Following Stormy Daniels’ testimony this week in the hush money trial of former President Donald Trump, her former lawyer, Michael Avennati, has spoken sharply to the adult film star.
Despite this, Avenatti destroyed Daniels when attorneys for the former president urged Judge Juan Merchan to declare a mistrial on the grounds that her evidence differed from years-old public accounts. Avenatti is currently serving time in a minimum security federal prison in California for various offences.
According to The Blaze, Avenatti said in his argument that Daniels had effectively committed the same crime as Trump. He said that a producer had contacted him the previous year about doing a documentary about Daniels.
He had considered joining at first, but he changed his mind when he learned that Daniels was receiving compensation for her services. For him, this was an obvious sign that Daniels would be in charge, biassed, and dishonest about the project.
Furthermore, according to Avenatti, the producer informed him that Daniels would be “secretly paid” to conceal the funds because “she owed Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars” as a result of a defamation lawsuit he had successfully won against her.
The producer disclosed to me, among other things, that they had fictitiously “optioned” the rights to Daniels’ book and then disbursed the money Daniels requested via a sham ‘trust’ created in Daniels’ daughter’s name in order to conceal the funds from Trump and evade paying the judgement.
During her direct examination, Daniels allegedly told a story that differed from her previous public statements. As a result, Trump’s legal team requested a mistrial on Tuesday.
Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s attorneys, told Merchan, “A lot of the testimony that this witness talked about today is way different than the story she was peddling in 2016.
“She talked about a consensual encounter with President Trump that she was trying to sell … and that’s not the story she told today,” he stated. “But now we’ve heard it. And it is an issue. How can you unring the bell?”
Merchan refused to declare a mistrial but did say she divulged much more detail than was necessary. She was also cracking jokes, according to reports, some of which fell flat.