Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels and a Courtroom Time Capsule From 2018

In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.

Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.

Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.

Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.

“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.

“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”

“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.

“Yes,” she responded.

The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.

Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”

Yes, she said.

He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.

She responded affirmatively.

As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.

Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)

If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.

Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.

The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.

“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”

At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.

“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”

But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.

It was on Tuesday, the second day of his trial in the case involving Ms. Daniels, that Mr. Avenatti announced outside of the jury’s presence that he wanted to dismiss his lawyers and represent himself. He cited a “breakdown in the relationship” with his lawyers “that goes to the heart of my ability to mount a defense.”

In the fraud case in California, Mr. Avenatti noted, he had represented himself in a trial that ended in a mistrial after the judge found the prosecution had withheld from the defense certain financial data collected in the government’s investigation.

The judge overseeing the Manhattan trial, Jesse M. Furman, cautioned Mr. Avenatti that he did not have experience handling criminal trials beyond the California case. Judge Furman also noted that in the case involving Ms. Daniels, Mr. Avenatti was facing very serious charges, including a wire fraud count that carries a potential maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

“You must know, in other words, what you are doing and make your choice with your eyes wide open,” the judge said.

He agreed to allow Mr. Avenatti to represent himself — his team of federal public defenders would remain as standby counsel to assist if needed — and he warned Mr. Avenatti to abide by courtroom protocol and maintain proper decorum. “You may not improperly disrupt the proceedings,” he said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Avenatti raised concerns before the judge that Ms. Daniels might be a problem during cross-examination. He said he wanted to avoid a situation where she did not answer one of his questions and “instead gives answers well beyond my question — or is combative.”

“I don’t have any intent on being combative with Ms. Daniels,” he said.

The prosecution called Ms. Daniels to testify on Thursday, and it was not until late in the afternoon that Mr. Avenatti began his cross-examination, which ran most of Friday.

At one point, Mr. Avenatti asked Ms. Daniels whether she had made the comment attributed to her in The Times in 2018, likening his work to the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

“Yes,” she testified, “that’s what you told me to say.”

Mr. Avenatti addressed the judge: “Your honor, move to strike everything after ‘yes’ as nonresponsive.”