Michael Avenatti convicted of stealing from Stormy Daniels

Michael Avenatti has been convicted of charges that he cheated the porn actor Stormy Daniels out of nearly 300,000 dollars (£222,000) she was supposed to get for writing a book about an alleged tryst with former president Donald Trump.

The verdict was another crushing defeat for the California lawyer, who has faced a host of legal problems after briefly rising to fame as one of Mr Trump’s leading antagonists on cable news early in the Republican’s administration.

Daniels had initially hired Avenatti as she was trying to escape the terms of a 130,000 hush payment deal that kept her from speaking publicly about an alleged sexual encounter that Trump says never happened.

Avenatti, 50, was considering running for president himself when his rise in popularity in Democratic circles was interrupted by his March 2019 arrest on charges that he tried to extort up to 25 million dollars from Nike with threats to spoil its reputation if the sportswear giant did not meet his demands.

The same day, he was charged in federal court in California with cheating clients and others out of millions of dollars. The Daniels case was brought weeks later.

In early 2020, Avenatti was convicted in the Nike case and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

He has not yet served that sentence. Last year, a trial on the California charges ended in a mistrial.