The Supreme Court won’t hear former attorney Michael Avenatti’s appeal over his conviction for misappropriating nearly $300,000 in book proceeds earmarked for his former client, adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels.
Avenatti represented Clifford in a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump. Daniels said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, a claim he has denied.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee going up against Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in the election on Nov. 5, was convicted in May on New York state charges relating to falsifying business records to conceal a payment made to Clifford so she would not publicly discuss the alleged affair.
Avenatti, who is currently behind bars in California, was convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in the Clifford-related case in a federal district court in New York in June 2022 after representing himself in court.
After payment of advances for her memoir, titled “Full Disclosure,” were not paid, Clifford asked Avenatti about the delays, and he gave her the impression that her publisher had failed to disburse the $297,500, she said. Prosecutors said Avenatti intercepted the funds by having an employee forge her signature.
A federal jury convicted Avenatti, who received a four-year prison term for conduct that the judge in the case termed “brazen and egregious.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed in March of this year.
Avenatti argued in the petition that the evidence against him in the Clifford case was not enough to sustain a conviction because the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in Dubin v. United States limited the scope of the federal Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act.
According to the petition, Clifford’s signature on a letter authorizing a change of bank accounts had been “copy-and-pasted from another document” by Avenatti’s secretary. The government argued that this act constituted identity theft, an assertion Avenatti denied.
Separately, in 2020, Avenatti was convicted of extorting shoe maker Nike and defrauding a client.
Avenatti was recorded saying he would blacken the company’s public image and harm its stock price by making public information he said showed improper payments had been made to the families of college basketball prospects.
Avenatti reportedly said he would “blow the lid” on Nike at a press conference unless the company gave him as much as $25 million to carry out an investigation, along with $1.5 million for his client, a basketball coach.
The federal government would not discuss the latest Supreme Court case.
“We will decline to comment on the denial of Avenatti’s appeal,” Nicholas Biase, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, told The Epoch Times by email.
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Avenatti’s attorney, federal public defender Kendra Hutchinson of New York City, but received no reply by publication time.
