There are a couple of strange side shows going on with the Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen-Keith Davidson main legal event. The most recent is that Shera Bechard has named Keith Davidson, Elliot Broidy, and incredibly, Michael Avenatti, as defendants in a new lawsuit and the complaint is sealed. This is the second anomalous legal event to occur with this group of people since Monday.
Please see the below statement regarding the new lawsuit filed by Ms. Bechard against Mr. Broidy et al. in Los Angeles Superior Court. pic.twitter.com/i7gQMWLrG7
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) July 6, 2018
Now just a few days ago Michael Cohen’s attorney, Brent Blakely, blew a court filing deadline. A responsive pleading was due in the lawsuit Stormy Daniels filed in June alleging collusion between Cohen and her previous attorney, Keith Davidson, who also was Shera Bechard’s attorney. Here’s what Avenatti tweeted about that.
Instead of trying to get a gag order issued so I cannot speak the truth to the public, Mr. Cohen and his lawyer Brent Blakely should be focused on simple court deadlines. They blew the deadline to respond to our complaint. As a result, the court just issued this order. #Basta pic.twitter.com/ZYzNyh2RRd
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) July 2, 2018
There are a couple of possibilities as to what this second matter is all about: One, is that Cohen and his lawyer are simply asleep at the switch and so are all the staffers because calendaring a responsive pleading is very basic stuff. That’s very unlikely. Two, is that Cohen is busy putting together a plea deal with S.D.N.Y. and doesn’t want to give away information in responding to the civil case that he could use in the plea deal, so he’s keeping that information to himself for right now. While using whatever he can to file a plea deal might be a good idea, it’s not going to fix the Daniels case. So maybe he just doesn’t care? That also is very unlikely, especially in a high profile case like this one. This is the case where Cohen and Sean Hannity were discussing having Stormy Daniels on Hannity’s show. The emails and texts between them are considering very damaging.
In any event, Monday is the 9th of July and that’s Cohen’s new deadline. If Cohen doesn’t do something then, Avenatti may begin the process of taking a default judgment, meaning Stormy Daniels would win by default because Cohen just didn’t mount a defense. The speculation on that has been that Cohen has decided that it would be cheaper to allow a default judgment to be taken than to actually defend the suit, or that he lost Blakely as a lawyer and he doesn’t have another lawyer, (although he did just acquire Lanny Davis as co-counsel with Guy Petrillo in the S.D.N.Y. suit.)
Now what you just read is exactly as stated, speculation. There’s a lot of hearsay on these developments but not a lot of facts beyond whatever Avenatti has shared in his tweets.
There are a lot of horses on the Cohen-Davidson-Daniels-Bechard merry-go-round and who knows where either of these cases is going, but there are certainly some interesting twists and turns happening.
