Geragos Tangled in Avenatti Extortion Case

Avenatti has denied the charges. Geragos, who has not been charged, did not respond to an email for comment.

But the link between Avenatti and Geragos goes beyond Monday’s allegations. Both are on-camera naturals fueled by an underdog ethos. And Geragos first landed in the national spotlight in the 1990s by walking into a political firestorm that led right to the White House — circumstances not unlike those that catapulted Avenatti into national recognition over the last year.

Law was in Geragos’s blood. His family were members of Los Angeles’s close Armenian-American community. His father worked as a district attorney before entering private practice.

“My father was sworn in as a D.A. in January 1957, the same month I was conceived,” Geragos told Super Lawyers in 2009. As a kid, Geragos would sit in courtrooms and watch as his father’s cases unfold, an experience that fixed his own trajectory toward the courthouse.

“You could get paid for shooting your mouth off and not much else,” he told Super Lawyers.

Geragos studied anthropology and sociology at Haverford College, then after graduation entered Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. While studying law, he worked up a side business as a rock concert promoter in Pasadena, booking shows for acts such as the Ramones, the Pretenders, and the Go-Go’s, according to Super Lawyers. In 1983, he began working at his father’s firm.

“He was always a very public kind of person,” Stanley A. Goldman, a friend and former law professor, told the New York Times in 2003. “[H]e claims he rarely showed up for class because he was organizing rock concerts. I like Mark Geragos. A lot of people don’t. He can be extremely pushy.”

Geragos’s first splash into mainstream news came more than a decade later, when he began representing a woman at the center of a presidential scandal then dominating national headlines.

Susan McDougal was a former business partner of President Bill Clinton on the failed Whitewater real estate deal. When McDougal refused to testify before a grand jury called by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison for civil contempt beginning in 1996.

Upon release, McDougal was charged again for criminal contempt and obstruction of justice. At the suggestion of his father, Geragos stepped in to her defense. As he explained to the New York Times, Geragos took the case pro bono, explaining to McDougal that because of his Armenian background, he “had a special appreciation for victims of government oppression.”

When McDougal went to trial in Little Rock in 1999, the cornerstone of Geragos’s case was that his client had been railroaded in retaliation for not cooperating in Starr’s “vendetta” against the Clintons. The proceedings started less than a month after Clinton was acquitted at his impeachment trial in the Senate.

“I fully intend to put Kenneth W. Starr on trial,” Geragos told reporters at the start of the case, the Post reported at the time.

The attorney made more headlines by grilling Starr deputy W. Hickman Ewing Jr. on the witness stand. Under Geragos’s questioning, Ewing admitted he had drafted an indictment against Hillary Clinton during the Starr investigation.

“I didn’t like that she was evasive,” Ewing testified, according to Super Lawyers.

“Sort of like you right now?”, Geragos snapped back.

The jury acquitted McDougal on the obstruction of justice charge and deadlocked on the criminal contempt charge. Geragos was defiant on the steps of the courthouse. “They don’t have the guts to retry it,” he said, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2003. He eventually worked to get McDougal a full pardon in the last hours of Clinton’s presidency.

As Avenatti’s representation of Daniels in her lawsuit against President Trump over an alleged affair punched the attorney’s ticket into cable news green rooms, Geragos’s work for McDougal elevated his career to a new level.

“I always tease him about my case launching him into the limelight,” McDougal told the New York Times in 2003. “He was just absolutely perfect.”

Unlike Avenatti, Geragos spun the attention into a busy practice — too busy, some critics said. In 2003, when he was shuttling up and down California defending both Jackson and Peterson, the pop star eventually replaced him. He continued leading Peterson’s defense, but lost the case; the husband was sentenced to death row.

But those setbacks have not kept his phone from buzzing whenever a high-profile personality is in trouble — including Avenatti. According to the Hollywood Reporter, when Avenatti was arrested over an alleged domestic violence situation last November, he consulted with Geragos about the charges. (Prosecutors declined to file any charges related to the incident.)

But if the recent indictment is correct, the two attorneys’ relationship continued last week, when Avenatti and Geragos allegedly approached Nike, threatening to expose employees for funneling payments to top high school basketball players and their families.

The indictment alleges the attorneys demanded the company to hire them both to conduct an internal investigation into the issue for $15 million to $25 million. Should the case move forward, both attorneys will likely seek representation cut from the same mold — a vociferous, TV-ready advocate.

“I do take seriously the idea that you’re not supposed to turn down a case just because of its notoriety,”Geragos once told the Los Angeles Times.