District Judge cites “severe remorse” among reasons to give Michael Avenatti (way-below-guideline) sentence of 30 months in federal prison

This NBC News piece reports that “Michael Avenatti, the brash attorney who had been a leading foe of then-President Donald Trump, was sentenced Thursday to 30 months in prison for a brazen, botched scheme to extort athletic apparel giant Nike out of up to $25 million.” Here is more about this high-profile sentencing:

That sentence was much lower than the nine years that was the bottom of the sentencing range suggested by federal guidelines, and not anywhere close to “a substantial” prison term sought by federal prosecutors for the California lawyer.

“I alone have destroyed my career, my relationships and my life. And there is no doubt I need to pay,” Avenatti, 50, tearfully told Manhattan federal court Judge Paul Gardephe before he was sentenced. “I am truly sorry for all of the pain I caused to Mr. Franklin and others,” Avenatti said, referring to his former client Gary Franklin, an amateur basketball coach.

Avenatti’s sentencing came more than three years after he gained widespread fame, and infamy, for his bombastic representation of porn star Stormy Daniels, who received a $130,000 hush money payment from Trump’s then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about claims she had sex with Trump years before he ran for the White House.

Daniels is one of several former Avenatti clients that he is charged with swindling in two other separate federal prosecutions, one of which is due to begin next week in California.

Gardephe said that in the Nike scheme, “Mr. Avenatti’s conduct was outrageous.”  “He hijacked his client’s claims, and he used him to further his own agenda, which was to extort Nike millions of dollars for himself,” said the judge, who also sentenced Avenatti to three years of supervised release for the case, in which Avenatti was convicted at trial last year. “He outright betrayed his client,” Gardephe said….

But Gardephe added that Avenatti deserved a lighter sentence than the range recommended by federal guidelines — from nine years to 11-years and three months — because, the judge said that for the first time in the case, “Mr. Avenatti has expressed what I believe to be severe remorse today.”

The judge also cited the brutal conditions in which Avenatti was kept for several months in a Manhattan federal prison after his 2019 arrest. And Gardephe sharply noted, in justifying the lower-than-recommended sentence, how federal prosecutors did not criminally charge Geragos in spite of what they have said was his active participation with Avenatti in the shakedown.

The judge ordered Avenatti, who remains free on bond, to surrender on Sept. 15 to begin his sentence, which Gardephe recommended be served in at the federal prison camp in Sheridan, Oregon. Avenatti’s lawyers had asked for a sentence of just six months….

At his trial next week, Avenatti is accused of crimes that include defrauding clients out of millions of dollars. One of those clients was a mentally ill paraplegic. Avenatti next year is due back in Manhattan federal court to be tried on charges related to allegedly swindling Daniels, out of $300,000 in proceeds for a book she wrote.