Objection! (28 page)

In retrospect, there are some important lessons to learn from this case about the deeply unjust nature of the attacks that were aimed at the jogger. We learned that when the standard slanders on a rape victim do not apply, we must not lower our guard. The blame-the-victim strategy is always there, ready to take on any form. For instance, there were a myriad of “should-have”s used to blame the victim in the jogger case.

The jogger
should have
known that Central Park is dangerous. She
should have
known that thugs hang out there. She
should have
gone running with a friend. She
should have
been home tucked away behind a locked apartment door. But she wasn’t. And we are not. We’ve all innocently taken some chances that looked unsafe in retrospect. Just because she chose to live her life, the jogger suffered horrific and painful consequences.

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Luckily, she survived. Fourteen years after being known only as

“the Jogger,” Trisha Meili emerged from the shadows and authored a bestseller about her experience. She survived not only a brutal attack in New York’s Central Park, but a punishing one in the courtroom as well.

S P R E A D I N G T H E B L A M E

The blame-the-victim defense
isn’t limited to rape cases. Consider these other high-profile cases where the victim was attacked in the courtroom by defense attorneys gunning for a not-guilty verdict at any and all costs.

B O N N Y L E E B A K L E Y

On the evening of May 4, 2001, the actor Robert Blake, who starred in the television series
Baretta
in the seventies and is best known for his role in the film
In Cold Blood
, went out to dinner with his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. The couple went to one of Blake’s favorite Italian restaurants, Vitello’s, located in the Studio City section of Los Angeles. Blake parked on a back street about one and a half blocks away, instead of in front of the restaurant as usual. The actor says that after dinner he realized he’d left his gun inside the restaurant, a gun he claimed he carried because he feared that Bakley’s life was in danger.

Leaving her alone in his car in a darkened alley, he walked back to the restaurant. No one, including busboys, remembers Blake retrieving anything. Instead he came back into the restaurant, drank a glass of water and returned to his car, where he says he discovered Bakley shot to death after being away from her for just a few moments.

A neighbor who came to help Bakley noted that the passenger window was rolled down and there was no shattered glass. The car’s interior was covered with blood. Bakley was still alive, making gurgling sounds and gasping for air. The neighbor, not Blake, tried to render aid to the dying woman.

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When asked by the police to take a polygraph test that night, Blake refused. He claimed he was too distraught. Blake also reportedly said that he feared he would fail the test because, as in the O. J. Simpson case, he’d had dreams of killing her and thought that could skew the lie-detector results. He also reportedly stated he blamed himself for her death because he’d left her alone in the car and thought that could skew the test results as well.

Court TV reported that two stuntmen who had once worked as body doubles on
Baretta
testified that the actor had offered them money in exchange for help in killing his wife. Gary “Whiz Kid” McLarty testified in 2003 that Blake offered him $10,000 to “pop” his wife in a bizarre setup similar to her actual murder behind an Italian restaurant.

Whoever pulled the trigger that night didn’t travel far from the scene to dump the murder weapon—LAPD found the gun thrown into a nearby Dumpster.

With facts like those stacked against the defense, there’s only one place to point the blame—at the victim. On the night of the murder, Blake’s lawyer, Harland Braun, moved in pronto, racing Blake to a hospital to manage his “high blood pressure.” The antivictim posturing began with Braun himself taking all questions and diverting the media toward several far-fetched theories. Braun immediately began to poison the potential jury pool by lambasting Bakley as a lowlife who conned lonely men with topless photos of herself and promises of sex. Braun went so far as to hypothesize that any one of Bakley’s swindled customers could have murdered her.

He also openly attacked the marriage itself, describing it as “troubled.” It was then reported that Blake had married Bakley only because she was pregnant with his child. In order to shift focus from the obvious and most likely suspect, his client, Braun threw out another possibility: that a dangerous neighborhood burglar might have killed Bakley.

Bonny Lee Bakley’s character was assassinated before the trial even started. Her past and her every wrongdoing were twisted into accusations, publicized, and used as a defense tool. I wonder what makes O B J E C T I O N !

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her any more disposable than you or me? Is her life less valuable because of who she was? I hope not.

The search for justice in Bonny Lee Bakley’s case suffered intensely because she wasn’t a “good girl.” Plus, there’s another victim who suffered as a result of all the horrible press about Bakley—her daughter. Rose Lenore Sophia, born June 2, 2000, was an infant at the time of her mother’s murder. Someday she’ll read the articles, hear the reports, and learn what was said about her mother. In their zeal to blame the victim, the defense has even managed to destroy a little girl’s most precious memories.

N I C O L E B R O W N S I M P S O N

Even now, more than ten years after the brutal slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, O. J. Simpson still blames his ex-wife for her own murder. The former NFL star long ago gave up searching for her “real killer.” Simpson has said, “Sometimes I think that instead of putting off the move to Florida, I should have grabbed Nicole and the kids and changed our environment. I wonder how things would have turned out.” He blames the “bad crowd” his wife kept company with after they divorced and says her death resulted from her own ill-advised connections, possibly involving drugs. “A month before she died, I had an argument with her about those people,” he has said. “Something was out of control here.” All of his un-substantiated claims are just words.

But words do matter. Simpson’s defense team asked Judge Ito to order the prosecution to use the phrase “domestic discord” rather than

“domestic violence.” The defense preferred euphemisms for wife beating instead of the harsh truth. Terms like “battered wife” and “stalker”

were taboo as well, according to the defense.

Shortly before her death, Nicole Brown told her mother, Juditha, that she was deathly afraid of Simpson. “I go to the gas station, [Simpson] is there. I go to the Payless Shoe Store and he’s there. I’m driving and he’s behind me. . . . I’m scared.” It wasn’t the first time Nicole’s 1 9 2

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own words of fear and hopelessness had chronicled her deep-seated fear of her ex-husband. Detailed descriptions of the physical abuse inflicted upon her by Simpson were recorded in her diary. Brown even called a battered-women’s shelter five days before her murder. There were multiple complaints of domestic abuse made by Brown against O. J. Simpson to the police. Most of those reports never made it to the jury. The jury saw one photo of her face bruised and swollen, but the majority of alleged prior abuse didn’t make it into evidence.

Instead of learning about the private hell Brown endured, the jury heard endless references to her alleged drug use, her dating history, her

“questionable” friends and their flaws, and her penchant for partying.

The defense even tried to blame Brown’s and Goldman’s deaths on a mysterious Colombian drug dealer. Only Simpson was completely blameless.

In an interview that aired on Fox in 2004, Simpson actually said he often feels “angry” at Nicole for falling in with the wrong crowd. Unbelievable. These many years later, it continues, coming full circle on the ten-year mark of her murder, the relentless blaming of Nicole Brown, the victim.

G R U M P Y O L D M A N

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T H E R O B E R T D U R S T D E F E N S E

In the 2003 murder case involving eccentric millionaire Robert Durst, his claim that the murder victim was grumpy and cantankerous resulted in an acquittal. Back in 2000, Robert Durst left New York under suspicion that he had killed his wife, twenty-nine-year-old medical student Kathie Durst. The sixty-year-old millionaire had been a hot topic in the city’s newspapers ever since Kathie disappeared without a trace in 1982.

After relocating to Galveston, Texas, Durst disguised himself as a mute woman. Later that year, he was arrested and charged with murdering an elderly neighbor in their run-down apartment complex. Durst was acquitted of the murder charge in November 2003. The defendant O B J E C T I O N !

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closed his eyes and dropped his mouth open in disbelief as Judge Susan Criss read the panel’s not-guilty verdict in open court. I was just as shocked as the defendant. The verdict was a sickening surprise to many, as Durst had admitted to dismembering seventy-one-year-old Morris Black and disposing of his body in Galveston Bay. The courtroom was packed with reporters from around the world, drawn to the Texas Gulf Coast community by the bizarre facts of the case and because of the celebrity associated with the Durst name. The Durst Organization owns skyscrapers and other real estate in New York worth billions. Defendant Durst had been passed over for control of the family business despite being Seymour Durst’s oldest child.

Durst took the stand at trial under his attorney’s direct exam and attacked the victim. Without the traditional ammunition of the victim’s having a bad reputation or an extensive rap sheet, Durst was determined to disparage a lonely senior citizen living in a $300-a-month rental. He portrayed his elderly neighbor as angry, complaining, unreasonable, and hard to get along with. He claimed under oath that Black was a cranky and confrontational loner and said that it was Black who’d threatened him, with Durst’s own gun, on September 28, 2001. But it was Black who wound up dead after being shot in the face with Durst’s pistol.

During several days on the stand, Durst testified that he panicked after shooting Black because he was living under an assumed name and being investigated in his wife’s disappearance. He assumed the police would never believe his story about Black’s death. He testified that while under the influence of alcohol, he dismembered Black’s body, dumped it in Galveston Bay, and cleaned up the scene. The victim’s head was never recovered.

T H E S A N F R A N C I S C O

D O G - M A U L I N G C A S E

A beautiful, all-American lacrosse player was mauled to death by two hundred-plus-pound Presa Canario dogs on January 26, 2001. The victim, thirty-three-year-old Diane Whipple, was simply trying to get 1 9 4

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into her own apartment while juggling an armload of groceries. There had been numerous complaints and fears raised in the apartment building concerning the two aggressive and seemingly uncontrollable dogs.

It all culminated in Whipple’s being mauled to death. To make matters worse, the dogs were in the care of one of their owners at the time. The dog’s owners, Marjorie Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, both attorneys, went on trial for the outrageous death.

I met personally with Whipple’s friends, and they told me they were horrified by the personal attacks made at trial and in the press against Diane. Knoller and Noel had promptly gone on the offense, claiming that the victim brought on the attack by putting herself in harm’s way. In letters to San Francisco prosecutors, the couple boldly claimed Whipple brought the attack on herself by entering the hallway outside her apartment after Knoller had pushed her inside and gotten control of the attacking dog, Bane.

The attorneys also accused Whipple of using steroids or wearing a pheromone-based fragrance that drew the dogs to her, provoking aggressive behavior in them. She’s mauled to death and they blame her perfume! “The presence of either of those substances would also explain Ms. Whipple’s behavior at the time of the incident in leaving the confines and safety of her apartment and coming into the hall to confront the dog after Ms. Knoller had secured it,” according to one letter signed by Noel, demanding that police preserve evidence of such substances.

One resident of the building called the allegations outrageous. “I’m absolutely speechless,” said Derek Brown, who was living one floor below the attorneys at the time of the attack. “Every time they [the dogs]

have crossed my path, they’ve gone berserk and lunged at me, trying to take a chunk out of me.”

The five-week trial riveted the country, as prosecutors described the horrific attack in which Whipple was bitten all over her body, her throat ripped and her clothes torn off. The jury of seven men and five O B J E C T I O N !

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women saw graphic photos of the victim’s ravaged body. There were deep wounds visible from her ankles to her face. Pictures of the bloodstained hallway where the attack occurred depicted the horror Whipple must have felt as she fought for her life. Despite all that, Noel continued his contentions in a separate nineteen-page letter to the district attorney. The defendant placed the blame for the death squarely on the victim. It began, he said, when the victim, standing outside her own door, stared at Bane. Knoller told Whipple, who was uninjured at that point, not to move. Knoller crawled out on her knees with the dog behind. But Whipple did not stay inside, Noel said. “Marjorie has no idea why Ms. Whipple, rather than remaining in her apartment and closing the door, came out into the hall and toward Marjorie and Bane,” wrote Noel. The defendants went on to write with some levity, in another letter not to the district attorney, that Ms. Whipple was “acting very macho, when in fact she lives in fear of the dog.”