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Prosecutors said that she "did not sign or allow the letter" addressed to her agent and "did not even know that she existed". Mr. Avenatti attempted to conceal this effort by offering him money "from another source" to replace a payment. , the prosecutor said, and he falsely said that the publisher had not paid when she asked for another portion.
Mr. Avenatti drew the country's attention when he began representing Ms. Daniels in early 2018 by filing lawsuits against President Trump and Michael D. Cohen, a former lawyer and mediator to the president. He sought to release Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, from a silence agreement that she had signed prior to the 2016 elections. As part of that agreement, she accepted $ 130,000. and agreed to remain silent about a sexual relationship she allegedly had with Mr. Trump in 2006.
The two lawsuits filed by Mr. Avenatti on behalf of Ms. Daniels were dismissed. In one case, she was ordered to pay Mr. Trump $ 293,000 in legal fees.
However, Ms. Daniels' story has created new problems for the president, who culminated in Mr. Cohen's guilty plea last year for campaigning against financial crimes related to the secret payment. This month, he began serving a three-year sentence. The same office that won Mr. Cohen's guilty plea – the public corruption unit of the US District Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York – brought new charges against Mr. Avenatti, including the aggravated identity theft.
The new charges add to the many other filings this year. Mr. Avenatti was arrested in March in New York for extortion, accused of having asked Nike for millions of dollars in exchange for what he described as evidence of misconduct on the part of Company employees in the recruitment of college basketball players. On Wednesday, he was also charged for previously announced charges.
In a separate indictment filed in California this spring, Avenatti was charged with stealing millions of dollars from five other clients, including a paraplegic man who had won a $ 4 million settlement but had not received only a fraction of it in the form of periodic payments. exceeded $ 1,900. Mr. Avenatti was also charged with falsifying false tax returns with a Mississippi bank and repeatedly lied about his business and his income with the company. an agent of the Internal Revenue Service, creditors, a bankruptcy court and a trustee in bankruptcy.
Avenatti, who has spent most of the 2018 crusade against Trump on cable television shows and teasing his own presidential career, said the prosecution was politically motivated. .
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