Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who admitted to paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to cover up her affair with the former president, attended the start of the trial of Ms Daniels’s own ex-lawyer, Michael Avenatti on Monday.
Mr Avenatti stands accused of defrauding Ms Daniels out of a book advance totalling some $300,000. His former client is expected to testify against him; he has insisted he is innocent of the alleged crimes, which include wire fraud and identity theft.
Tweeting in advance of the trial’s opening, Mr Cohen mocked Mr Avenatti, who has been a bitter personal rival since Ms Daniels brought a defamation lawsuit against the Trump lawyer during the president’s term.
“I figured @MichaelAvenatti was so kind and gracious to use other peoples’ money to fly himself and @StormyDaniels to my hearing,” he wrote, “the only decent thing to do is to reciprocate … so here I am at the courthouse!!!”
That greeting was returned by Mr Avenatti at the courthouse on Monday in an incident first reported by The Daily Beast. According to the news outlet, Mr Avenatti made some type of remarks about Mr Cohen supposedly wearing his “Donald Trump kneepads”, which appeared to be a crude sexual reference.
“He’s shown himself to be the dirtbag everybody expected him to be,” Mr Cohen told the New York Daily News in an interview afterwards, adding that he didn’t know what Mr Avenatti meant about the remark.
The beginning of Mr Avenatti’s fraud trial marks another sordid turn in the long-running Daniels-Trump-Cohen saga, which saw Mr Cohen sentenced to three years in jail for multiple offences to which he pleaded guilty – among them tax evasion and campaign finance violations related to the Daniels payment.
Since the end of his sentence late last year, Mr Cohen has been an increasingly vocal Trump critic and public figure. He is co-operating with various investigations into the former president’s personal and business affairs, and has made numerous predictions and claims about his sometime boss’s alleged involvement in financial misconduct.
Mr Cohen last year interviewed Ms Daniels on his podcast, Mea Culpa, apologising for causing her “needless pain” and thanking her for “speaking out” against the former president, whom she unsuccessfully tried to sue for defamation.
Mr Avenatti, meanwhile, has previously been convicted of using threats of reputational damage to try and extort $25m from sportswear brand Nike, for which he was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He is also facing a retrial in a California case where he stands accused of swindling clients.
