Only The Really Rich Or Really Indigent Can Dodge Accountability, And Rudy Giuliani Isn’t There Yet

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

It’s not often you hear about the advantages of being indigent. Now I’m not talking about the huddling under a bridge burning a Dostoevsky novel for warmth type of indigence. There’s really not much to be said for that.

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It’s more like affluent-indigent. Afflindigent? Most people in the real world don’t encounter these types of folks very often (or if you do you don’t know it because the whole point is to keep up appearances) even though those of us in litigation encounter them all the time.

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A certain level of indigence serves as quite an effective insulator against liability. If you want to sue a person for something, one of the first things any lawyer you contact is going to ask about is whether that person is insured. If not, you’d better hope this person has some assets to their name that you can realistically collect against.

Stuff that is leveraged to the hilt doesn’t count either. Real estate that doesn’t have any equity or fancy cars bought with debt are valueless to any creditor too far down the food chain. Something convinced lenders that these sorts could pay back their debts, but all too often it was very creative accounting or income from self-employment. Be my guest, force someone running their own business who isn’t exactly a stickler for documentary accuracy to garnish their own wages.

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Yes, it’s all a bit like the time I took a road trip down the East Coast with my cousin who happily accumulated a colorful sheaf of different jurisdictions’ parking tickets that he shoved into his glove compartment and promptly forgot about. “I’m never coming back to any of these states!” he shouted with glee, snatching more papers off his windshield. Things like parking on the grass at the National Mall were still a bit of a novelty back then.

On the other hand, we’re all a lot more familiar with the other end of the spectrum. When someone gets wealthy enough to be able to spend an essentially unlimited amount of money on attorneys, it is very difficult to hold that person accountable for anything.

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Beyond having the means to pay your lawyers to draft them, the only practical limit on how many motions one can file in a typical court proceeding is how much one is willing to test the judge’s patience. Then there’s appeal, appeal to an even higher court, and oh, even after all that, it’s ultimately a loss, you say? Well, maybe it turns out the money wasn’t ever even owned by the rich person in the first place, it’s in some trust somewhere or in a Russian nesting doll of shell companies or literally in Russia. Good luck finding it!

Donald Trump has become the type specimen for the latter method of dodging responsibility. He built an entire career out of it. None of his cronies are truly rich enough to follow suit though, and with Trump refusing to pay legal bills for anyone else (very on-brand), some of the inner-circle Trump-adjacent dolts are trying the former approach.

Rudy Giuliani is easily the saddest example. In a recent hearing for the Smartmatic case (the voting machines company is suing both Giuliani and Fox News for defamation), Giuliani’s lawyer said that Giuliani was “close to broke.” Giuliani just put his Manhattan apartment on the market for $6.5 million in an attempt to solve his cash crunch, but he was also just found to have defamed two Georgia election workers by a federal judge. I sure hope the lawyers for those Georgia election workers are figuring out some way to put a lien on real estate after liability has been confirmed but before damages have been set.

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Still, perhaps all’s not lost for ol’ Rudy just yet. While Trump won’t open his own wallet for Giuliani, he’s perfectly willing to goad his supporters into opening theirs, and Trump has agreed to host a $100,000 per ticket fundraiser for Giuliani.

Giuliani isn’t quite indigent enough at this point to fully feel secure in the protection of his destitution. He might get there — anyone who can grossly mismanage a legal career as badly as Giuliani can surely grossly mismanage their own finances enough to spend themselves into poverty. Kinda seems like a bad system that allows people to spend their last few million bucks on legal fees defending against obviously meritorious suits only to end up stiffing the people who should be getting compensated, doesn’t it?

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

ATL Finance, Donald Trump, Finance, Finance Docket, Indigence, Legal Fees, Rudy Giuliani