The Fast and Furious Michael Avenatt
By Matthew Shaer
July 10, 2018
The attorney Michael Avenatti stands just under six feet tall, with blatant blue eyes and thinning hair he shaves down to stubble, exposing the crumpled vein at his left temple. Before February, when he agreed to represent Stephanie Clifford — the pornographic film performer better known as Stormy Daniels — in her legal battle with the president of the United States, Avenatti was in the best shape of his life: 185 pounds, 9 percent body fat. The ever-expanding pressures of the case have meant less time at the gym, and in recent months he has lost some 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. In bulleted, 12-point Arial font, the document levied an astonishing charge: that in 2017, a Russian oligarch named Viktor Vekselberg had deposited around $500,000 into the same bank account Michael Cohen, President 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 rivaled by only 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 United States would be withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. So Avenatti delayed posting a link to the Dropbox file on Twitter until 5 o’clock, with three cable appearances to follow, starting with an 8 o’clock 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.”
(Oh God, is there more)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/magazine/michael-avenatti-stormy-daniels-donald-trump-media.html
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