Prosecutor: Michael Avenatti saw dollar signs in Nike fraud

NEW YORK (AP) — A deep-in-debt Michael Avenatti threatened to deploy his big social media and television presence like a “modern weapon” to try to extort up to $25 million from Nike, a prosecutor claimed Wednesday while a lawyer for the California attorney told jurors at a trial's opening not to criminalize his client's “aggressive, tenacious, demanding behavior.”

“He's outrageous and sometimes he might even be offensive,” attorney Howard Srebnick said of Avenatti, who turned his body and his gaze toward his lawyer and the jury as the first of three fraud trials he faces on two coasts launched.

But what Avenatti said and how he said it in his representation of an amateur California basketball coach who was mad at Nike, “that's not extortion,” Srebnick insisted.

Prosecutors said Avenatti, 48, tried to extort $15 million to $25 million from Oregon-based Nike last March by threatening to go public with evidence that the shoemaker had paid off the families of highly ranked high school basketball prospects. The trial was expected to last about 2 1/2 weeks.

The Avenatti whose enthusiastic representation of porn star Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump made him a favorite of cable television program hosts has lost none of his energy and intensity in his conversion to a courthouse defendant in a suit and blue tie.

His eyes canvas a courtroom as large as a basketball gymnasium, settling on jurors, journalists, lawyers and spectators. Sometimes, he passes notes to his attorneys. When the first witness — attorney Scott Wilson — was asked to identify Avenatti in the courtroom, Avenatti sprang to his feet before Wilson could point him out.

Wilson testified he was representing Nike when Avenatti in March 2019 threatened to stage a news conference and go public with allegations Nike was...