By Mark Curriden
(Sept. 29) – Rusty Hardin was cross-examining Anna Nicole Smith in a case in which the 26-year-old former Playboy centerfold sought hundreds of millions of dollars from the estate of her deceased husband, 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall II.
“How do you spend $100,000 a week?” he asked.
“Rusty, you have to understand,” answered Smith, clutching a portrait of her deceased husband near her heart in full view of the jury. “It’s very expensive being me.”
“Mrs. Marshall, have you been taking new acting lessons?” Hardin asked.
“Screw you, Rusty,” she replied.
“That trial was 16 years ago, but people still yell out that line to me,” Hardin says. “Last year, I was getting on a plane and this little old gray haired lady in the back yells out, ‘Screw you, Rusty.’ I love it.”
Hardin, who is 73, has won dozens of high-profile cases. He speaks all over the country at bar associations and law schools and civic events, but none generated the publicity that the Smith trial did. Hardin still has people remind him of the case by quoting her three-word response.
“No matter where I go or what other big case I’ve been involved in more recently, people always ask me about Anna Nicole,” he says.
For a guy who barely got into law school, Hardin has won some huge trials.
He convinced a jury that baseball great Roger Clemens was not guilty of perjury. He won acquittals for basketball Hall-of-Famer Calvin Murphy, who was accused of molestation; Houston Oilers QB Warren Moon, who was charged with spousal abuse; and TV evangelist Joel Osteen’s wife, Victoria, who had been accused of assault by a flight attendant. He persuaded prosecutors to drop DUI charges against Houston Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich.
And Hardin vigorously defended Arthur Andersen against allegations of obstruction of justice for the one-time accounting giant’s role in shredding critical documents in the Enron scandal. Hardin’s case was rejected at the trial court, as Andersen was convicted, but appellate lawyers used Hardin’s exact arguments and presentation of evidence to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Andersen’s conviction and set legal precedent in the process.
USA Today reported that Hardin “put up a ferocious fight” and that he “was the star of the six-week trial.”
Following the 2002 trial, Texas Monthly published a 5,000-word profile of Hardin in which the author wrote, “He is all things a great defender must be — raconteur, showman, charmer, tactician, egotist — and he has a ferocious charisma that a rival once described as ‘slicker ’n deer guts on a doorknob.’”
While Hardin appreciates the media and public praise, he says the true satisfaction comes from clients or the families of clients.
“I love it when the deck is stacked against us because it presents a wonderful challenge,” he says. “In the Roger Clemens case, everyone in the country believed he was guilty. After the jury ruled for us, I saw Clemens with his wife and four boys huddled in the courtroom crying. There’s no better feeling.”
Another time, he was boarding a plane in the Charlotte, N.C. airport a couple of years ago when he heard someone calling his name.
“We just want to thank you for saving our son’s life,” said an older man who was getting on the same plane. Seventeen years earlier, Hardin represented their teenaged son in a theft case.
Hardin realized the son was actually a good kid who needed a little guidance and a little mercy from the courts. He convinced the judge to wipe the defendant’s record clean if he stayed out of trouble.
“The parents told me their son had gone on to achieve great things that would not have been possible if he had a criminal record,” Hardin says. “That is the greatest satisfaction as a lawyer, to know that I made a difference in people’s lives. The high-profile cases are interesting, but sometimes it’s the cases that never made the news that are most memorable to me.”
Hardin grew up in rural North Carolina where his dad owned a cotton warehouse. He taught school in Montgomery, Ala. and then enlisted in the Army, where he served a tour in Vietnam.
At age 31, he decided to go to school to become a lawyer, but 22 of the 23 law schools to which he applied rejected him.
“Thank God for SMU,” he says. “Thank God SMU looked beyond LSATs and standardized testing.”
Hardin spent the first 14 years of his career as a prosecutor in Harris County, where he sent 14 people to death row. The State Bar of Texas named him “Prosecutor of the Year” in 1989.
“I think the biggest surprise to me is how my career has gone,” he says. “I still think of myself as a prosecutor doing auto theft cases. Part of it is luck, but part of it is just how much I love being a lawyer.
“I love what I do so much that sometimes I forget to go home at the end of the day,” he says.