Michael Avenatti, the lawyer famous for representing Stormy Daniels, opened up a major can of worms on Monday with a tweet aimed at college basketball and Nike.
Teasing a press conference on Tuesday, he wrote on Twitter that he’ll be disclosing “a major high school/college basketball scandal perpetrated by Nike that we have uncovered. This criminal conduct reaches the highest levels of Nike and involves some of the biggest names in college basketball.”
Obviously college basketball is still reeling from the recent scandal of a similar nature involving Adidas that implicated many prominent head coaches and universities. Another major scandal involving a sports manufacturing giant wouldn’t be all that surprising.
The timing of this announcement cannot be a coincidence, as the NCAA Tournament is just about to enter the Sweet 16 on Thursday. So Avenatti and the people he represents will be gaining the maximum exposure possible.
It’s also worth pointing out that, shortly after Avenatti tweeted this out, he was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with “attempting to extort millions of dollars out of Nike Inc. by threatening to release damaging information about the company, which did not meet his demands,” Bloomberg News reported.
When we know more, we’ll certainly share it. For now, it’s enough to know that college basketball is once more likely to be in the cross hairs of the United States legal system, if these allegations are true.