Michael Avenatti Is the 1990s-Style Celebrity Lawyer of the Trump Age

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Michael Avenatti Is the 1990s-Style Celebrity Lawyer of the Trump Age
The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.
Rosie Gray 6:00 AM ET Politics


On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

All of the elements have worked in Avenatti’s favor: the missteps of President Trump’s lawyers and media defenders, the desire in Resistance America for a counterpoint to Trump’s dominance, and the eagerness of cable news to amplify and obsess over people who cause a spectacle. Of course, this has long ceased to be just about Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and her legal dealings with the president with whom she says she had an affair. Daniels says Trump bought her silence—for a while—through his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen for $130,000. The saga has taken on a life of its own, with Avenatti treating it like an episodic television show, teasing information reveals, getting into all-out scraps with critics, and generally making it a capital-T Thing. The Washington Post has profiled him more than once.

“We are covering this like O.J.,” said one cable-news staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. “I’ve never been more sure someone is going to get a TV-contributor deal in my life.”

The O.J. Simpson comparison is apt. As far as media coverage, the Daniels story has started to resemble nothing so much as major spectacles like the Simpson trial did. It’s an all-encompassing vortex that has pulled all kinds of issues into its wake and become about much more than Trump’s alleged affair: Cohen’s selling of access to the president, his potential role in Russian efforts to help Trump, and what his role in Trump’s world says about how the whole thing works. None of these angles have gotten by without a boost from the smooth-headed Avenatti, who broke the news of the payment from a Russian oligarch to Cohen. “I’m the lawyer for Stormy Daniels in the first instance and I’m the lawyer for the truth in the second instance,” he said on MSNBC last week.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/michael-avenatti-is-the-1990s-style-celebrity-lawyer-of-the-trump-age/561089/