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Disgraced Democratic lawyer Michael Avenatti has been moved from federal prison to a halfway house in California, according to Bureau of Prisons records, but remains in federal custody with a projected release date of September 2028.
Avenatti is best known for representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her failed 2018 defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump. Once a media darling with presidential ambitions, he was later convicted in multiple fraud cases and sentenced to years in federal prison.
An official with the Bureau of Prisons confirmed to Fox News Digital that Avenatti was transferred from the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) Los Angeles to community confinement overseen by the BOP Long Beach Residential Reentry Management (RRM) Office. He has a projected release date of September 8, 2028.
In 2022, Avenatti was convicted and sentenced to 48 months in prison for stealing close to $300,000 in proceeds from Daniels. At the time of his sentencing, Avenatti was already serving a 30-month sentence for threatening to extort $25 million from Nike. Avenatti was also sentenced in December 2022 to 14 years in prison for stealing from four of his clients. One of those clients was a paraplegic.
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Michael Avenatti exits the United States Courthouse in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., October 8, 2019. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
A copy of the probation order signed by U.S. District Judge James Selna stated that Avenatti must pay $5,937,725.58 in restitution to his victims, and he is ordered to participate in a mental health treatment program. Following his release from federal custody in 2028, Avenatti will be under supervised release for three years.
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Former attorney Michael Avenatti, representing himself, cross-examines witness Stormy Daniels during his criminal trial. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)
Avenatti’s early release comes after a federal judge in June 2025 reduced his collective prison sentence to eight years, allowing credit for some of the sentences running concurrently. Avenatti’s resentencing came after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his 14-year sentence in October 2024. He was disbarred in California in February 2025.
As Daniels’ defamation lawyer, Avenatti became a household name after regularly appearing on network TV shows. Fox News Digital previously reported that between 2018 and 2019, before his legal troubles began, he appeared on CNN 121 times and MSNBC 108 times.
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Avenatti was a staunch critic of Trump, saying in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered in 2018 that Trump is “either going to resign… be removed from office by impeachment, or I’m going to beat him in 2020.”
“But one way or the other, he’s not going to serve a second term,” Avenatti said.
Anderson Cooper had disgraced anti-Trump lawyer Michael Avenatti on his show a whopping 20 times during a two-month span in 2018, more than any other cable news host. (Screenshot/CNN)
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However, the disgraced lawyer has since changed his tone, claiming in an April 2024 New York Post that he is “bothered that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against Trump.
“There’s no question [the trial] is politically motivated because they’re concerned that he may be reelected,” Avenatti told the Post. “If the defendant was anyone other than Donald Trump, this case would not have been brought at this time, and for the government to attempt to bring this case and convict him in an effort to prevent tens of millions of people from voting for him, I think it’s just flat out wrong, and atrocious.”
A lawyer for Avenatti declined to comment.