20/20 - The Housewife and the Hustler 2: The Reckoning

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

It was a marriage of luxury and excess for Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne and powerhouse attorney Tom Girardi. But his empire came crashing down amidst allegations he was stealing from the very clients he swore to protect. Now, with a recent guilty verdict in the case, we look back at how this scandal exposed systemic failures in California, what Erika Jayne knew and the pursuit of justice for victims. Originally Aired: 02/12/2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Hey there, 2020 listeners. It's Debra Roberts. He was once considered one of America's best lawyers, but he had what a prosecutor called a remarkable fall from grace.

Tom Girardi, who portrayed himself as the champion of the little guy, convicted on four counts of wire fraud. Today, we're revisiting some earlier reporting on the Girardi story from our colleagues at ABC News Studios and LA Times Studios. Here's part two of The Housewife and the Hustler. Let's just... Oh, there she is. Hello.

Hi. Hey, Erica. I feel like we should... Okay. I do. I see you. I see you, too. Thanks, Frank.

Hi. I... am at sort of a loss for what to say because we have had such a... We've been standing on the opposite sides of a lot of things. Yeah. So I don't know if there's anything that you'd like to say or ask or... Well, I don't know who you know of, the victims, if you know our names. Do you know anything

about us? Not really, to be perfectly honest. Did you see the documentary? The Housewife and the Houseluck? I did did I watched It was a couple years ago, so explain to me or remind me what happened to you A lot has happened since we last talked. A lot of ups and downs.

A lot of new health issues, which I didn't think I could add on anymore. It's been volatile. I've had a lot of people reach out to me saying they're also victims of Girardi. You know, my story helped them. Tom Girardi was LA Law. A superstar. Legendary. We're just talking about the money that we're really going to give. And that's $15 million.

Tom Girardi let me know that everything was going to be okay. He made you feel like you could trust him and that he's that guy. We hired an attorney to fight for us, not to steal from us. Fraud on a massive scale. Girardi stands accused of pocketing a fortune from his clients. Federal prosecutors had said the fraud at the Girardi-Keese law firm

was in excess of $100 million. How did he get away with it? We had found that Tom Girardi or his firm had been the subject of more than 100 lawsuits since the early 80s. What is going on here? We were calling the state bar saying, why won't you say anything? We was standing on the mountain saying, this is not right and you guys are letting it happen. It's not like tom did this alone that is the reckoning that

still has not happened a federal grand jury has indicted tom girardi girardi faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted his lawyer claims that he is not mentally competent to stand trial My first question, what did Erica know? And when? It's been very difficult to kind of find out what was real, what wasn't. I was married to a very complex person. I'm not saying I don't feel for the potential victims. You can play the villain on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills if you want.

I don't give a about anybody else but me. But don't be an to victims. Erica, why did it take you so long? I was never asked to do this. I wanted Erica to say I'm sorry to the victims face to face. I liked her, I liked her. I respected her.

At the drop of a hat, she turned on me when she needed money. People might look at this story and see housewives and see Quinn. But to me, it's a story about accountability and of government corruption. Find our money and give it back to us. This should be 50 pounds, exactly.

There's only one way to do it. It's not like a hot tub where you dip your toe in and feel it out. You just got to shorten the suffering. This has just been one of the ways to manage my pain. It's terrible when you're in it, but afterwards, your pain goes from, like, let's say a level eight to a level three or, you know, level two. My name's Joe Ragomes, and I'm a former Girardi client.

Breaking news, San Bruno, California. A towering fire is just burning out of control. Police say a gas line erupted into a massive fireball. I just remember them putting like an oxygen mask on my face. Then within five seconds, I was out. When I finally found the burn center, it was like, oh my god, it is him. I mean, you could just tell he was so badly, so badly hurt.

Did I trust Tom? Yeah, I did trust him. He's fought these big battles before and has gotten large settlements. So I'm like, this seems like the perfect guy for the job. Tom Girardi definitely should have been stopped before he ever got to me. The system moves slow.

It's hard for me as a reporter. It's hard for the public. It's probably hard for Housewives viewers, but it's still involving in real time. I'm Matt Hamilton. I'm an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times. I cover courts, legal affairs, and breaking news all across California. I'm Harriet Ryan.

I'm a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. I like to say that I write about powerful people and institutions. So that's included everyone from Michael Jackson and Britney Spears to Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin and the Catholic Church. We've done so many stories together, but we are most known for writing the saga of Tom and Erica Girardi. And I've made peace with that. So at the beginning of 2020, Matt and I were sitting down to sort of map out what our stories were going to be for that year. And I remember the Girardi story was number four on that list.

Harriet and I had each heard independently of like, oh, you should look at Girardi-Keese. We'd heard weird rumors about him. There had been an allegation that he bribed a mediator, that Tom had been sued so many times that he couldn't get malpractice insurance anymore. And I said to Harriet, oh, you know Tom Girardi's wife is Erika Jayne. Hey.

All you girls is fake. Erika, what do you say to the haters? off. And I just continued the conversation because I was almost embarrassed to admit that I knew, like, a lot about Erika Jayne's life by that point from just kind of peripheral stalking on Instagram. So we were just like, let's just look at this guy. Not that he's doing anything wrong, we think at that point, but he's fascinating and no one's really taken a look at him. Tom Girardi's cases have been making headlines since the 1960s. He was the first attorney in California to get a million dollar malpractice judgment.

He was the first attorney in California to get a million dollar malpractice judgment. He was known for getting justice for large groups of people. We're talking the town of Hinkley and the Aaron Brockovich case. The water they were drinking was contaminated by PG&E. A lot of local LA pollution cases. In the legal profession, he was Bill Gates. Every lawyer knew Tom Girardi. When he just walked into the room, the weather changed.

The plaintiff's attorney in Los Angeles, companies were scared of him. Because they knew if they had to go before a jury, Tom Girardi would win. At that time, Tom Girardi was still too powerful for anyone to talk to us. But just in the public record, there was so much disturbing information. We started pulling court records, and we made a list of every lawsuit that had been filed against him. It wasn't just like there were two lawsuits.

There were more than 100 lawsuits. The focus of most of the lawsuits was settlement money that should have gone to clients. Where was it? Tom Turdy's whole business was vulnerable people. He was always the champion of the little guy. Regular people who were injured by big government or big corporations needed someone to fight for them. That was his reputation and what he did. This is where I started working at Lockheed Aircraft.

This area now is Burbank Airport. We had to strip the runway and then seal it. And that's what we did every day. I was born here in Los Angeles. 1961. We were a middle-class Black family. Dad worked in maintenance for Lockheed Aircraft. They built military planes.

Minimum wages back then, I think, was $2.50. And I came into Lockheed making $8.33. In the 90s this was just like a dirt field with warehouses. As a maintenance worker you clean whatever. Absolutely it was a good job, but we worked around a lot of unknown chemicals. We have a story tonight that is part medical mystery, part legal challenge. You would always feel this deep void in your chest. People who have worked inside Lockheed's building 351

say it is hot and unventilated. I knew that there's something wrong here. You would always hear, well, so-and-so died. I'm like, it's the things that we're working around. They worked in a toxic cloud of shavings and chemical mist. My dad had died of cancer. From everything we know so far, the materials they're working with

do not pose an undue health hazard. I was 25. I was diagnosed with a mass in my chest. It was cancer. I was very frightened. I'm saying, you know, why do I have to die like this? I knew then that it came from Lockheed. Period. I knew it.

And that's where Tom Girardi came in. We were pulling everything together, looking at all the times he's been sued. And right in that window, Erica files for divorce. Erica Girardi filing for divorce was the canary in the coal mine. For a lot of people in Girardi world, that was like a five alarm fire because their relationship and the way that she presented it on Real Housewives was largely based in him being able to fund her lifestyle. It's on order.

It's at Cartier. It'll be here in two weeks. Really? Yeah. Thank you, baby. And if she's leaving, what does that mean about his ability to remain solvent? Around late November, early December 2020, I heard that Jay Edelson in Chicago was filing a lawsuit against Tom Girardi. Jay Edelson is a Chicago attorney. He has a firm, and they had worked with Girardi on this big case against Boeing.

We begin tonight with the deadly plane crash, the new Boeing jet that went down overseas. Lion Air Flight 610 off the coast of Indonesia. Girardi reached a settlement with Boeing on behalf of his clients, who were these widows and orphans in Indonesia. But they weren't getting the money. And Edelson was trying to figure out what's going on. After Erica files for divorce, it's like, oh my God, you don't have any money, and like goes to the judge.

And the judge says, Girardi, where is the money?, you don't have any money. And like goes to the judge. And the judge says, Jordy, where is the money? And he doesn't have any answer. And that's where Tom Jordy's reputation just starts to plummet. We had to move quickly. Because we knew we have to tell the full story now. to move quickly because we knew we have to tell the full story now. Our first big story was in December 2020, and she sort of laid out what we knew at the time.

The rise and fall of Tom Girardi and Erika Jayne. There had been allegations over the years that he wasn't paying people, how that tracked with his wife's rise to fame and all the money being spent on her. For him to be involved in something like that in such a massive scheme, and then for it to involve a real housewife, we couldn't believe it. My reaction was, oh, crap. The fans went crazy. It blew up on social media. If you have not read this article, run to the LA Times now and read it.

Double check the price, huh. Don't need your advice, huh. If you're gonna talk to me, then just talk to me nice, huh. You wonder how deep does this go? The biggest lawyers in town were reading the same article as, like, Real Housewives fans. Then people started going backwards. And looking at every piece of footage as if it was the Zapruder film. They're trying to find little cracks in their story.

This is someone who had a prodigious amount of money, relationships with law enforcement. How much of this was a lie, and how much did she know? Oh my God. This is the LA Times. It was strange to watch these beautiful, glamorous women reading my story. I have to read it. I have to. It's just too long.

Or in this case, talking about how long the story was. Did you read the whole thing? I read the whole thing. Oh, you did? So then you tell us because we haven't had time to read it. It's so complicated. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's what the whole article, just so long.

My kids' reaction was like, I had won, like, the biggest award that there was in journalism. And this was, like, two years after I won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. So it was a little odd. I won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, so it was a little odd. We thought a few years ago that Tom was this bad guy who had lost his way somewhere along the way. And now we know he has a trail of tears of four decades of victims.

Tom Girardi's individual fall from grace is maybe interesting for a few weeks. But the question was, how did Tom Girardi get away with this for so long? I mean, how many red flags there have to be? Why wasn't he caught? Every few years, there's a story about a lawyer that's gone bad. But this story was a nuclear explosion.

We held him as a community in such high esteem. When that person falls, nobody ever thought that would be a possibility at all. I really value being a lawyer. I value the fact that we're thought of as a very ethical and hardworking firm that does great things. So I sleep pretty good at night, without a doubt. When I was growing up, I talked... On I Was Prey, the podcast. Listen to the life or death experiences of people who have survived animal attacks, natural disasters, and deadly parasites alike. Hear how a triathlete is attacked by a shark while training and manages to escape after being pulled underwater. And how a hiker in Alaska survives a 1,000-pound moose attack after the animal crushes her limbs.

I Was Prey features audio from hit shows like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, and Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, and Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. It's about wanting to be a lawyer sometimes. And my dad would say that he'd rather I be a sex worker than a lawyer because at least it's an honest job. And so now, you know, what do you say? Parents are always right. Eventually. These are a bunch of Girardi, like, memory stuff. Programs from events that I did with Girardi, so you'll see like at the bottom we think Tom. My relationship with Tom was complicated. I was a liability

expert. I was the best friend of one of his big clients. I saw him as a mentor. I saw him as a legal icon. And now I see him as a master manipulator. This is probably the most important thing on my desk. This is the reason why I met Tom Girardi. I started out as a victim's advocate. I just wanted to know more of the nuts and bolts of how a case, you know, went through the system. So I take a legal class and they show the Erin Brockovich movie.

Hi. Hi. Donna Jensen? Yes. I'm Erin Brockovich with Masry and Vitito. Oh! You're a lawyer? Hell no. I hate lawyers. I just work for them. After seeing the Aaron Brockovich movie, then I wrote an email to the Aaron Brockovich lawyers.

And so this was prepared for Tom. Tom Girardi has really catapulted to a new level of fame in the 1990s. For years in a serene desert town in Southern California, children exposed to a poison. They let these innocent people drink water, which was laced with chromium, day in and day out. It's as bad as it gets. Girardi doesn't appear in the film that he was a composite character. Aaron, it's great to meet you. You've done a fabulous job. But he always let everyone know that that had been his case.

What lawyer had an Oscar-winning movie that the lead was played by Julia Roberts as your free marketing? And the Oscar goes to Julia Roberts. No lawyer has that. I mean, you can buy all the billboards and commercials you want. You're never going to catch up with Aaron Brockovich's SEO. Trust that. The plaintiff's bar is an area where it's known that it can be one big case

that can set you up for the rest of your life. big case that can set you up for the rest of your life. When you're looking at a law firm bringing in 40% of hundreds of millions of dollars of settlements, and he has three billion plus dollar settlements, what's 40% of a billion? I don't know, money forever. Not only was he successful, he was powerful. And those two things don't always go together. Okay, there I am. He was powerful because of the relationships that he strategically cultivated. Relationships

to make him look completely untouchable. All this money, I'ma count it all up. All this money, I'ma count it all up. Count it all up. I'ma count it all up. Tom Durde was an enormous donor to democratic causes and candidates across the country. He had a fundraiser at his private club for Joe Biden in 2019. When John Edwards ran for president in 2008, Girardi was one of his main advisors and supporters.

Tom must have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars during an election year. And does he give to you? He has been extraordinarily generous. Nice! So she is my favorite real housewife. I'm currently a lawyer in private sector, but had served many, many decades in California government,

in the legislature, as president of the Senate, as the attorney general and the state treasurer. Somewhere along the way, I got to know Tom Girardi. I considered him a personal friend. His wife and mine would socialize together. She was glamorous. He was, I think, devoted to her, very attentive to kind of keeping her happy. When she first began her singing career, I guess it was,

I remember getting a little video on my phone. Swing, bada bada swing, bada bada swing Blue parachute, blue tube, blue green Baby stay made better, finer things. One and they can't make my baby sing. Erica had the best choreographers, songwriters, producers. It was not your normal route to fame.

She was able to go out and get people that had worked with Britney Spears. So she started kind of at that level because of Tom's wealth. A heavy pinnacle point here. A little bit of love here. When we started working with Erica, I think she only had like... A couple hundred followers. A couple hundred followers on social media.

She only had like a couple hundred followers on social media. Real Housewives didn't come until much later in our working relationship. But she always made us feel like friends. Wow. Five, six, seven, wait. Basically every leading lady, every female pop star over the last decade, we have had something on at one time or another. Wow. Bergie's Glamorous. The Glamorous.

Ooh, the flowers, the flowers. The California girls cupcakes. Fine, fresh beers, we got it on house. By 2011, we were addressing more than half of the acts at the AMAs. We did that basically up until the time that we met Erica. Erica to the right. Erica to the front of the office. My album came out yesterday, and it's doing really well. that we met, Erica.

My album came out yesterday and it's doing really well. I'm really pleased. We had a mutual publicist. She had a video for a song called Party People. They just needed something made last minute. She was personable, she was down to earth, she looked us in the eye. I mean, I think in that first fitting, I said to myself,

this is something that I should be a part of because she does have that energy. Chris, do you have the pink stretch silk? When we had Erica's first fitting, we tried the look on her and it was fabulous. When I approached Erica with the invoice in hand, she kind of waved me off and dismissed it and said, we won't be needing those. In 2015, we started working together a lot more consistently. We were never given a budget, you know, there was never a cap. The investment into herself just seemed wild to me.

But I didn't really have any experience having unlimited funds, so I thought maybe that's just how things went. She's in Dallas tonight. She's in Washington, D.C. tomorrow. She's part of the gay party in Palm Springs, which are 10,000 people. They love gay music. And so this thing has been great for her.

We heard that Erica was in the running for Real Housewives. The second she found out that that was happening, she knew that she needed to upgrade. How many do I give? We did a big run of music videos. How many eps? One, zero, zero, zero, die. Expensive. That all happened, like, in a lump.

It's expensive to be me. Hey, hey, hey, eh, eh. Look in this good, don't come for free. Eh, eh, ah, why? That's just who I be. It's expensive to be me. In terms of like before and after the housewives, I've never seen anyone leverage a moment so beautifully.

That show not only provided her the opportunity I've never seen anyone leverage a moment so beautifully. That show not only provided her the opportunity to showcase her best looks... Hey, how are you? I bet you get to see him. ...but also showcase her quip... Jesus, Marco. ...her humor and her quick way. Yeah.

I like being Erika Jayne because as Erika Jayne, I can do anything I want. It was always sort of like the highest end of the sparkly detail she could get. The feedback I would get was, it needs to be more. Just the materials expenses alone on something like that are pretty costly. Through all of the three years of working with her, the hundreds of outfits that we created for her, there was never, ever an issue. Not only was there not an issue,

Erica was overjoyed with every single thing we ever made her. She loved us, and she trusted us. It's important for me to sit down here and tell you to be cautious with the people that you bring into your life. I liked her, I respected her, and at the drop of a hat, she turned on me when she needed money. After publication in 2020, Tom Girardi called the LA Times

dozens and dozens and dozens of times. He left voicemails. I do have an audio recording. Yeah. Hi, this is Thomas Girardi. It's a demand for a retraction. We will file the fraud lawsuit on Monday. Good luck. We felt pretty confident that the story was bulletproof because it was based on records. There was nothing defamatory in it. After we published the story, my editor at the time was like, okay, what are you guys going to do after Girardi? And Matt and I were like, there is no after Girardi.

Like, we're just getting started. A flood of victims came forward. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about Tom Girardi. And we were overwhelmed with court filings, and there was so much to look at. The Lockheed case that Girardi handled, it's really a huge guide for us to understanding the issues. We found this letter from December 19, 2000, in which one of the attorneys working with Tom Girardi is outlining all the issues with this settlement. He's saying there's $6.2 million of client payment discrepancies. There's inappropriate costs of about $2.5 million. He's saying Tom Girardi's divorce attorney has gotten payments from the settlement.

The payments for your private jet were improper. He's highlighting clients unconnected to this litigation that supposedly received settlement checks and that the names seem made up. Names like Kay Ernest Citizen, John Farmer, Giovanni Medici. The issues with Tom Girardi mishandling settlements was not something late in his career. This is something that's been going on for decades.

late in his career. This is something that's been going on for decades. I'm gonna do something a little unorthodox here. I'm gonna play a little word association. So if I say Lockheed to you. Chemicals. Tom Girardi. The devil. The California State Bar.

His imps. Had I not been cheated out of my money from these attorneys, Tom Girardi, I would not be here in this neighborhood and in this area. I would be in a better place, a better environment. The chemical exposure case at Lockheed was a complex litigation comprises 600 people. Lockheed employees are suing, claiming that materials used at this site to produce the F-19 are toxic. I was 25, and they told me it was a black mass in my chest. They did a biopsy. I remember waking up.

I asked him, did you get it, doc? And he actually had tears in his eyes. He knew the pain that was waiting for me. Other workers have similar complaints. Nausea, headaches, fatigue, loss of memory, skin irritations. So these are some declarations from the work environment. And these are some of the things we experienced. I had never heard of Tom Girardi.

All of a sudden, we get this letter. We're told that Girardi is going to be a personal injury attorney. Never signed anything or any of that. They were saying, hey, trust this process. These guys are good. Then we hear about a settlement, $33 million. This was a landmark case. The Lockheed litigation was such that it taught companies that they got to protect their workers

and so forth. So it was, we felt really good about it. Tom took the money without our consent and said he would be giving everybody $25,000. And he really talked bad to people. It was like, why are you crying? You never seen $25,000 at one time. And then we were told there were 18 other defendants, and there's going to be more money coming.

We had began to go in and start asking, well, give us a list of the names of everybody that's in the groups. They didn't want to do that. Shortly thereafter, we started filing complaints to California State Bar. This goes unheeded. 95, 96, 97, we get another group that filed complaints as well. We complained to the bar at least four or five times. I'm thinking he just threw in us, this group of black people, you know.

Did I know that he was doing it to the extent and that the bar was allowing it to that extent? I did not know that. The State Bar of California is responsible for licensing attorneys, for distributing the bar exam, for enforcing the ethics of the state, for disciplining attorneys. Stealing from your clients is grounds for disbarment. We found out that Tom Girardi or his firm had been the subject of more than a hundred lawsuits since the early 80s that accused him of malpractice, of stealing client money, of misconduct in the practice of law. We immediately asked ourselves a question. How has Tom Girardi managed to maintain this immaculate license, pristine license,

when he's been sued this many times and this many people have said that he stole their money? What is going on here? We started zeroing in on this big 17-page whistleblower report that had happened at the State Bar in 2014 and 2015. One of the main characters was this investigator named Tom Layton. It says, Layton frequently took calls from Girardi during business hours, boasted about his

relationship with Girardi, disappeared during work days days and appeared to be engaging in political activities during State Bar time. So we're like, who is Tom Leighton? Tom Leighton was an investigator at the State Bar. He's a guy who'd been a deputy sheriff in LA, and he had a lot of political connections. The relationship between Tom Girardi and Tom Leighton was just so incredibly close that it was just jaw-dropping. They had lunch together almost every day. He had employed Tom Layton's two children at the law firm.

Mr. Layton was flying on his private jet. It was really hard to understand how someone who was so low level had amassed so much power. What are you doing? Just having lunch with Layton. What are you doing? Just having lunch with the lady. When we're looking through various sources of information,

we're finding all these connections between Girardi and people that work at the bar. And it's from very minor things like, huh, they're always attending all his Christmas parties, to much, much more worrisome things. Tom was showering them with gifts. Tom threw a lavish party for the Chief Justice of California. He flew in Paul Anka to sing at the party. A bunch of judges and state bar officials had come. We realized this is not a typical way things are run at a state agency.

You know, the people that you're supposed to be investigating are not, like, buying you glass after glass of wine at Morton's. That's not how it's supposed to go. Matt and I were like, something very big and very concerning is going on here. Second Story really drove home for the people in power that this wasn't just

a reality TV concocted storm. It put some meat on the bone in power, that this wasn't just a reality TV concocted storm. It put some meat on the bone in terms of corruption and that they were referred to our firm. So far, we've had to play defense. I had some very basic questions for her. Why did you file for divorce just a month or so before the bankruptcy cases? And what did you know? And her answer to me is privilege, but I would describe it as escalating pressure, lawsuits. My strong suspicion, I wasn't there.

When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care?

Is it Tom Girardi consistently lied to this poor woman and she had no idea? She had no visibility into finances. I heard from you, he forbade her from wearing blue jeans. That's called either a control freak or an a**hole, however you want to put it. She left that marriage. The only reason Erica was really able to do that

was because of help from a longtime friend she had, meaning you. I think you gave her $150,000 to pay for a lawyer and to move out. Jim opened up a bank account with her and provided her with, over time, a significant amount of money to pay for lawyers, to make a down payment on a rental.

I mean, if she didn't have the help of a friend who had a lot of money, she was lost. I mean, it was bad. How much have you spent on this? I have no idea. Over a couple million. What it's cost me in my practice I can't conceive. I've known Tom since about 2000. Erica and Tom and I would get to spend time together hanging out. We probably did four, five, six trips with

him. Tom knew a lot of fun people. I was in boxing and I think I got a picture somewhere of that Schwarzenegger sitting on the right, and Charles Barkley on the left. He loved that kind of stuff. Around 2009 or 10, Tom changed. Tom became very angry. You could tell there was a little hustle in him, but he was always cordial. And he stopped being cordial, and it scared me. Erica has been the victim of a great injustice. Her crime was having a husband who wasn't trustworthy that she stayed with for 20 years.

Hey, Tom, how you doing? Looking great. Good to see you. Nice thumbs up. How you feeling? Real good, baby. That's what I like to see. How you liking your new residence? Well, we have some questions, but we're liking it pretty good. That's great to hear. That's great to hear. You know what? Can you set the record straight for us?

Did Erica know anything? Everybody wants to know. We're ready to go. All right. Everybody just wants to know if she had any insight of what was going on. Why don't you drop the camera? Okay? Do you hear me? Mm-hmm. Okay. He wants to answer the question.

No, he doesn't. I think she does. Let's go. Thank you, Tom. At the end of 2020, from the divorce filing through the beginning of 2021, the house of cards tumbled very quickly. His family has started saying that they think he's not all there

mentally. There was a conservatorship that was put in place. He's out of his Pasadena mansion that he's lived in for decades, and now he is in an assisted living facility. There were so many people that he owed money. Creditors, when they realized that they were not going to get paid or at risk of not getting paid, forced Girardi into bankruptcy. From the IRS to clients that weren't getting paid. Everybody had to fill out a claim and say, I'm owed this much money. And there were hundreds of claims, I mean, more than 600 claims. And Erica Girardi herself filed as a creditor in the law firm bankruptcy. this much money and there were hundreds of claims i mean more than 600 claims and erica gerardi herself filed as a creditor in the law firm bankruptcy why erica would file as a creditor

in the bankruptcy from a pr standpoint is a conundrum that i cannot answer gerardi keys no longer exists but a court-appointed trusteeee is trying to scrounge up money wherever she can so that she can pay the victims the money that they are owed. It's a question of marshaling all the assets. Okay, Gerard doesn't have any money now, but, like, what's left? Like, selling the house, selling his law practice building.

He started crashing and burning. The demise of his law firm, the lawsuits and the state bar complaints. Me, as a lawyer in the community, I respected him, but I'm also competing with him. His law building, when the bankruptcies put it up for sale, I said, hey, I'm knocking him off that throne. I am taking that building.

If you want, we'll do it like MTV Cribs, and then I'll kick you guys out. So when Girardi's stuff came up for auction, I bought a lot of the things. It's a beautiful example of Our Lady of Justice. Tom had a lot of faults, but one thing he did right was the construction. Pretty much it's the same as it was when Girardi was here. You know how they describe offices as like trying to intimidate? That was just kind of built into the structure.

It's very upscale. And at the end is Tom's office with these big doors. And he'd be sitting at his desk, you know, as the king of the castle. Down here, we have great furnishings. I'm sure Tom spent a lot of money on it. Left on all these desks were active files. They just abandoned them. This was his file room. Thousands and thousands of boxes and file names on them.

And when they left, it looked like they left in a fire. They ran out. There were lunches still on the desks when I took over the building. still on the desks when I took over the building. There's like blood on the walls in there. This is a crime scene. Not like a glowing firm that helps people. The reality of it is, that's the place that did the business of harming people, not helping them.

I don't know why I like the rain so much. Maybe it's because of things I've been through in my life. I'm kind of comfortable being uncomfortable. This helps stabilize the shoulders, so I'm less likely to have another dislocation. Trying to bulletproof these bad boys now. There's still some surgeries I need to do. There's a lot of bone-on-bone. I need to get some artificial cartilage.

It was very disappointing when you find out your lawyer basically robbed you, knowing that he knows everything that I've been through. I mean, it was as simple as me noticing, like, okay, I'm expected to get a payment this day, and I didn't get it. So I would call him, and you know, he was hard to get ahold of.

I wanna do as good as I can for you. I'm in your corner. I've never believed in a case more, and I've never liked a family more than you guys. I mean that. Okay, I'll try and reach you over the weekend. Goodbye. Once the Rui Gomez's got a judgment against him,

they were entitled to go after his assets, so they started asking questions in a video deposition. And when they said, like, how much money do you have? I mean, his answer is jaw dropping. At one point, I had about 80 million or 50 million in cash. That's all gone. I'm fighting for money that I'm owed.

I'm fighting for money that's gonna take care of me with all the surgeries I have to do, all the rehabilitations I have to do. As far as the bankruptcy, it's a long drawn out process. I'm just waiting to see how it unfolds. I'm very worried that there's going to be a handful of victims that don't

get what they were supposed to get. What's emerged in bankruptcy court is that it's so complicated, and his banking was just, like, bizarre. The judge in the bankruptcy court is like, I do not think that we are ever going to be able to reconstruct everywhere the money came from and everywhere it went. Because things were purchased out of the Girardi-Keys funds and then used for personal things, figuring out what went where and where it should have gone becomes even more difficult.

Tom Girardi gave everyone an American Express card that the law firm was paying for, from Erica to the CFO who was paying for his cars and other things. All of it on the credit cards, and there are hundreds of charges. They really give a picture of how they lived. It's kind of a mess, but you can come in here. Knowing we know about Gerardy now, everything in their lifestyle is suspect. Every private jet ride, every piece of couture she's worn. Erica's pop career and her lifestyle, how much of that was financed with client settlement money? The law firm trustee is going after her for upwards of $25 million for money that Tom Gerardi paid to her and her businesses, not just in paying

for physical goods and services, but stuff that the law firm was paying for Erika's personal use. And then there was a pair of very expensive earrings that came into all of this. The diamond earrings became just like fodder for Bravo accounts. The first thing we are talking about today are Erika Girardi's earrings. Everyone wants to know, should Erika Jayne give back the earrings? Yes! She should.

The bankruptcy trustee is looking through records in a settlement for people that have been injured by a specific drug. One line item says, M&M $750,000. M&M is not another lawyer, it's not some consultant, it's not an expert witness. It is a jewelry store in downtown LA where Tom Giardia liked to buy jewelry for Erica. So he took direct client funds to pay for a personal gift for Erica.

The trustee is like, look, all assets, everything that was improperly taken from the clients, it all has to come back. They were a gift from her husband. That's what her lawyers say. She didn't know it was client money. Most normal people would have been appalled, and if they had had earrings like that, they wouldn't want it anywhere near them. Erica did the opposite. Doesn't Erica's Jane want to just give them up? No, hold on. Her castmates brought up often, like, why won't you just turn over the jewelry

if it was purchased with illegal funds? Why wouldn't you just go, f*** it, let's pay the victim? It's not saying I'm guilty. It's saying I have compassion. I have a heart. Hold on. Are they stolen? I don't know.

You know what I say? I'm not guilty. And how dare you say that about me? The trustee ordered Erica to turn the earrings over. She refused to do that. They had to get a court order. They ended up agreeing to turn the earrings over. She refused to do that. They had to get a court order. They ended up agreeing to put the earrings in a trust. Ultimately, those earrings were sold.

But the fight over the earrings continues. The earrings issue is one tiny fraction of one of the nine pending lawsuits against Erica. And unfortunately, that's what gets media attention. It became a media story. Why all the focus on this woman? The theme that they were pushing at the beginning was the ungrateful gold digger bitch. Excuse me for saying that, but it's the implicit message they had about her. It's just not the story here. Erica is not the story. People have conflated a reality TV show to real life. You don't go after the showgirl when what really happened is you have money lenders, you have other attorneys and law firms who preyed upon Tom Girardi at the very end to take all of the cases and value out of that law

firm. Why isn't anybody pointing out whose pocket got lined and all of that? For all the victims and all the money and all the years, it's pretty wild to think that none of the unsecured creditor victims have received a dime yet. What the? Erica's legal troubles have driven Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

for the last couple of seasons, and it's not stopping this season, because people still want to talk about it. When people watch a show for a certain amount of time they become invested in you and your story and we live in a time where people want to peel every layer back and unfortunately for Erika I don't know if people are going to be ready to let go of the story until they have all the answers. of the story until they have all the answers. Erica mentioned that she wore a wire in an earlier season of the show. I wore a wire and was a witness in a government case.

Oh! Why did she wear a wire? Did this have anything to do with Tom? We found out that it involved Marco Marco. It was a case involving Chris Basila. We had started digging into what was he accused of, what happened here, and then it grew into something much bigger.

Any connection point we should give a little love to, but this is the main one and this is the main one, you know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In November of 2016, we had just gotten an order from Erica. It was a couple of leotards in multiple colors. And we had started building those. And I got a call out of the blue saying, Erica didn't approve that.

It really caught me off guard. And then Erica personally calls me, and she says, well, I want you to send me all of the invoices right now. Lawyers are asking, so I need you to hurry up. He came in. He was like, what am I supposed to do? I said, don't worry about it. I said, did you do something wrong? He said, no. I said, okay, then let's talk to her. And then I called for a meeting.

He said, no. I said, OK, then let's talk to her. And then I called for a meeting. Erica came in with sort of like an accusatory, like authoritative tone that I had never experienced from her before. We were friends. How could you do this to Mr. Girardi, saying that I had stolen upwards of $800,000 from them.

I said that that was impossible. In my mind, it was like, well, this is obviously a f***ing joke. The reality is, like, $800,000, we were lucky if that was a whole year's worth of work inside this space 24 hours a day. I didn't know that that meeting was being recorded. I was very aware of how powerful she and her husband were and the influence that they had on people. And that alone is pretty terrifying.

After the new year, the studio is filled with United States Secret Service agents. They're executing a search warrant. It was terrifying. They showed up with guns drawn at employees, told everybody to leave the building. And I just thought like, what the heck is happening here? Then in April of 2017, two Secret Service agents come in the back door of my studio, and they are there to arrest me for wire fraud claims against Erica.

My heart sank, and I instantly started crying. I had never been arrested before. I had never even been in a jail. I had never been arrested before. I had never even been in a jail. I had never been handcuffed. I broke down into tears the second I saw him in those chains. The way that they tore him down over the next few months was just like... I think about how I'm affected by it,

and all I had to do was watch, you know? They made every effort to keep me in jail until my court hearing. Luckily, his brother and his husband were willing to put up the however many $50,000, $100,000 to get him out of bail, but they would have left him there, you know? This period of time where I was under indictment went on for almost five years. The company began to like fall apart.

My mind fell apart. And you know, my husband and I were denied the opportunity to adopt a child that we had worked hard on and like put our heart into. That was taken away just one blow after another. My younger brother passed away. He passed away not ever seeing me as a free man. And if it wasn't bad enough, my dad gets cancer.

And he died too, not knowing if I was ever going to get out of this. I've lost my entire family. So I'm pretty broken. The charges were dismissed shortly after my dad passed. And... It's such a bittersweet thing. It's also, you know, still a big question. I still have no idea why. Why it was dismissed.

We looked at as much evidence as we could get our hands on in Chris Posila's case. And one big question that emerged was, why was the Secret Service involved in the first place? The Secret Service does deal with financial crimes, and they will help the FBI with large-scale crimes as an investigative agency. But I was surprised that the Secret Service was involved. Most of the financial crimes I've seen them involved with are much larger scale. So I started looking into who was running the Secret Service office here in LA at the time.

And it was a man named Rob Savage. And as I did a little more digging, I realized that Rob Savage and Tom Girardi were friends. They had socialized over the years. Rob Savage had gone to events that Tom Girardi hosted. And Tom Girardi had represented Rob Savage in a civil case. When the case didn't go his way, Tom Girardi had promised to pay Rob Savage a big amount of money. As Tom Girardi was appearing in court

to try to get a better settlement for the Savages, the very next day, that's when Secret Service agents who worked for Savage were putting a wire on Erica Girardi to then surreptitiously record Chris Basila. So I sent a list of detailed questions to Rob Savage and he responded and acknowledged, yes, he was friends with Tom Girardi. He had known him for years.

He had family connections. So it was a much deeper relationship than I knew. So I said, there's our story. It was the first time I learned of the friendly relationship that Tom and Erica had with the head of the Secret Service, Rob Savage. And I felt compelled to pursue a case against the people who had wronged me. The civil lawsuit against Erica Girardi,

American Express, and the Secret Service is alleging that this was a large scheme to falsely prosecute him because Erica and Tom Girardi couldn't pay the bills. It's completely obvious to me that they needed that money. And at whatever cost. The allegations here also state that she used her connections and Tom's connections with Secret Service to investigate Marco Margot.

Chris's lawsuit has alleged Tom Girardi representing Rob Savage was a quid pro quo and a bribe. He alleged that in court papers. Erica, she knew Savage was her husband's friend, and she contacts Savage on her own without talking to Tom, sets up a meeting. She didn't know that Tom Girardi was representing Savage, but it is all happening at the same time. Erica never speaks with Savage again after that point.

He put two of his guys on it. December 8, Chris sends Erica an email that says, I've been going through orders and credit card statements over and over, and I'm clearly seeing mistakes. He says, I want to have a meeting. He got this sorted. So they did. At that meeting, Erica wore wire. Here's what he says.

There are overcharges of, quote, just over $100,000, end quote. I went into the meeting trying to solve any issues with the attitude of, like, whatever issue she has, we're going to solve it because the customer is always right. I mean, this was a three-year working relationship and friendship.

I didn't want her to go away. I really valued her and her work. The legal question is when citizens are protected in going to law enforcement to report suspicions of wrongdoing, if you have a basis for it, what they call probable cause, you're immune. Now his story is, man, this is all, I got receipts for everything.

You made it all up. I made it up. You're the one who said to me, I've been going over your voices, I'm clearly seeing mistakes. What I have here are the exhibits that are attached to the complaint that we filed. We've compiled images of Erica and her dancers in the outfits along with text messages requesting the looks presented. And we have the development or build of the costumes that were provided here. It's not hard to show that the costumes were approved because they sent their credit card for it. We reached out to the Secret Service and they did not respond to questions and declined to comment, but we did hear back from federal prosecutors and all they said was that the reason they dismissed Chris Basila's case was because

of evidence preservation issues, basically pointing the finger at the Secret Service. I think it's important to sit down and do this interview to bring exposure to these systems that failed. At the end of the day, those people that you do trust, hopefully you can be there and protect them and, you know, save all your receipts. the California bar could have stopped Tom when we filed our complaints but it was never anything done

from what the state bar has since released that second story really put them on notice that they had a scandal on their hands. The agency actually came out and admitted publicly that they had mishandled complaints against him. When an agency is going to admit publicly that they've done a little something wrong, then they probably have done a lot more wrong, and you have to keep pressing. We were pursuing a lot of different angles to try to get accountability at the bar. I had filed a public records request, and I had asked them to release Tom Girardi's discipline file.

Let us know how many complaints were filed, what the complaints were, and did you do anything? Complaints at the State Bar are confidential. So, like, we can't go down to the State Bar and say, like, hey, give us your Girardi complaints. If they didn't take action against him, they're secret. We had to sue in order to find out how many complaints were against him. Most attorneys never get a complaint

about them to the State Bar. Tom had over 200 complaints filed against him. It's crazy. I would be personally, as an attorney, horrified to receive that many complaints through the State Bar. That's a lot. 200 complaints is absolutely unheard of. The number one thing that is going to get a lawyer disbarred

is messing with client money, unless you're Tom Girardi. This wasn't just a flood of complaints near the end of Tom's career either. This is complaints in the 80s, in the 90s, in the early 2000s. This is generations of bar staff that either looked the other way, didn't do thorough investigations, or worse, quashed them when they were totally legitimate. Bar officials, they hired an outside law firm to go through and conduct an investigation. And that report was released in February of 2023. They named names and it was pretty damning.

There were people that we heard whispers about that they had the goods on. We knew the broad strokes, but we didn't know where the amounts of money that had changed hands. We were right about all these State Bar employees who had received gifts, plane rides, had their families working for Tom's law firm. But there's so much we didn't know. One of the most significant was two prosecutors had been fired from the State Bar after they had pushed for Tom Girardi to get disciplined in a case over a decade ago. We learned in this report that Tom Layton and his wife had received a million dollars in gifts and cash from Girardi, and he paid the leases on two BMWs and a Cadillac for

them. They had financial records showing that Tom Layton had a firm credit card and was using that for all sorts of things, both while he worked at the State Bar and long afterward. One thing that stuck out to me that I didn't know was Girardi is the godfather to Layton's daughter. I knew they were close friends.

I knew that they had a very firm and tight bond. But making Girardi the godfather to your daughter is like a level of proximity that, I mean, I hadn a part of it. They were a part of the pain and the suffering of so many people over the years. and the suffering of so many people over the years. And that's how you get almost 40 years of this guy doing this. I mean, as long as there's money to pad their pockets,

there's going to be favoritism, stuff like that. It was horrifying. He had so many people on his payroll. They need to be in jail. They need to be sanctioned. They need to pay the people for every claim that they denied. Unbelievably cruel, doing that, knowing he already had my money. After the documentary came out, Josie Hernandez called me.

And as soon as we started talking, we just hit it off. When I met Kim, she just turned out to be a saving grace for me. She guided me through the process. Victims have two different ways that they can try to get the money that Girardi stole from them back. They can file a claim in the bankruptcy, and then there's also a victim fund from the California Bar.

Now, there is a cap on that. It's a $100,000 cap per case. Josie Hernandez and a number of other victims have been able to get their money back through that program. Technically, it wasn't Girardi-Keese that paid you your settlement. No. It was the state bar. Right. Did that feel like justice to you, Evan? No.

No, it didn't. Celebrity attorney Tom Girardi is indicted today on federal fraud charges. In early 2023, Girardi was indicted by the feds in two jurisdictions, in Chicago, related to the Lion Air case in the Indonesian families, and in Los Angeles. Federal prosecutors unveiled that they were charging Girardi with stealing millions of dollars from his clients.

The Ruy Gomez's, Josie Hernandez. The federal government caught up with Tom Girardi, but did he get away with it because it's too late? A high-profile Los Angeles attorney and the one-time husband to a glamorous Real Housewives reality star. In court today, accused of embezzling millions from clients while he lived the high life. The question is does he suffer from dementia or is he faking it to avoid prosecution? Today is the competency hearing for Tom Girardi. One of the Bravo bloggers texts me, happy competency day.

At the first hearing, his lawyer said that he's incompetent. I don't think he's incompetent. That's f***ing crazy. He doesn't know where the hell he is. The standard in America is that if you're incompetent, you cannot be tried for a crime. One of his daughters said his writing is gibberish. If that is true, what is his mind like? Do I think that he'll play the old, frail man? Hell yeah, he will. When they did the indictment, I got up close to him.

He knew who the guy was. And his eyes were not empty. His eyes were evil. This is the performance of his life right now. I mean, if he's incompetent, then there's no possibility that he's going to be held accountable. I want to look him in the eye, at least give him some sense of,

you didn't get away with this. You did this to these people. We see you. I see you. I see you. First day for the competency hearing, it was really striking. When I first saw Tom, I couldn't tell if it was almost like an act. His suit jacket was way too big. He had the slippers on. It just didn't look like the distinguished gentleman we had seen on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for years.

just didn't look like the distinguished gentleman we had seen on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for years. Federal government brought forth an expert who could testify that Tom Girardi is certainly not in his prime. He's an 84-year-old man and he's lost a step, but he's exaggerating the extent of his memory loss because it suits him. And the defense brought an expert who said,

no, actually, he can't remember the charges against him. He can't remember the case between meetings with him. The prosecutors would tell you, hey, this is all part of the act. Putting you on speakerphone. Yes, Kathy. Because Josie and Nancy and Kiki wanted to all say hi. And now I guess they- And she's already there, huh? Yeah. What I wanna know is, do the people taking care of him, do they have dementia? They don't know how to put his shoes on.

They don't know how to dress him. He has to play the part. So they're purposely doing it. That's what makes it look so obnoxious. Thank you. Look at him. He's calculating everything. Yeah. The guy is a calculating person.

He's been calculating outcomes for every jury his whole life. I mean, he's a great actor, right? He doesn't look confused when he looks over at the attorney or he looks over at the judge. He's sitting there perfectly, which is kind of giving an example that he should be able to be at trial. He's his own example right now. Think about it. That's good, Nancy. That's good.

That's actually a good observation. Most of the times Tom was in court, he sat pretty quietly. But by the third day of the competency hearing, he seemed rattled. One of the prosecutors was grilling an expert who was saying that Girardi was incompetent. And Tom mouthed to the prosecutor, I had never seen that before. That was one part that was memorable. Could he have dementia right now?

It's possible, but he's been scamming people since the early 80s, as we know now. He's just crooked and always has been. Tom pretended to be David against Goliath, and he wasn't. He didn't do it alone. What do you have to say to your clients if you think they're stealing their money?

If Tom is said to be competent and stands trial and goes to prison, that's just one person. Huh? You're still still carrying that? Who enabled Tom, and who's still doing it right now? What do you think about the people saying he stole their money, Tom? Do you have anything to say about the people that said you disgraced?

This is just the beginning of the story and not the end. You're at peace, Mr. Girardi. People often ask me, is reality television real? There are real people, and the truth is, you always show who you are on screen. The camera never lies. I'll go head on with you all f***ing day. Don't talk to me like that. Or what? Seriously.

Or what? What aired showed her as being very combative. She was portrayed as kind of this villain and just sort of like victims, what victims? I'm not saying I don't feel for the potential victims. Potential victims? Yeah, because who knows if they're true or not. Let's say she really didn't know what's going on. That's very stressful for a person.

I like to feel like I would handle that stress better, but I'm not in her shoes. All I think about are victims. I don't give a about anybody else but me. Has she said some things that there was no need to say? People watching can perceive a certain callousness? Yes. Had I been able to advise her in the beginning, I would have said, you cannot be on that TV show.

We all respond to pain differently. Erica responds by fighting back. But she has to be on the show, because she can't buy bread if she's not on the show. I had victims call me crying, how dare her say we're alleged. One day, I just said, well, why don't I just reach out to Erica's lawyers? Now how it happened was just sort of a fluke.

Today, several victims will get a chance to finally meet Erica Girardi, who many victims vilified. They look to Erica as one of the people to blame. Hey! Oh, my God! How are you? I'm good. Great. I had been planning National Ice Cream Day to do an event and raise money for No Birthday Left Behind. They do birthday parties for unhoused kids.

Kathy and Josie and Nancy, who are all Girardi victims, are going to be working at the event. They were volunteering. I get a call from Jim Wilkes, and he asks if Erica could come. I just thought, what am I going to say to her? And then I said, I'm not going to say anything. I'll listen.

I think she owes us more than we owe her. She's been given a lot in life as far as a platform. She can make the victim's life a living hell still, or she could add a little light. Which one is it going to be? Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. I mean, I know it feels weird with all the mics and lights, but, I mean, we've all had a lot of questions for a long time.

Erica, why did it take you so long? To do what? To this. I was never asked to do this. But wouldn't it be something that would come from you? No. I'll tell you why. I was being accused of money laundering and all kinds of other things. So the time was not right. I had to absolutely defend myself. My life fell apart, and here come all of these lawsuits. So I think that it's easy to say, you know, Erica didn't want to be

here or Erica didn't care. I was actually in a very dangerous place for my, for myself. Everyone was easily, you know, easily dropping off the blame at my front door. Did you ever hear about him taking money or anything before this whole thing blew up? No. Like the lawsuits that were against him? I found out when I was sued in Arizona from a lending company when I was named, and that was the first time. And I said, why am I in this lawsuit? And the three answers I kept getting were, it's ******.

Don't worry about it. I've got it handled. But why is my name in here? Like, I'm not part of the business. So, that's when I started noticing something's wrong. So did you not sign, um,

did you sign that form with one of the lenders? It's possible. I don't know. I signed a lot of things. You know, I signed things that Tom put in front of me. I think like a lot of wives do. And I trusted my husband as you trusted him to do the right thing. So we're all kind of in the same boat. Have you seen him lately? No, I haven't seen him in three years since I dropped him off at work and left. years since I dropped him off at work and left him. And we speak, he calls, you know, because he calls, but it's never, it's very informal. It's very surface stuff.

And he doesn't bring up, like he doesn't, you don't see any remorse or anything? I don't see him acknowledging anything. He has not acknowledged anything. But that's not unusual because Tom always thought that everything was okay. And Tom always made it right. He would never do that. I don't think Tom could ever admit that he was ever wrong. He's that personality and still is to this day. I'm sorry that my husband

did this to everybody. And I mean that, you know, as heartfelt as I can. But a lot of it is new to me too. You know? See, but that's the part that we didn't understand. Well, nobody would listen. And that's what I kept trying to say.

Hold on a second. You're not hearing, you're filling in the blanks. You're not letting me speak, and I couldn't speak for so long because, you know, they were trying to throw me in the same pot with everyone else, with men that worked at the firm, and that just wasn't true and nobody was really interested in my side of the story they were interested in blaming me true you know they weren't interested in what i was going through they were interested in that girl you know that woman took down the law firm or whatever else, you know.

And that's the story that they told. When I married Tom, this was not how this was supposed to end. I wish I could do something. And if there is something I can do, I will. I think, like, changing the dialogue so that, you know, every episode that airs like makes the victims feel uncomfortable. I would love that too. Unfortunately, it was such a story that that's what they, when I say they, I mean the show, chose to focus on. when I say they, I mean the show, chose to focus on. I will do anything I can to help you and help everyone involved and hurt.

I came here with an open heart. No one wants this. Yeah, I think it just came across weird because they would attack you over it and so then your responses about the victims would just be, would sound like at least on that on the housewife show it would sound which is editing yeah it came across yeah remember that the housewife show is entertainment right at everyone's expense real right at everyone's expense and then you end up having one narrative that isn't quite right.

And I can raise my hands as much as I possibly can, but at the end of the day, I don't make the decision on what goes in the shell. So I appreciate your sitting with me and, you know, from the bottom of my heart, I'm very sorry for anything that Tom Girardi, Girardi Keys or any of us, certainly I didn't know. But on behalf of everyone else, I'm very sorry.

I don't want this to happen to anybody. Look, today was very heavy because you hear people that are hurt by someone that I was married to. A lot of conflicting emotions. These women had been lied to. It's like double the injury, triple the injury. So I feel very badly for them. I think that we were able to see each other and hear each other.

We're all here in this very terrible situation together. There are just so many levels to the awkwardness. Like, there's all these cameras, so, like, how genuine is this going to be? It seemed like reality TV within reality TV. It was frustrating because I wasn't asking questions, and I'm used to being in the reporter position. Her proximity to Tom gives her a lot of insight about his relationships to judges and public officials,

because I think that that could be helpful in getting some accountability and potentially exposing further corruption. We had a very small universe of victims. It's a lot to ask these women to represent everybody that he robbed. How do I think Erica came? If I was advising her, I would be telling her that should be the top of your list to

do. It's something that she should have done all along. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm kind of waiting on the action. I'm not holding my breath, but I hope that she does follow through and helps us. Hopefully, we will see some accountability for the things she can be accountable for. She can't be accountable for everything her husband did, but she can be accountable for the way that she responded to it. accountable for the way that she responded to it. All of the lawyers, all of the years, the knowledge that the California Bar, everybody had to think that Erica had to be the one to sit there and say, I'm sorry? Tom Girardi has been found competent to stand trial.

You think Tom Girardi's cursing at prosecutors now? I would guess he is. I will be sitting front row. The question now is, is Tom going to plead guilty? Is he going to try to work out some kind of deal? We're just really back starting the process again. My first thought was we needed to get a story up. My other thought was, well, this is 2024 now. We're going to be gearing up for a Tom Girardi trial and all the hoopla that comes with that.

In the last couple years, I've done a lot of self-growth. It's important to show my kids that everybody is not above the law. Welcome, as I said hello to everybody else already. I want them to see that and not ever be afraid of fighting for what they believe is right and questioning the legal system. Marco and I, we made a conscious decision to build this company back up, and we have done that.

The bones are the same, but it's a tougher skin. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that hard to do what's right. Why not go to sleep knowing that you did the right thing when it's in your power to do it? do it. I would like my future to outside of Tom Girardi.

They need to get everyone, but I have very little faith that'll happen. I have very little faith that'll happen. It's an importance to Tom Girardi that's beyond Tom Girardi and Erika Girardi and Real Housewives. It's that we want to live in a society that's fair and the fix is not always in. And I hope that by exposing everything that he did, there won't be another Tom Girardi.

The system failed. Just like the corruption of people who were afraid to come forward, who knew better, who chose to do the wrong thing. And there's also the story of people who did try to come forward, who were sounding the alarm and who were quashed. It's not like tom did this alone in terms of true accountability it's still not here yet

This is Deborah Roberts. In 2023, Tom Girardi pled not guilty to four counts of wire fraud. In August of 2024, he went on trial and a jury found him guilty of all four charges. The 85-year-old Girardi is currently scheduled to be sentenced in December of 2024. Girardi is currently scheduled to be sentenced in December of 2024. The Housewife and the Hustler was produced by ABC News Studios and LA Times Studios, and it's currently streaming on Hulu. And you can find all new broadcast episodes of 2020 Friday nights at 9 on ABC.