Michael Avenatti must pay Stormy Daniels $148K in stolen memoir earnings, NYC judge rules

Disgraced defense attorney Michael Avenatti must pay more than $148,000 in stolen memoir proceeds to the client who made him famous, porn star Stormy Daniels, a Manhattan judge has ruled.

The pugnacious California lawyer, convicted by a Manhattan jury in February of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, is currently serving two federal prison sentences — one for embezzling Daniels’ money in 2018 and another for trying to extort Nike.

Soon, he’ll be sentenced in a third case he pleaded guilty to in June for defrauding clients and the Internal Revenue Service.

U.S. District Court Judge Jesse Furman’s ruling issued late Friday requires Avenatti to pay Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, the remainder of what he owes her. Neither of their lawyers responded to requests seeking comment.

Evidence at Avenatti’s Manhattan trial showed how he rerouted advance payments for Daniels’ tell-all memoir “Full Disclosure” to bank accounts he controlled when he represented her in litigation involving then-president Donald Trump. On at least one occasion, he directed an employee at his law firm to forge Daniels’ signature to facilitate the transfer.

Daniels’ book, in part, tells the story of her sexual encounter with Trump. She had been forbidden from talking about the tryst with Trump per a non-disclosure agreement, which accompanied the now-infamous $130,000 “hush money” payment from Michael Cohen ahead of the 2016 presidential election. She hired Avenatti to help her exit that contract.

Witness testimony showed how a broke Avenatti used Daniels’ book money to pay off his Ferrari and expenses associated with his law firm and debt-laden coffee business.

Meanwhile, Daniels worried aloud to her lawyer about why her book publisher, St. Martin’s Press, hadn’t met its contractual obligations to issue payments ahead of the book’s launch. Scores of texts shown to jurors at trial showed Avenatti allaying Daniels’ concerns while mocking her to the publisher.

“Stormy Daniels is insane. She’s a porn actress. She doesn’t understand the real world,” he wrote Daniels’ literary agent, Luke Janklow, on one occasion.

The lawyer dumped his public defenders on the trial’s second day to represent himself against the criminal charges. He cross-examined Daniels on the stand and delivered the defense’s closing argument, attempting without success to make his former client look crazy and untrustworthy.

Daniels set the record straight about her interaction with Trump under cross-examination by Avenatti. The adult film actress said she slept with the former president once in 2006 at a charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, shortly after Melania Trump had given birth to his youngest child.

“[I]t was not romantic,” Daniels said at the trial. “I don’t consider getting cornered coming out of a bathroom to be an affair.”

During his lengthy summation, Avenatti bizarrely alternated between speaking in the first- and third-person. He began closings with a lie when he said his father had worked as a hot dog vendor at a ballpark in his youth. It later transpired in government filings that it was, in fact, the father of one of Avenatti’s court-appointed lawyers who had worked the blue-collar job. His father was an executive at a beer brewing company.

Avenatti’s also on the hook for $259,800 in restitution payments to Nike, which agreed to let him pay back his individual victims first. In that case, he tried to shake down the sportswear giant while representing an amateur youth basketball coach in a lawsuit against it.

Not even the coach, Gary Franklin, knew that Avenatti had tried to extort Nike of $25 million in closed-door conversations.

An outstanding $94 million lawsuit Avenatti filed against the federal government accuses prison officials at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center of subjecting him to torturous conditions while incarcerated in solitary confinement.

Avenatti’s lawsuit says jail guards gifted him a copy of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”