to discredit the Republican in his exploration of running for president against Trump in 2020, boasting that he has no problem raising money. Daniels said a decade earlier a trial with Trump led to him being paid $ 130,000 by Trump’s personal attorney in 2016 to remain silent. Trump denied the affair.

Talk about those goals evaporated when prosecutors in Los Angeles and New York charged him with fraud in March 2019. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said he was enjoying a $ 200,000-a-month living while defrauding clients of millions of dollars and the internal road Revenue Service. of thousands of dollars. Charges he defrauded Daniels of proceeds from a book deal that followed weeks later. Avenatti pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On Tuesday, Gardephe denied a request by Avenatti’s lawyers to discard his conviction in Nike’s case on attempted extortion and honest service fraud charges. The judge wrote that presented evidence that Avenatti had developed a Nike strategy designed to enrich itself rather than address his client’s goals.

In written arguments at the judgment, prosecutors said Avenatti tried to enrich himself by arming his public profile to try to force Nike to submit to his demands.

In a victim impact statement, Nike lawyers said Avenatti did substantial damage to the company by falsely attempting to link it to a scandal in which bribes were paid to the families of basketball players in college who are in the NBA to guide them in powerhouse programs. An Adidas employee, a competitor to Nike, was convicted of the prosecution.

Lawyers say Avenatti threatened to do billions of dollars in damage to Nike and then falsely tweeted that criminal behavior at Nike had reached its highest level.

Avenatti’s former client, Gary Franklin Jr., said in a statement submitted by prosecutors that Avenatti’s actions damaged me financially, professionally, and emotionally. Franklin is expected in court Thursday.

In their present submission, Avenatti’s lawyers said their client had suffered enough, citing massive public embarrassment and a difficult incarceration last year that ended after lawyers said he was particularly weak to coronavirus.

Although prosecutors asked Gardephe to impose a $ 1 million restitution order to help cover Nike’s legal costs, Avenatti’s attorneys cited the lack of financial losses as a reason for mitigation.

There was no financial loss to any of the victims so there was no payment in this case, they wrote. The fact that a white collar federal criminal case was brought despite this fact is itself an important mitigating factor.

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