Fifteen Minutes of Fame, A Lifetime of Infamy

Today, Michael Avenatti was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for extortion of Nike. The former lawyer for Stormy Daniels certainly had a massive fall from grace. He had been discussed as a potential candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination because…he was good at attacking Trump on TV during the Stormy Daniels scandal, I guess.

It seems like a pattern: Someone will very suddenly go from obscurity to massive fame, then quickly end up in notoriety.

Andrew Cuomo was just another governor who was less famous than his father, and even arguably less famous than his brother. Then the coronavirus hit New York first and most severely, and Cuomo’s press conference antics suddenly made him a media darling, possible Democratic presidential savior, and certainly the most-known governor in America.

But then came the scandals. Cuomosexuals disappeared when the sexual misconduct allegations emerged. Then we learned he mismanaged the response to the pandemic in many ways, erasing the very reason for his initial popularity. Now old stories are re-emerging, like his use of the n-word in 2019.

Cuomo certainly didn’t start off as obscure as Avenatti, but I’d guess the increase in name recognition was similar. And now nobody really spends much time thinking about them, and when their names are mentioned, it’s only negative thoughts.

This is a rather common occurrence. People who sudden get a huge increase in media attention often have a fall from grace not too long after. Sometimes, they have trouble handling the fame. Other times, the new attention causes reporters to dig into their past, or causes people from their past to come forward in a way that wouldn’t have mattered before the spotlight was on.

Avenatti, of course, played a part in toppling another figure who had just gotten a sudden jolt of fame when he represented an accuser of Brett Kavanaugh. Being appointed Supreme Court Justice is one of the largest regularly-occurring sudden rises from obscurity to being a household name, but the sexual assault allegations made Kavanaugh infamous. And of course the same happened with Clarence Thomas.

The moral of the story is to be skeptical of anyone who suddenly becomes famous. I’m guessing there will be at least one person who does something incredible at the Olympics later this month who soon becomes known, for one reason or another, as a reprehensible person. Their sudden fame will be met with swift backlash.