Thomas Girardi’s Legal Drama Approaches Its Hollywood Ending

The Oscar-winning legal thriller ‘Erin Brockovich’ catapulted the already successful Los Angeles attorney Thomas V. Girardi into the national limelight.

In the years after that 2000 film highlighted his role in securing a $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas & Electric for poisoning a California town’s drinking water, Girardi was inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame and was hailed as a pioneer of “toxic tort” litigation.

Decades later, the now-disbarred and bankrupt 85-year-old will face a criminal trial in Los Angeles federal court Tuesday. He’s charged with four counts of wire fraud for allegedly stealing $15 million in settlement funds that were supposed to go to his clients over the past decade.

A conviction would cap off the swift unwinding of his half-century long legal career, which has been cast in shadow after widespread allegations of unethical lawyering, and his cozy connections to the state’s lawyer disciplinary agency.

“The question is going to be whether the plaintiffs’ bar will use this moment to clean up our own backyard or try to sweep this under the rug as a supposed one-off,” said plaintiff’s attorney Jay Edelson, whose firm worked with Girardi to represent victims of an airplane crash but later sued him and his colleagues for fraud.

Aside from this trial, Girardi stares down additional client fraud charges in Illinois federal court; his firm; Girardi Keese, was forced into bankruptcy in 2020; and he faces numerous civil lawsuits from former clients.

Girardi’s fame and stature in the California legal community only add to the spectacle.

“I don’t think there was anyone quite as well-known as Tom Girardi,” said University of Georgia law professor Elizabeth Burch who studies the mass tort profession. “He did such a good job capitalizing off of ‘Erin Brockovich,’ and that all sort of added to the myth and the legend.”

The Prosecution

Girardi racked up over 200 misconduct complaints before the State Bar of California over four decades, but he managed to steer clear of any disciplinary action by relying on his close personal ties to its officials. The state bar declined to comment for this story.

The dam finally broke in 2020, when Girardi and his now-shuttered firm were accused of stealing millions of dollars in funds from clients in litigation over the 2018 crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX off the coast of Indonesia.

Those clients won’t be called as witnesses in the L.A. trial but are expected to play a role in Girardi’s Illinois fraud trial, which centers on the Boeing case.

Prosecutors in the US District Court for the Central District of California will argue at trial that Girardi engaged in scheme beginning in 2010 to divert tens of millions of dollars from his firm to pay for lavish personal expenses, including private jets, luxury cars, and exclusive golf clubs.

They allege that he used more than $25 million from Girardi Keese’s operating account to pay the expenses of EJ Global, an entertainment company set up by his now estranged wife Erika Jayne, a star in the reality TV show “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

No money went from Girardi Keese to EJ Global, its bank accounts, or Erika Jayne, her attorney Evan Borges said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. Vendors and creditors of the entertainment company sent their bills directly to Girardi Keese, and the payments were coded as alleged EJ Global expenses, Borges said.

Jayne isn’t set to appear as a witness in the trial, and Bravo, which runs the TV franchise, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The trial is expected to center on five former clients involved in personal injury cases who claim Girardi failed to pay them settlement money, instead falsely telling them he couldn’t make the payments until settling other debts or getting judges’ approval.

The prosecution has also called non-lawyers who worked closely with his firm, including legal consultant Kimberly Archie, who has gone public discussing Girardi’s behavior, and Shirleen Fujimoto, Girardi’s longtime secretary.

Cross-examination of these witnesses is likely to focus on their relationship to Girardi.

The Defense

Prosecutors could still face complications based on their decision to simultaneously pursue Girardi Keese’s CFO Christopher Kamon, said former federal prosecutor Robert Fisher, now a white collar criminal defense attorney at Nixon Peabody LLP.

Girardi’s attorneys intend to place blame for the embezzlement scheme on Kamon, who ran the firm’s finances.

Fisher said Girardi’s attorneys will likely argue during trial that as a lawyer “he’s really not responsible for what’s happening with the funds because he trusts who he hires.”

Judge Josephine L. Staton split Kamon’s trial from Girardi’s in July.

Girardi will also likely employ arguments that his cognitive decline over the past few years means that he couldn’t have intentionally defraud any of his clients and will draw on testimony from his doctor. He has been diagnosed with dementia and has resided in a memory care facility ahead of the trial.

“To the extent that Girardi’s condition has exacerbated and he looks disoriented and lost in front of the jury, that’s only going to help with the defense,” said former federal prosecutor Agustin Orozco, now an attorney at Crowell & Moring LLP.

Prosecutors will likely counter that Girardi was fully competent during the years he committed the crimes, Orozco said.

The judge ruled earlier this year that Girardi is competent to stand trial, but still found that he has mild to moderate cognitive impairment.

‘Housewives’ Fame

Girardi’s criminal trial follows other similar attorney fraud cases, including the conviction of Trump foe and celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti, or the securities class action attorney Melvyn Weiss, who pleaded guilty to paying kickbacks to clients.

But unlike those cases, Girardi has a unique combination of entertainment and legal fame, which adds to the spectacle of the trial, legal experts and white collar defense attorneys said.

“There are hundreds of examples of lawyers that get into trouble like this, but it’s usually not this extreme, or somebody who was just so well known nationally,” Fisher said.

The publicity of being married to a reality TV star has already influenced the case. Potential jurors will be asked whether they watch “Real Housewives” and about their celebrity gossip news consumption.

Girardi’s attorneys have argued that potential jurors who have watched the show will likely have a “highly negative” impression based on the show’s depiction of his estrangement from Jayne and his portrayal as a “hustler” that engaged in fraud.

Fisher, of Nixon Peabody, said the prosecutors should try to stay away from the publicity. “If you’re a prosecutor, you just want to make this a straightforward fraud case,” he said.

The case is USA v. Girardi, C.D. Cal., No. 2:23-cr-00047, trial begins 8/6/24.