“Prime-time anchors” and “talent” allegedly allowed disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti to be abusive towards staffers, a Vanity Fair report claims.
According to ex-wives, former clients, and the United States government, Avenatti is a physical and psychological bully, an outright thief, and on his way to prison.
According to Avenatti, he’s passionate, not abusive; a noble crusader for his clients, and a victim of Donald Trump, who is the cause of all his legal problems — of which there are many, including a recent indictment for ripping off his most famous client, porn star Stormy Daniels.
Whatever the case, we knew all of that. This stuff has been hitting the headlines for months.
What is actual news in this Vanity Fair piece, though, is the shocking revelation that news “prime-time anchors” and “talent” allowed Avenatti to be abusive towards their lowly staffers — towards “bookers” and “reporters” and “the people who were behind the scenes.”
And when we’re talking about “prime-time anchors” and “talent,” we are almost certainly talking about cable news in the form of MSNBC, and most especially CNN, because that is where Avenatti made hundreds of appearances — literally hundreds — as he slashed, burned, and raged against Trump with rumor, innuendo, fake news, and hyperbole.
But again we all knew that, we all knew that fake news outlets like CNN had weaponized Avenatti as a bludgeon against Trump; we all knew that conspiracy outlets like CNN had fallen under Avenatti’s spell as he expressed their hatred and rage against Trump, the man who dares treat the media with contempt it deserves.
And we all knew that Screechy McStupid is so enamored with Avenatti she compares him to nothing less than God — not a God, but the God, the Holy Ghost.
We knew that Tater McSeriaLiar is so enamored with Avenatti that he had the Creepy Porn Liar on to discuss his presidential aspirations. “I’m taking you seriously as a contender,” the conspiracy theorist told Avenatti in the full blush of a same sex crush.
What we did not know, though, is that behind the scenes, people like Ana Navarro and Brian Stelter stood idly by as Avenatti abused their staff.
This hair-raising revelation from Vanity Fair is a horrific look at just how awful it must be to work at CNN and MSNBC, an appalling window into the misconduct the Rachel Maddows and Jake Tappers allow to occur if it means furthering their left-wing political agenda.
Here’s the full except [emphasis added]:
Behind the scenes, his behavior was even more volatile. “He had a terrible temper,” one prime-time anchor told me. “He never lost it with me, or really with any of the talent, as far as I know, because it was mostly for the bookers or the people who were behind the scenes. But he would tell people, ‘I’m going to fucking bury you. Why the fuck would you do that?’ if he didn’t like something.” A number of reporters recalled that he would physically invade their space. “His nose gets millimeters from your face and it’s clear he knows no boundaries,” one broadcast reporter and producer told me.
Last spring, a print outlet published a story that called into question whether Avenatti had paid someone for information that would have helped his client. According to two people, he confronted the reporter on a cable set to express his displeasure and started to shout: “Fuck me once, shame on you.” People came up to her afterward to make sure she was O.K. “That’s how aggressive and alarming it was.”
His temper often flared when producers and bookers tried to vet stories he was involved in. “It felt like we were enabling a total rage-oholic,” one booker told me. “It was pathological.”
Read that again: “to make sure she was okay.”
“She.”
According to Vanity Fair’s sources inside the media, Avenatti verbally abused female staffers while “prime-time anchors” and “the talent” allowed it to happen, while the Brian Stelters and Rachel Maddows and Jake Tappers and Ana Navarros and Chris Hayes’s and Chris Cuomos let it continue for months — you know, because sometimes you gotta let a few women be physically and verbally intimidated to create that Social Justice Omelet.
Anyone with a half a brain knew Avenatti was a bad guy the moment he walked on the set, knew he would eventually implode under the weight of his own greedy demons. Nothing in this Vanity Fair article is news, except for a…
Fascinating look inside the world of cable news, a ghastly peek at the indecency and cruelty of the “prime-time anchors” and “talent” who kept inviting this “pathological … rage-oholic” back on the set to abuse The Little People.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.