CNN host Don Lemon on Monday asked Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti if his threats to Daily Caller reporters are similar to threats President Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen made.
"But also, People criticize –and I think you guys did–Michael Cohen for threatening a reporter or threatening someone," Lemon said to Avenatti. "Do you think that behavior is similar? That you’re threatening a reporter?"
"No. I think you’re talking apples and oranges," Avenatti responded.
On Sunday, Daily Caller News Foundation reporters Peter Hasson and Joe Simonson wrote a story on the "questionable history" of Stormy Daniels attorney and cable news mainstay Michael Avenatti. They reported Avenatti's former associates described him as "ruthless, greedy and unbothered by ethical questions."
Lemon asked Avenatti about the Daily Caller story, and the attorney said its attacks were "not appropriate."
"Let me tell you what's not appropriate. What's not appropriate is to engage in character assassination attempts aimed at either me, or my client, or our families, because you don't like the facts in the underlying cases, and you don't know how to address it," Avenatti said. "So what you try to do, is you try to create diversions by mucking up the record and bringing up all sorts of nonsense about our personal histories, et cetera. That has no place in any of this whatsoever."
In response to the story, Avenatti sent an email to Hasson, threatening to sue him and the Daily Caller.
"If you and your colleagues do not stop with the hit pieces that are full of lies and defamatory statements, I will have no choice but to sue each of you and your publication for defamation," Avenatti wrote. "During that process, we will expose your publication for what it truly is."
Avenatti, responding to a question from Lemon about what the email was all about, insinuated the Daily Caller reporters were unethical.
"All journalists are not ethical ... There's good journalists and there's bad journalists. There's ethical journalists and unethical journalists," Avenatti said. "If we encounter journalists who don't get their facts straight by design, don't follow basic standards of journalism, purposefully skew stories to fit their own political dialogue and what they want their message to be, we're going to continue to call them out on that."