Who’s ready for the latest twist in the Michael Avenatti freak show?
The prolific cable news guest denied rumors Tuesday alleging a member of the 4chan community, which is notorious for hoaxes and disinformation campaigns, duped him into believing he had found a third woman to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
“There is a rumor being floated that I was ‘duped’ or ‘pranked’ by a 4Chan user re Kavanaugh,” Avenatti said in a tweet Tuesday. “This is completely false. It never happened; it is a total fabrication. None of it is true. The right must be very worried. They should be.”
He said later in separate remarks to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the 4chan hoax “never happened. None of it. No truth to it. This is a fabrication of the right because they are worried and they should be.”
Avenatti also told Heavy that the hoax allegation is “completely false. … Ridiculous. No basis in fact.”
The attorney claims he is in contact with a woman who alleges she has information proving Kavanaugh led of gang of violent rapists when he was in high school. This is a real thing that’s happening right now.
Avenatti told a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer this weekend that he is privy to “significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s, during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them.”
The cable news attorney also claimed he had “multiple witnesses that will corroborate the facts” with public testimony.
Avenatti tweeted later on Sept. 24 that Brett Kavanaugh must “be asked about this entry in his yearbook: ‘FFFFFFFourth of July.’ We believe that this stands for: Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F*ck them, Forget them. As well as the term ‘Devil’s Triangle.’ Perhaps Sen. Grassley can ask him.”
Kavanaugh, for his part, denies everything, going so far as to reveal in an interview Monday that he never even had sexual intercourse, or “anything close to” it, until “many years” after he graduated from college. Avenatti has produced exactly zero evidence to back any of the gang-rape allegations and he has been steadfast in his refusal to do so. He has promised, however, that this supposed third Kavanaugh victim will go public in the next 36 hours.
I swear I am not making any of this up.
Interestingly enough, you can’t see any of the aforementioned Avenatti tweets right now because he made his Twitter account private Tuesday, claiming he has been getting an unusual amount of abuse from Twitter bots and pro-Trump supporters. At around the same time that he made his account private, social media users started sharing a 4chan post whose author claims to be the mastermind behind the gang-rape allegations. The anonymous user alleges he and a colleague posed as a woman and used a burner phone to contact Avenatti, and they promised him damaging information on Kavanaugh. The 4chan post claims the attention-hungry Avenatti bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, precisely because 4chan users peddle in so much disinformation, it’s just as likely that this claim of a prank is itself a prank. Also, there’s the issue that the 4chan ID alleging the hoax has no other posts. There’s also the issue that 4chan post itself is riddled with extremely dubious details, including that Avenatti supposedly offered to pay the alleged victim $75,000 to appear on CNN. Huh?
The smart play is to believe nothing until proven otherwise. And let’s see if Avenatti actually makes good on that 36 hour all-will-be-revealed deadline he has set for himself.
