Lawyer Michael Avenatti was unable to overturn an extortion conviction against Nike.
He was previously described as a “corrupt lawyer who claimed he was fighting for the little guy” by U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada. “In fact, he only cared about his own selfish interests.”
In 2019, the lawyer was arrested for threatening Nike after the company refused to pay millions of dollars to Avenatti and his client.
Avenatti pressed Nike to pay him up to $25 million for a probe and an additional $1.5 million for his client.
He was later charged and convicted of conspiracy to commit extortion, transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort, and extortion.
In asking the U.S. Second Circuit Court to overturn the decision, Avenatti said in an appellate brief that “the evidence failed to establish wrongfulness.”
The brief added, “More fundamentally, an attorney does not commit criminal extortion by pairing a threat of economic harm with a request for compensation.”
The court said Avenatti’s challenges were “meritless.”
According to the court’s decision, “Avenatti’s problem then was not that the challenged charge failed to provide him with a sufficient legal basis to argue his defense theory. Rather, his problem was that compelling evidence indicated that he had demanded a multi-million-dollar internal investigation retainer from Nike not to achieve Franklin’s objectives but only to enrich himself. Accordingly, we reject his challenge to the district court’s general authority instruction as meritless.”
Reporting from The Blaze:
In June 2022, Avenatti was sentenced to four years behind bars for defrauding his porn star client Stormy Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then, just a few months later, he was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for tax and wire fraud, having both stolen millions from his clients and failed to pay taxes for a coffee chain he owned. ... The 52-year-old in whom some Democrats once saw a future president will remain incarcerated at a federal prison near Los Angeles well into the 2030s.
