^*A month later, on February 10, 1972, Maheu filed a $17.5-million libel and slander lawsuit against the Hughes Tool Company in the United States district court in Los Angeles. On July 1, 1974, after a four-month trial, the jury found that the Hughes Tool Company, then the Summa Corporation, was liable for Hughes’s statements. A second trial to set damages followed. After hearing additional testimony, the jury awarded Maheu more than $2.8 million and a judgment for that amount was entered against Summa on December 23, 1974. Summa appealed the twin verdicts, arguing that “uncontradicted evidence regarding at least three specific incidents proves the truth of Hughes’ statement” and that under California law Summa need not prove the literal truth of the allegedly defamatory remark, “so long as imputation is substantially true so as to justify the ‘gist’ or ‘sting’ of the remark.” On December 27, 1977, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned both the jury’s liability finding and its damage award and sent the case back for retrial. The appellate court concluded that the presiding trial judge, Harry Pregerson, in summarizing the case before it went to the jury, had presented a favorable, “one-sided characterization of Maheu [that] came close to directing a verdict in his favor, thus denying Summa a fair trial.” The court noted that Judge Pregerson described Maheu as “affable, intelligent, imaginative, articulate, a friendly man with important friends in high places” and “a man of enormous energy and drive” with the “ability to get things done.” The appellate court observed that “while that description may be accurate, not all the evidence supported that view…. This glowing character reference failed to mention Summa’s contentions that Maheu was dishonest, a thief, an embezzler, and a perjurer, a contention that was supported by a mass of very persuasive evidence.” The appellate court took special note of one particular incident offered by Summa as evidence of the truth of Hughes’s statement. Maheu “was supposed to provide full time guard service, around the clock, for certain properties in Tucson owned by Summa. He submitted bills for those services. On their face they showed hours of work by each guard, and an hourly rate of pay. They were false. They showed many more hours, and substantially higher rates of pay, than were in fact furnished and paid, to the tune of many thousands of dollars. Maheu did not deny that the billings were false. He said that Hughes told him to make a good profit from furnishing the guards, and to conceal from the executives of Summa the fact that he was making a profit. His explanations of other instances were equally bizarre. But they had one thing in common. They rested on private, unrecorded conversations between him and Hughes.”