On Monday, the Southern District of New York (SDNY) charged lawyer Michael Avenatti with trying to extort over $20 million from Nike.
Fresh from jail, the fame hungry took to Twitter to proclaim his innocence and continue his attacks on Nike.
Background: At 12:16PM ET on Monday, Avenatti tweeted out about a press conference on Tuesday where he planned to expose a scandal that involved Nike.
About 46 minutes later, SDNY announced federal prosecutors charged Avenatti with extortion. The complaint states that Avenatti and his co-conspirator met with Nike’s attorneys where they “threatened to release damaging information” if Nike “did not agree to make multi-million dollar payments to them, as well as an additional $1.5 million payment to a client Avenatti claimed to represent.”
Avenatti’s co-conspirator is celebrity lawyer Mark Gergos. Authorities have not charged or arrested him.
Avenatti went to court Monday morning. They released him after he posted $300,000 bond.
This morning, he went on a tweetstorm and named Phoenix Suns rookie Deandre Ayton and University of Oregon player Bol Bol as those paid by Nike.
The report Avenatti tweeted came out in September 2017, which detailed how “Nike’s grassroots basketball division Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL) has been served with a subpoena, according to ESPN, as federal prosecutors and the FBI continue to dig into what acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim termed as the ‘dark underbelly’ of the college basketball world in a press conference on Tuesday.”
I don’t know why he tweeted out that article, but I guess he did it to back up his claims about Nike.
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