Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti was arrested Monday on charges he attempted to extort Nike out of up to $25 million by threatening to drive the athletic apparel giant’s market capitalization down by $10 billion by announcing claims of misconduct by company employees.
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The California resident Avenatti, 48, was busted in Midtown Manhattan at the law offices of Boies Schiller Flexner at 12:30 p.m. by FBI agents, about 15 minutes after he tweeted that he would be disclosing a big high school and college basketball scandal “perpetrated by” Nike that he supposedly had uncovered.
According to a criminal complaint, Avenatti had offered to not have that press conference “only if Nike made a payment of $1.5 million to a client of Avenatti’s in possession of information damaging to Nike ... and agreed to ‘retain’ Avenatti and [another person] to conduct an ‘internal investigation’ — an investigation that Nike did not request — for which Avenatti and [the other person] demanded to be paid, at a minimum, between $15 [million] and $25 million.”
The complaint says that last Wednesday, Avenatti and a cooperating witness spoke by phone with lawyers for Nike “during which Avenatti stated, with respect to his demands for payment of milions of dollars, that if those demands were not met ‘I’ll go take ten billion dollars off your client’s market cap ... I’m not f---ing around.’ ”