Disgraced celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was temporarily released from federal prison Friday over coronavirus fears.
The disgraced lawyer, whose clients included Stormy Daniels — and who was being held pending sentencing for trying to extort $25 million from Nike — was sprung from Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan at around 11 a.m., Fox News reported.
Avenatti must return to the facility in 90 days, ruled Judge James Selna, who granted the lawyer his release earlier this month due to the risk of contracting COVID-19 in custody.
Avenatti had to spend two weeks under quarantine at a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility before he could leave the facility in order to ensure he had no signs of the virus.
According to the judge’s order, an attorney will escort Avenatti on a flight to Venice, California, where he will wear a monitoring bracelet while serving three months of home confinement at his friend’s house. He can see his wife but is prohibited from using the Internet.
In addition to his upcoming Nike-extortion sentencing, Avenatti is awaiting trial in Manhattan federal court for allegedly embezzling funds from Daniels.
Selna’s ruling was the result of an appeal Avenatti’s attorney filed last month, arguing Avenatti was in danger after a cellmate came down with flu-like symptoms.
The lawyer is one of many detainees and convicts released from jails across the country as officials have looked prevent the spread of the coronavirus behind bars.
Also ordered released early due to coronavirus concerns Friday was Haena Park, 44, who defrauded loved ones and former Harvard classmates out of $23 million through her NYC capital management companies, Phaetra Capital GP and Argenta Capital.
Park, who suffers severe asthma, had served only 16 months — less than half of her 36-month sentence — at the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Conn., for a six-year campaign of lies that destroyed the life savings of dozens of people through incompetent currency trading deals.
She was ordered freed immediately by the same judge who had sentenced her, US District Judge Ronnie Abrams, who conceded in an opinion Friday, “Ms. Park’s conduct was egregious.”
Park deserves to spend every day of her sentence in prison, Abrams wrote.
Still, “The Court fears that leaving Ms. Park any longer in FCI Danbury may convert a three-year prison sentence into a death sentence,” the judge noted.
“And that the Court cannot allow.”
Federal prosecutors had asked that Park serve at least nine years in prison.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg
