After less than a full day of deliberations, on Tuesday a federal jury found Tom Girardi guilty of embezzling more than $15 million from his firm’s clients. The verdict adds a criminal conviction to Girardi’s collapse over the last few years, falling as he did from the heights of Los Angeles law.
At his peak, Girardi, now 85, was the rare attorney with a pop-culture imprint. His exploits in the field of personal injury law garnered him recognition in the credits of Erin Brockovich—a connection, as mentioned during the trial, that he was happy to play up—and later, as the husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Erika Jayne, a broad platform for his wealthy and connected reputation.
In the last few years, though, Girardi has faced lawsuits related to allegedly missing client funds, and his firm filed for bankruptcy in late 2020. He was disbarred and indicted on federal fraud charges in Chicago and Los Angeles, where he is being represented by public defenders.
That has all naturally made for Real Housewives fodder over the past few seasons of Jayne’s arc on the show, but the three-week trial turned the focus toward the victims of Girardi’s fraud. By nature, his work usually involved representing those who suffered tragedies or lost loved ones. Testimony tended to circle the mechanisms of delay he employed—excuses and promises of forthcoming sums.
“They were just reopening wounds that we were trying to close,” one victim testified through tears.
“He would always butter me up,” said another. “Call me ‘babe’ and stuff like that.”
The defense strategy hinged on claims about Girardi’s dementia. In a somewhat surreal turn toward the end of the proceedings, he took the stand and insisted that Girardi & Keese remains open to this day. “I didn’t intentionally ever tell somebody the wrong thing,” he told the jury. His lawyers had argued that his firm’s former chief financial officer—also his codefendant, who is awaiting a separate trial—was responsible for the settlement theft and deceived his aging boss about it.
From the beginning of the trial, though, the government took pains to put the blame squarely at Girardi’s feet. As one prosecutor put it in opening statements, Girardi used his clients’ trust accounts like a “personal piggy bank,” partly in service of his wife’s entertainment career. (Before she was on Real Housewives, Jayne had a fledgling pop career that began after the couple met.)
The trial and its attendant ogling offered a glimpse into their marriage—a miniature of the portrait depicted on Bravo. Over the course of 10 years, one of Girardi’s employees testified, more than $70 million was transferred from client trust accounts for the purpose of operating expenses, which included golf club membership and private jet trips. A few days earlier, the Daily Mail reported on Jayne’s whereabouts: “completely stress-free and relaxed” on a cast trip to Saint Lucia.
Jayne filed for divorce in late 2020, shortly before Girardi’s firm went bankrupt, though their split has not yet been made official. Each fraud count Girardi faced held a maximum 20-year prison sentence; he is currently living in an assisted living facility and under a conservatorship. His descent, as complete as it was, has set off some measure of soul-searching in legal circles—how could he have evaded detection in plain sight?
As she testified earlier this month, one of the victim’s mothers described her difficulty in recouping funds from the defendants. “Nobody would file against Tom Girardi,” she recalled. “He is the kingpin, so to say.”
