Avenatti to Begin Defense in Nike Extortion Trial as U.S. Rests

(Bloomberg) -- Federal prosecutors rested their case against Michael Avenatti after a week and a half, setting the stage for the celebrity lawyer to begin his defense against charges he tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike Inc.

Avenatti’s lawyer, Scott Srbenick, said Monday the defense would likely begin Tuesday and be very brief, suggesting Avenatti did not intend to take the stand in the case in federal court in Manhattan. “The scope of the defense case is going to be very limited,” Srebnick said. Closing arguments could start as soon as Tuesday.

Witnesses who testified for the government included a senior Nike in-house lawyer and a sports consultant who advised a youth basketball coach to hire Avenatti. Both told the Manhattan jury that Avenatti used the coach’s claims that Nike paid bribes to elite high school players to try to enrich himself.

Avenatti, who shot to fame as the lawyer to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in a lawsuit against President Donald Trump, was charged last year with trying to extort as much as $25 million from Nike by threatening to hold a press conference announcing the allegations unless it paid him and a colleague to conduct an internal corporate probe.

The lawyer maintains that his actions were legitimate in the context of tough negotiations on behalf of his client, coach Gary Franklin, and that the fee demand was reasonable for an internal investigation of serious corporate misconduct allegations. Avenatti has also argued that the case was retribution for his aggressive criticisms of the president.

Avenatti, who is being held in a federal lockup in New York, received a setback over the weekend when the judge overseeing the case blocked his subpoenas for testimony by two Nike executives who allegedly arranged the illicit payments.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been probing Nike over possible corruption of amateur basketball since 2017, but the company hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing by the government. Even so, evidence of the alleged payments have taken center stage during the trial, with Avenatti arguing Nike threw him under the bus to curry favor with the government.

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Anthony Lin

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