LAS VEGAS, Nevada—On Saturday night, celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti, a man whose quick ascent to mainstream fame came almost as suddenly as his decline this past winter, accompanied his client Stormy Daniels on the red carpet of the 36th annual AVN Awards, known as the “Oscars of Porn.”
Avenatti, who briefly flirted with a 2020 run until a domestic violence allegation against him in December, spent more of his time talking about centrist policy than smut. Though he endorsed Medicare for All and free college, the lawyer also expressed wariness of the Abolish ICE movement, and a familiar skepticism against a Green New Deal, calling it “unrealistic.”
“I think we certainly have to figure out the health-care situation,” Avenatti told The Daily Beast. “There’s too many Americans that don’t have insurance and are concerned about their health care and rightfully so. I do think we have to have a strong southern border, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily have to build a wall. I think we’ve got to find a way for each kid in America to go to college if they want to go to college. Above all else, whoever the Democrats nominate, they’ve got to be a fighter. If Trump is the nominee on the other side, he’s not just going to roll over, you’re going to have to take the fight to him.”
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Avenatti’s notion of fighting did not seem to apply to freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the Green New Deal, her plan to stimulate job creation and ready the country for the omnipresent threat of climate change.
“I haven’t examined her plan in detail enough,” he said. “I think a lot about what she talks about makes a lot of sense, but I think a bunch of it is a little unrealistic... I definitely think we need to make climate change a priority. We need to rejoin the Paris Agreement. We need to make dealing with climate change a priority—there’s no question it’s a crisis. I just don’t know if we can take that big a step, to a Green New Deal in that short a time period. I think her plan would require basically all gasoline engines to be eliminated in 10 years.”
An explosive report from the U.N. in September warned the world had just 12 years to reduce net carbon production to zero. An apocalyptic predicament Avenatti called “a shame.”
“I think we also have to be measured in the way we go about it,” he said.
Halfway down the carpet, the lawyer left policy-talk briefly to tell a few raunchy, well-rehearsed, resistance jokes. “It’s an honor for me to be here tonight because Bob Mueller and I were co-nominated for an award tonight,” Avenatti told a trio of AVN nominees who’d made an adult Hamilton parody called Hamiltoe. “It’s a joint award. It’s ‘Best Domination of a Sitting U.S. President.’”
But after a few low blows (“I was a little surprised to learn that Trump wasn’t here tonight. Because he’s f*cked more people than anybody”), and a dig about Javanka’s kinks (“probably pictures of themselves”), the lawyer got back on track. He told the crowd he was pressuring Congress to make Michael Cohen’s congressional hearing a public event.
“Stormy and I are going to attend, providing that it’s a public hearing,” he said. ”I’m demanding that it be public to hear the testimony from Michael Cohen. It should not be in some smoke-filled room. Frankly, I want America to see Stormy at that hearing because that hearing would not have taken place but for the courageousness and fortitude of Stormy Daniels. It would not have happened. None of this would have happened without Stormy Daniels. I’m going to be diligent and make sure that people know her significance in American history.”
