Christian Smith
Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti request to consider whether his conviction for conspiracy to extort Nike should be thrown out.
Avenatti, who became famous for playing porn actress Stormy Daniels In her case against former President Trump, she was found guilty of attempting to extort up to $25 million from Nike and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
Prosecutors alleged at trial that the high-profile lawyer, who represented an amateur basketball coach, claimed to have evidence that Nike was paying non-professional players and demanded a settlement or risk a press conference on the eve of the company’s quarterly earnings call. .
He petitioned the Supreme Court in February after a federal appeals court unanimously refused to overturn his conviction on the premise that the evidence did not support it and that jurors were wrongly instructed about whether he defrauded Nike in “honest services”.
Avenatti’s petition asked the high court whether the law under which he was convicted of honest services fraud is too vague and therefore void, and whether a lawyer’s plea agreement makes them liable for criminal extortion.
The court’s brief order noted that the Judge Brett Kavanaugh refused to consider Avenatti’s petition. Kavanaugh did not provide a rationale, which two of the nine justices now do. Avenatti represented a woman who came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh denies the allegations.
In his petition to the high court, the disgraced lawyer argued that the Second Circuit’s opinion illegally expands “what was, at most, attorney misconduct, correctively in a State Bar disciplinary proceeding, into a wave of federal crimes ”.
“This Court should once again affirm that the federal criminal code is not so unlimited,” the petition says.
The Justice Department responded that Avenatti’s lawyer did not raise the issue of vagueness in the appeals court and that his other arguments lacked merit.
“Petitioner did not threaten to sue a public official based on false statements, nor did he face a RICO civil suit for litigious conduct in a business dispute. In fact, the effort allegations in this case were not based in any way on the petitioner’s “litigious conduct,” wrote U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Prelogar.
“Instead, these allegations were based on the petitioner’s demand – completely separate from his reasonable request for compensation for his client – that Nike hire him to conduct an internal investigation,” Prelogar said.
Avenatti was convicted separately of stealing recipes from Daniels’ books and sentenced to 14 years in prison for stealing settlement funds from other clients and failing to pay taxes.
The Associated Press contributed.
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