As soon as a Trump Foil, Michael Avenatti Says Jail Remedy Was Payback

Michael Avenatti, who rose to prominence because the lawyer representing a pornographic movie actress in lawsuits in opposition to former President Donald J. Trump and was later convicted of trying to extort Nike, is in search of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in compensation for harsh jail circumstances that he says have been retaliation for his outspoken criticism of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Avenatti’s claims come simply weeks earlier than he faces trial in Manhattan in one other legal case, on fees that he stole about $300,000 from Stormy Daniels, the actress, who was on the middle of a scandal throughout Mr. Trump’s first presidential marketing campaign. He has pleaded not responsible to these fees.

Mr. Avenatti’s legal professionals stated he was in search of the compensation beneath the Federal Tort Claims Act, a regulation that can enable him to sue the federal government if the declare shouldn’t be settled inside six months.

“They handled him very in a different way than anyone else in jail,” one in every of his legal professionals, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, stated on Thursday. “As soon as that they had him in custody, they held him in a unit for violent criminals and terrorists.”

Mr. Avenatti, 50, was arrested and jailed in January 2020 after prosecutors stated he had violated the phrases of his bail in a fraud case he confronted in California. Mr. Avenatti stated in his declare that he had initially been held in solitary confinement within the Santa Ana Jail in Orange County and had then been taken to Manhattan and detained on the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Heart, a lot of that point in its most safe wing, 10 South.

Historically, 10 South was used to carry detainees charged with terrorism and different infamous crimes. Its most notable latest occupant was Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord often known as El Chapo.

“To take a person who has lived for many years with none legal convictions, no historical past of violence,” Mr. Avenatti stated in a telephone interview with one in every of his legal professionals on the road, “and inside 72 hours put him beneath these circumstances the place he’s housed in essentially the most restrictive, diabolical unit in the whole United States for pretrial detainees, is unheard-of.”

Mr. Avenatti’s declare, a duplicate of which was offered to The New York Occasions by his legal professionals, says that whereas he was in detention, he spent about 94 days in solitary confinement or beneath locked-down standing. “For the overwhelming majority of that point interval, I used to be in 10 South,” he stated within the interview.

Final July, when he was sentenced to two and a half years in the Nike case, Choose Paul G. Gardephe of Federal District Court docket noticed that Mr. Avenatti had been held “in horrific circumstances on the M.C.C. for greater than three months, in solitary confinement for a lot of the time and in lockdown for practically all of it; first, as a result of a loaded handgun had been smuggled by somebody into the power, and later due to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“Situations have been horrible,” the choose added. “It’s exhausting to consider they might happen in america of America.”

Mr. Avenatti was launched from jail in late April 2020 and has been held in residence confinement in California ever since, one other of his legal professionals, Daniel McGuinness, stated.

Mr. Avenatti stated within the papers that whereas he was on the M.C.C., he had been prohibited from talking with family or mates, he had been offered no entry to contemporary air or recreation, temperatures at night time had been frigid, and he had been permitted to see the sky solely as soon as.

When he requested for studying materials, he stated in his declare, he was initially refused and was then offered one ebook: “Trump: The Artwork of the Deal.”

Mr. Avenatti says within the declare that the month after he was detained, a senior jail worker escorted him from a authorized go to to his cell and requested if he understood why he was being housed in 10 South.

In keeping with Mr. Avenatti’s declare, “The worker defined that the orders got here from the legal professional basic” — William P. Barr on the time.

Mr. Barr, requested for touch upon Mr. Avenatti’s claims, responded with one phrase: “Ridiculous.”

A Justice Division spokeswoman declined to remark.