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A Chicago professor who started studying the impact of social media at the time of the Arab Spring is behind nearly $200 million in penalties awarded against Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Her name is Ashlee Humphreys and no amount of disparagement by Trump’s lawyers has put her off her stride or persuaded a judge to exclude her from a courtroom. Now the Times’s Will Pavia has interviewed her and discovered a simple methodology behind her numbers. “I’m a beancounter,” she says. “I just count impressions.” She calculated that two defamatory statements made by Trump about the journalist E Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted, were seen by between 86 and 104 million people and believed by a quarter of them. She then estimated the cost of an influencer-led online campaign to correct those false impressions, putting it at $2.7 million. The jury added that to damages and compensation in a verdict worth $5 million. Humphreys is also the expert behind a $148 million defamation verdict against Giuliani in a Georgia case brought by two Black election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. Team Trump has tried to rubbish her analyses, so far in vain.