BIG READ: The Avenatti Effect - The lawyer, the porn star, and the plan to take down a president

By Matthew Shaer

THE lawyer Michael Avenatti stands just under six feet tall, with blatant blue eyes and thinning hair, which he shaves down to stubble, exposing the crumpled vein at his left temple.

Before February, when he agreed to represent Stephanie Clifford — the porn star better known as Stormy Daniels — in her legal battle with Donald Trump, the president of the United States, Avenatti was in the best shape of his life: 185 pounds, with 9% body fat.

The case has meant less time at the gym for Avenatti, and he has lost muscle weight. But his cheeks and chin remain Cubist in their geometry, and, in motion, head lowered and shoulders hunched, he still has the bearing of a light-heavyweight brawler.

On the second Tuesday in May, Avenatti, who is 47, strode down the hallway of his luxury Manhattan hotel and, toeing open the door, sat down at his desk to read a draft his paralegal had recently uploaded to Dropbox.

The document levied an astonishing charge: that in 2017, a Russian oligarch named Viktor Vekselberg had deposited $500,000 into the same bank account that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, used to pay off Avenatti’s client in October, 2016.

If the details were accurate, as Avenatti was certain they were, the two dominant scandals dogging the Trump administration — a supposed 2006 affair between Daniels and Trump and the Robert Mueller-led investigation into election meddling by the Russian government — were about to merge.

Avenatti, whose ability to steer a news cycle is rivalled only by the president’s, initially hoped to distribute the file that morning, thus ensuring wall-to-wall coverage for the better part of the day.

Then came word that Trump had scheduled an early-afternoon address, to announce that the US would be withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. So Avenatti delayed posting a link to the Dropbox file on Twitter until 5pm, with three cable appearances to follow, starting with an 8pm spot on ‘Anderson Cooper 360,’ on CNN.

After a final scan of the document, Avenatti fished out his iPhone and thumbed in the number of his law office, in Newport Beach. “Looks good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

At 6.10pm, The Daily Beast went live with an article confirming that the transactions between Vekselberg and Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants, had taken place.

The Times followed with a more in-depth corroboration, based on a review of bank records. Avenatti opened up his MacBook and ate jellies while he scrolled.

In the frenzied news landscape of 2018, it is all but impossible for any development to dominate the conversation for long, But, for the moment, Avenatti was at the centre of the news universe. His mailbox swelled with interview requests. In his Twitter mentions, canonisation proceedings were underway.

Avenatti pecked at the keyboard: “We are just getting started. ... “

“Should I send it?” he asked me.

His finger, trembling with adrenaline, hovered above the laptop. “I’m going to send it.”

He stood up and began to pace. His face, steely and composed, was now looking back at us from the television screen in archival footage from a news conference he gave with Daniels in April, and when I clicked from CNN to MSNBC, there he was again.

The phone rang, and it did not stop ringing for the better part of an hour. Avenatti does not employ a public relations specialist, preferring to handle all media scheduling himself, and I listened as he fielded calls from nearly every major news outlet.

He exchanged a few minutes of profane banter with his friend, Don Lemon, then accepted a call from Lemon’s colleague, Jake Tapper.

Half an hour later, he was slumped in the makeup chair at the CNN studios in Columbus Circle, where he seemed to know most of the staff by name. Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, appeared in the doorway, grinning. The men exchanged greetings and retreated to a corner of the greenroom to speak privately.

According to Avenatti, since early March he has been interviewed more than 200 times on network and cable TV. Recently, he has cut down on the frequency of his appearances, if only slightly.

He is still a fixture on AC 360 and on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show and on MSNBC’s The Beat With Ari Melber.

On paper, at least, Avenatti’s campaign against Trump and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is limited to three lawsuits. The oldest, from March, seeks to void the 2016 nondisclosure agreement prohibiting Daniels from discussing her supposed affair with Trump, on the grounds that Trump failed to sign the document — possibly, Avenatti has argued, because the future president wished to maintain plausible deniability. (Trump is identified in the paperwork by the pseudonym David Dennison.)

A corollary suit, from April, accuses Trump of defamation for calling Daniels “a total con job” on Twitter. And a final suit claims that Daniels’s previous attorney, Keith Davidson, conspired with Michael Cohen and Trump to keep Daniels quiet.

In early April, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as part of a bank-fraud probe, raided Cohen’s offices and also the hotel room he was using during construction in his apartment building, seizing thousands of documents and electronic devices.

Although the results of the raid have not been made public, the evidence is widely believed to contain files pertaining to the Daniels payout, which Cohen has admitted to orchestrating and which Trump had previously denied knowing anything about.

If any of the seized material reveals evidence of campaign-law violations — or if Avenatti, in the discovery phase of a trial over the NDA, is able to produce such evidence — Trump could be held criminally liable. Avenatti, for his part, claims to already have all the damning evidence he needs.

Avenatti often describes his media omnipresence as integral to his long game: It rattles Trump’s defenders — as appeared to happen when the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, contradicted the White House and acknowledged payment to Daniels.

It has also brought in $600,000 for a CrowdJustice account in Daniels’s name, which Avenatti says is his sole source of financing for the case. It has also generated leads for Avenatti, like the Vekselberg data. “None of this happens if we don’t have a high profile,” Avenatti said.

But litigating a case in the press is not without risk. As one of Avenatti’s former colleagues, the lawyer, Brian Panish, said: “Michael is good with the media, but the media isn’t always going to do what he wants them to do.”

When Avenatti was 10, his father, an executive at Anheuser-Busch, took him to an off-road car race near the family’s home, in Colorado Springs. The younger Avenatti was captivated.

“The speed, the danger — I couldn’t look away,” he told me. “In retrospect, it was the feeling I’d get later on, working on a major legal case. You’re nervous, there’s a sense of fear, and also a sense of intense excitement.”

Neither Avenatti’s mother nor father graduated from college, and they expected their only son to support himself from an early age. (Avenatti has two half-siblings, from his mother’s first marriage.)

In 1989, he worked part-time for the Democratic senator, Dick Gephardt, and enrolled in St. Louis University, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, as a political-science major.

Photos from that time depict a scrawny kid; his hair is dark and full, his glare preternaturally confident. “I used to call him the little man with the brown briefcase,” Avenatti’s first wife, Christine Avenatti-Carlin, told me.

To avoid getting too deep into student-loan debt, Avenatti, who had long thought about going into politics, took a year and a half off from Penn and accepted a full-time job with Rahm Emanuel’s political-consulting firm, the Research Group.

At first, Avenatti, “the low man on the totem pole,” as he puts it, was on the advance team for rallies and speeches, but the firm’s leadership soon promoted him to opposition researcher.

“This was before the days of the internet, so if you wanted to find clerk records or look up business disputes, you would have to go to the candidate’s jurisdiction,” Avenatti says. “I did a lot of flying around, a lot of gumshoeing.”

He has participated in 150 campaigns in 42 states, including Pennsylvania and Delaware senate races and a Philadelphia mayoral contest. It was an exceptionally demanding schedule for someone who had not yet finished his senior year in college, and, by 1996, Avenatti was burned out on politics.

He and Christine moved to Washington, where Avenatti had been accepted at George Washington University’s law school. Between his second and third years there, he was a summer associate at O’Melveny & Myers, a white-shoe defence firm based in Los Angeles. After graduation, he accepted a full-time job as a junior associate.

Avenatti’s first encounter with Trump occurred years before he ever met Stormy Daniels: In 2004, he sued the future president and the producer, Mark Burnett, for stealing the concept of The Apprentice from a client.

“In LA, anytime a show is a success, people come out of the woodwork, claiming they had the idea first,” Avenatti told me. “But this was legit.”

Stormy Daniels

Following the paper trail, Avenatti was able to prove his client had pitched a pilot called CEO to Burnett’s people. Trump and Burnett settled.

Avenatti co-founded Eagan O’Malley & Avenatti in 2007, but the principals eventually became enmeshed in a dispute over the partnership. O’Malley exited the firm, and settled for $2.7m. By early 2016, Avenatti was dealing with a potentially more costly legal matter, this one involving a former litigator at the firm, Jason Frank.

In an arbitration case filed in California, Frank claimed that Avenatti had kept pertinent financial forms from him and misstated profits to avoid paying Frank millions.

A counterclaim for Eagan Avenatti charged that Frank was fired after being caught plotting with other attorneys to form a new firm, taking clients with them; he was accused of fraud and breach of contract. In 2017, an arbitration panel of three retired judges began hearing both claims.

Then came a puzzling twist: A Florida man and felon, named Gerald Tobin, who previously worked for Eagan Avenatti as a contract investigator, filed a petition to put the firm into involuntary bankruptcy.

Tobin has said he did so “because I had read that such an action usually resulted in getting a debt paid quickly and would place the target under considerable pressure to resolve the matter.”

A judge in Florida issued what’s called an automatic stay on Eagan Avenatti, a temporary form of bankruptcy that would remain in effect until the debt to Tobin was repaid.

The timing and circumstances of this development — which meant Frank could not move forward in his effort to recoup the millions he said he was owed — troubled the judge in charge of adjudicating the bankruptcy. Referring to what she described as a “stench of impropriety,” the judge said it was unclear whether “Tobin had some relationship with the firm that would have induced a collusive filing” or whether “Eagan Avenatti just got plain lucky.”

In February of this year, a settlement with Frank was approved by a bankruptcy judge: Eagan Avenatti was to pay Frank $4.85m, with $2m due in May. (That first payment was missed; the parties now dispute the terms of the settlement.) Around the same time, Avenatti reached out to William Hearon, a lawyer friend, to talk about a new client he was considering representing in a civil suit.

“You take cases because you think you’re right, because you trust your client,” Hearon, a Miami attorney, told me.

“And that was what was happening here: Michael was convinced a wrong had been perpetrated, and he wanted to help correct it.”

Avenatti has taken great pains not to reveal how he was introduced to Stormy Daniels, possibly because he worries the story of their meeting could fuel persistent suspicions that he is acting on behalf of a Democratic donor — charges he vehemently denies.

Avenatti’s theatrics, and the often-intersecting paths of the Mueller probe and his own legal crusade, have left him vulnerable to the charge that he is merely piggybacking onto an investigation that would move forward with or without his participation.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Avenatti has “frustrated” the efforts of Mueller’s team to investigate Cohen’s orchestration of the NDA — a charge Avenatti vociferously denies, saying he has gone out of his way to be accommodating to Mueller’s team.

“He’s just there to thicken the plot, while we wait for prosecutorial movement,” the reporter on the Mueller beat told me.

The potential legal costs of a press-heavy approach, meanwhile, are immense.

Should Avenatti, for instance, fail in his bid to invalidate the NDA, his client, who described on 60 Minutes the details of her alleged affair with Trump, could be liable for millions in damages.

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, left, with Daniels and 60 Minutes host, AndersonCooper.

And by continuing to appear on television, Avenatti risks annoying jurists on his cases, like Kimba Wood, the judge overseeing the federal Cohen probe.

At a hearing in early June, Wood instructed Avenatti that he had to choose between his “publicity tour” and representing Daniels’s interests in her courtroom.

A few days after Judge Wood delivered her ultimatum, I met Avenatti at his apartment in Los Angeles. Climbing into a spectacularly expensive European convertible — for privacy reasons, I agreed not to identify the make — we sped south on the 405, toward Newport Beach.

His phone rang. It was a reporter at a local law magazine, asking for comment on a new countersuit filed by Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, who was claiming Avenatti and Daniels had defamed him. (Cohen has filed an analogous motion, seeking to stop Avenatti from talking about him in the press; Avenatti says the motion is “frivolous.”) “You want a comment?” Avenatti responded. “Here’s the comment: Keith Davidson is a disgrace.”

At the end of the day, we climbed into the sports car and headed back toward Beverly Hills. The sun was setting, the temperature was hovering around 75 degrees, and there was a warm breeze blowing off the ocean.

Even on the 405, the air was fragrant. Using the paddle shifters, Avenatti dropped the car into fifth, and we shot forward down the carpool lane, until the surrounding scenery had been reduced to a nauseating blur.

Around Torrance, I spotted the lights.

“Pull over,” the police cruiser’s loudspeaker crackled.

I sneaked a look at Avenatti. He was smiling. He took the next exit, and, drawing to a halt in a strip-mall parking lot, waited for the cop to reach his window.

Instead of writing a ticket, the officer gave Avenatti a warning: “Sir, in the future, make sure to stay in your lane.”

Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine