She had downloaded and was sharing a couple thousand songs. I don't think we've been told what the RIAA's initial settlement offer was when they contacted her, but I believe those are generally in the $3-5k range.
Now at this point, you probably don't know how many songs they know you have pirated and are sharing, and of those you don't know how many they can actually prove. You can guess that they probably know about a lot, though, as they have generally only gone after big time sharers.
For every song that they can prove you violated copyright on, they will get a MINIMUM of $200 statutory damages if you can prove that you were an "innocent infringer". If not, the MINIMUM is $750 per song. (The maximum is something like $30k/song, raised up to something like $150k/song if they can show you were a willful infringer).
Being extremely optimistic, knowing that you've in fact infringed a couple thousand songs, and so calculating damages as an innocent infringer, all they need to do is get you on more than 25 songs, and your BEST CASE outcome is worse than just accepting the initial settlement.
If the innocent infringer thing doesn't fly, all they have to do is get you on 7 songs and you lose compared to accepting a $5k settlement offer up front.
A rational defendant would simply have jumped at the initial settlement offer, accepting that by pirating a couple thousand songs they were essentially taking a bet that they could get the songs for free, but if they lost they'd end up paying about 2.5 times per song than what they would have paid at iTunes.
She refused to settle. She tried to blame others, such as her kids, for the downloading. She tried to destroy evidence (after the other side knew about the evidence--if you are going to destroy evidence you really need to destroy it BEFORE the other side knows it exists). She lied about her actions under oath in court.
These are the kind of actions that make a jury think you are not an innocent infringer--in fact they make a jury think you are scum, and when told to pick damages from a big range, the jury tends to go high, not low on you.
She had another chance to be rational, as the RIAA again made a settlement offer after the first trial, for considerably less than they had won. I don't believe it was as good as their initial offer, but it was still pretty good--somewhere close to the bottom range of non-innocent infringer statutory damages for the 24 songs they actually ended up litigating over.
Nope, she fought and got another trial. She lost again (which makes since, given nothing had changed), and this new jury went much higher on damages. Oops. Now she's had a third trial, and another loss, and another jury going high.
And she's rejected a $25k settlement offer from the RIAA.
She should accept that offer, apologize for being such an idiot, and ask for donations. There will be enough sympathetic people to cover $25k.
And then someone should see if the lawyers who represented here can be brought up on ethical charges. It seems pretty clear that they used her in order to try out their cockamamie legal theories, and that they were acting in their interests, not in the interests of their client.