Avenatti Blindsided After Playboy Playmate Flips Script, Presses Lawsuit Against Him
The clock is ticking on the 15 minutes of fame being enjoyed by attorney Michael Avenatti, the anti-Trump lawyer representing porn star Stormy Daniels in a legal dispute against President Donald Trump and his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
The crux of the dispute between Avenatti/Daniels and Cohen/Trump is a nondisclosure agreement and “hush money” reached between Daniels — real name Stephanie Clifford — and Cohen regarding an alleged affair between Daniels and Trump many years ago, an NDA Daniels is now seeking to extricate herself from.
But now it appears that there is a wholly separate, if strikingly similar, NDA issue that Avenatti was involved in. And this particular legal dispute may not come out in his favor, according to The Daily Caller.
A judge in California’s Los Angeles Superior Court has ruled that part of a lawsuit filed against Avenatti by former Playboy Playmate Shera Béchard may proceed, rejecting Avenatti’s bid to dismiss the suit in its entirety.
Avenatti became the subject of that suit after he allegedly revealed the existence of an NDA and hush money settlement reached between Béchard and prominent Republican fundraiser Eliot Briody, who’d wanted to keep their illicit affair a secret.
Béchard had hired attorney Keith Davidson to represent her interests in setting up the NDA over the affair. Davidson had, in turn, allegedly enlisted the aid of his attorney acquaintance Michael Cohen — yes, the same Cohen — to approach Briody and represent him in the matter.
Interestingly, Davidson had initially represented Daniels in her NDA lawsuit prior to being replaced by Avenatti.
The agreement that was ultimately reached in December 2017 on the Briody NDA called for $1.6 million to be paid to Béchard in several quarterly installments in exchange for her silence with regard to the affair.
However, Béchard only received two of the scheduled payments prior to a Wall Street Journal article in April which exposed the agreement and prompted Briody to refuse any further payments once the secret had been revealed.
Quite tellingly, Avenatti had tweeted some of the pertinent facts — while still withholding names — in that case the night before the article was published as part of his ongoing bid to smear and destroy Cohen over his role in the Daniels NDA case.
Incredibly, Avenatti even griped later that the WSJ failed to attribute any credit to him for its story exposing the agreement between Béchard and Briody.
Upon learning these details leaked by Avenatti and the relationship between Davidson and Cohen, Béchard fired Davidson and accused him of revealing the secret details of the NDA to Avenatti, who in turn made them public on social media, or perhaps even leaked them to the media.
Now represented by a new attorney, Peter Stris, Béchard has filed a lawsuit against Avenatti, Briody and Davidson which seeks the remainder of the settlement from Briody and unspecified damages from Avenatti and Davidson.
Avenatti moved to dismiss all of Béchard’s claims, and while Judge Elizabeth Allen White agreed to dismiss two of the three claims against Avenatti, she allowed to stand one claim which asserted that Avenatti had unlawfully interfered with Béchard’s NDA arrangement.
Of course, Avenatti maintains that he’s done nothing wrong and will appeal the judge’s ruling. He has also boastfully predicted that he will ultimately prevail in this matter.
That remains to be seen, but one thing that cannot be disputed is the pure irony of the fact that a weaselly lawyer who represents one so-called sex icon’s claims against a powerful figure is in turn being sued by a different so-called sex icon whose similar situation may have been breached and exposed by the weaselly lawyer’s non-stop running mouth, which many have assumed would get him into trouble one of these days.
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