Jurors were considering the defamation case against Kris Jenner, Khloé Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, after a judge threw out the part of the lawsuit against Kim Kardashian in the middle of deliberations.
All four of the women testified during the nine-day trial.
The trial focused largely on allegations that Chyna violently attacked her then-fiancé and reality TV co-star Rob Kardashian on a night and morning in December 2016. He testified that she twice held a gun to his head, wrapped a phone-charging cord around his neck and beat him with a metal rod. She testified that she had put the cord around his neck and held the gun playfully as the two celebrated the renewal of their reality show, and when the celebration turned into a dispute, she was never violent against him.
But the legal questions the jury considered were all about the aftermath of that fight. Jurors had to decide whether each of the defendants knowingly lied about the abuse when they talked about it with the producers and executives overseeing “Rob & Chyna,” or spread word about it with reckless disregard for the truth. And they had to decide for each defendant whether those communications were an illegal interference with Chyna’s contract to appear on the show.
In her closing argument, Chyna’s attorney Lynne Ciani argued that it was unreasonable for the four women to have believed that her client violently attacked her former fiancé Rob Kardashian.
“He didn’t have a mark on him,” Ciani told jurors. “There was no call to the police, no trip to the hospital, not even a Band-Aid.”
Kardashian attorney Michael G. Rhodes argued during his closing that the women had every reason to believe the accounts of the attack from Rob Kardashian and from Kris Jenner’s longtime boyfriend Corey Gamble, who arrived at the scene and broke up the dispute.
“Do you remember how Rob looked on the stand? His pain was real,” Rhodes said. “This is a real family. Yeah, they’re famous, but they’re real people. He got really badly hurt here.”
It appeared during the trial that Gamble would prove to be the key witness for the defense. But the television executives and producers whose testimony was often technical, and utterly without drama, would prove more important in the jury’s findings, which rendered the women’s stories of abuse largely irrelevant.
Jurors were free to make it a split decision — finding against some of the Kardashians but not others.
They gave the family a clean sweep instead, and gave Chyna nothing.
The 5-year-old lawsuit overcame many obstacles — including motions to dismiss and settlement talks between the two sides — and was a longshot to even get to trial.
But the final obstacle, convincing a jury, proved too much to overcome.