Sean Avery grinned and punched the air as he left a Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday morning.
“What a day,” the former New York Rangers player announced to reporters. “What a great day. New York City tax dollars at work.”
Avery, a Canadian who now lives in California, had just finished the first day of his likely brief trial—it’s expected to last two or three days—on a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief that could carry a sentence of up to three months. The path here had been long and careening. In February 2019, prosecutors claimed, Avery bashed his electric scooter into the side of a minivan following a dispute with the driver, venture capitalist Jonathan Schulhof, and his wife, Kimberly Kravis, the daughter of private-equity billionaire and Republican donor Henry Kravis. The couple had three of their children in the backseats.
In the more than three years after, Avery rejected several plea offers, pushing instead for a jury trial. In an April hearing, The New York Times reported, Avery declared in Manhattan Criminal Court, “I’d like to move forward by representing myself,” prompting his then lawyer, Dmitriy Shakhnevich, to leave the courtroom. Eventually, the hockey player got his wish for a trial, but only a bench trial—one in which a judge would make a decision alone. Avery then hired another lawyer after all, and Jason Goldman represented him in court on Wednesday.
“In this crazy city that we live in,” Goldman said in his opening remarks, “it wasn’t that out of the ordinary.”
While still playing hockey and after retiring in 2012, Avery expanded on his career as a notorious agitator on the ice with a growing list of extracurriculars: modeling, acting, advertising, Dancing With the Stars, interning at Vogue (which, like Vanity Fair, is published by Condé Nast). Chief among these passions was posting videos on Instagram in which Avery confronted and berated anyone he saw occupying a bike lane on New York City streets.
“If I need to be the poster boy for defending the bike lanes, I will absolutely do that,” he told the New York Post after a June 2019 court appearance. “We need to be able to just bike in freedom.”
Avery arrived in the courtroom on Wednesday wearing aviator sunglasses. Schulhof testified that Avery took his scooter and “used it as a cudgel,” and then scooted away after grinning at Kravis. Goldman and Schulhof sparred for most of the morning, arguing about the semantics of the words observe and verbatim. Avery alternated between taking notes in red pen and staring Schulhof down.
Prosecutors pointed out at the beginning of the day that Avery had used his podcast the week before to mention some of the witnesses—Schulhof and Kravis—by name and urge Rangers fans to pack the courthouse when the trial began. In practice, the effect wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as the show of support by Johnny Depp fans during the actor’s recent defamation trial against Amber Heard, which Avery invoked in making the request. Of the 20 or so onlookers in the courtroom, one wore an Avery Rangers jersey, while another wore a Rangers hat.
Still, Avery made what he could out of it, posing for photos with fans outside the courthouse after the trial let out for the day. One of them, Anna Tillison, said she got into the Rangers after she arrived in New York from Poland 16 years ago. “It’s just part of the culture here in New York,” she said.
Tillison said she was trying to be diplomatic about the incident but ultimately rooting for Avery: “I would say, let’s just pass the past and just don’t bring it back anymore.”