Five Amway distributors who were held liable for spreading satanic rumors about Procter & Gamble have asked for the $19.25 million jury verdict to be thrown out, claiming jurors mistakenly awarded damages “in the form of attorney fees.”

Since the March 16 verdict, three of the 11 jurors have declared in affidavits that they found P&G had no case for any category of damages except “out of pocket” expenses. In his instructions to jurors, the trial judge said they could consider such expenses as P&G incurred to “correct the defendants’ false statements.”

In Lanham Act cases, only judges can award attorney's fees. But according to one juror's affidavit, “The out-of-pocket expenses category was presumed to be primarily attorneys' fees and litigation costs.”

Each juror estimated the attorneys' hourly rate -- “[W]e used our own experiences with attorneys and lawsuits,” another affidavit says –- and decided the appropriate compensation for 12 years of litigation. The awards ranged from $0 to $50 million, but averaged out to $19.25 million.

“[T]he jurors entered into a bizarre agreement concerning facts that were not in the record,” the defense says in a motion for a new trial.

The award against Randy Haugen of Ogden, Utah, and four of his Amway distributors was one of the largest for false advertising on record. In an April 1995 message posted on the Amvox internal phone-mail system, Haugen said P&G's president had appeared on a TV talk show and “stated that a large portion of the profits from [P&G] products go to support his satanic church.”

The affidavits -– which are attached to a motion for a judicial inquiry into possible jury misconduct -– certainly seem to explain how jurors could have awarded P&G damages despite the lack of any evidence that the rumors actually cost the company any sales.

“P&G could not prove a single lost sale at trial,” the misconduct motion says. “Lacking such evidence, the jury fashioned a damages remedy of its own in the form of attorney fees.”

The defense had proposed that the jury be instructed to consider “[a]ny reasonable and necessary out-of-pocket expenses that P&G incurred in preventing customers from being deceived.” But U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart rejected that wording, the defense says, leaving the jury

to speculate that attorneys’ fees and other legal expenses were necessary to correct the defendants’ false statements.

P&G's lawyers, meanwhile, have asked Stewart to apply the Lanham Act's provision for triple damages and increase the award to $57,750,000.

But a magistrate judge captured the flimsiness of P&G's case 10 years ago when he told the company, “[Y]ou could probably get three ladies from Snowville to say that maybe they didn't buy a bar of soap or something and that is going to be your damage claim.”