LATEST: Federal prosecutors in New York charge Michael Avenatti with additional financial crimes, including allegedly forging the signature of his former client Stormy Daniels and diverting nearly $300,000 owed to her into his own account.
Federal prosecutors in New York charged Michael Avenatti with additional financial crimes Wednesday, including allegedly forging the signature of his former client Stormy Daniels and diverting nearly $300,000 owed to her for a book advance into his own account, according to court records filed on Wednesday.
"Avenatti used misrepresentations and a fraudulent document purporting to bear his client's name and signature to convince his client's literary agent to divert money owed to Avenatti's client to an account controlled by Avenatti," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement."Avenatti then spent the money principally for his own personal and business purposes.
"She received millions of dollars worth of legal services and we expended huge sums in expenses," he wrote in a statement to ABC News.Federal prosecutors charge in court papers that Avenatti forged Daniels signature on a document for the purpose of diverting the funds she was owed into an account of his own, and leaving Daniels with the impression that the publishing house she was contracted with to write a book had not delivered the promised advances.
"To conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to Avenatti as [Daniels'] lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that [Daniels] believed was missing, Avenatti led [her] to believe that [her] publisher was refusing to make the payment...," prosecutors claim. In a subsequent statement to ABC News after the charges were filed, Avenatti again reiterated his innocence and said he was entitled to the money from the book advance.
The Daniels investigation is not related to those charges. But it is being run by the same team of federal officials who slapped Avenatti with two counts of extortion for his alleged role in what prosecutors called “an old-fashioned shakedown” of Nike.
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