The Steal (21 page)

Rundle argued that Ryder volunteered her confession, including the bits about the movie, and therefore did not need to be Mirandized. She further noted that Ryder had signed a civil demand confession, which begins with the phrase “I, Winona Ryder, agree that I have stolen . . .” But, Geragos countered, although his client may or may not have confessed, in the holding room, the male security guards asked her to “lift up” her shirt, he said. “And my skirt,” Ryder added helpfully from her seat.

Judge Fox ruled that Ryder’s alleged lines about doing research for a role could stay but suppressed the confession.

Besides Peter Guber, a movie executive whose studio had produced several of Ryder’s films, the jury included a legal secretary who worked at Sony and a program developer for television. A representative of the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California filed a motion to unseal the records the judge had sealed, which inspired Mark Geragos to say, “My client’s right to have a fair trial on the evidence that is admissible in court greatly overwhelms the
L.A. Times
. . . desire to report on this shoplifting trial as opposed to the war in Iraq.”

Ann Rundle presented Ryder’s case as one of “a simple theft,” and Geragos claimed that Saks had fabricated evidence. Ryder never testified. She wore one designer outfit after another, representing “the woman wronged,” as Geragos would later call her.

Of the six witnesses Ann Rundle called, five were Saks security guards. The first, Ken Evans, introduced the jury to the “researching a role” story. Evans spent two days delivering a rambling narrative about Ryder’s hour and a half in the store, beginning with an account of every item she shoplifted. He tracked her on several of Saks’s sixty cameras. He began early on, when she was still on the first floor in the accessories area, he said, displaying an impressive command of haute couture.

In his cross-examination, Geragos’s characterization of Evans’s overzealousness could neither erase the “researching a role” story nor the damning testimony of other Saks employees. Shirley Warren, a “Donna Karan specialist,” saw Ryder’s finger bleeding and got her a Band-Aid. “She just appeared to be a little nervous.” A salesperson from the third floor testified that she saw Ryder holding the very garments that the prosecution now presented as evidence, except that now they had holes in them, ostensibly from where the movie star cut out the security tags.

It was Colleen Rainey who first saw with her own eyes a shoplifter cutting the tags off a Natori handbag and a Dolce & Gabbana handbag and failing to cut tags off several other handbags. And it was Rainey who first realized that the shoplifter was Winona Ryder. This epiphany occurred when Rainey stood outside the fitting room. Peering through the slats, she watched Ryder kneeling on the floor and stuffing hats, socks, and hair bands into one of her bags. Rainey could detect the star reflected in the mirror on the wall opposite the door. She whispered to the saleswoman that it was Ryder and returned to her post.

Throughout the trial, Geragos tried to spin his client’s silence to his advantage by asking witnesses whether anyone had touched her, thrown anything at her, called her names, asked her for movie premiere tickets or phone numbers, and otherwise making it look as though she was a victim. But in the end, the prosecutor won points with her nononsense approach. Trying to get Ryder’s signed confession admitted into evidence, Rundle responded tartly to the defense attorney’s assertions that store employees had invented it—made up, indeed, every single thing that happened in the holding room that pointed to her guilt. “Why would they need to go back and change their story to make up evidence against the defendant to prove that she did it when in fact, from the very day on December 12, 2001, they had her signed statement?”

Saks had bullied his client into signing, the defense attorney replied. And there was another thing that made Saks seem like a bully: Although she allegedly shoplifted $5,500 worth of clothing, Ryder, Geragos claimed, gave Saks an imprint of her credit card when she bought a pair of shoes that day. Saks acknowledged that Ryder did pay for the shoes, a leather bomber jacket, and two shirts—worth around $3,000—but denied that any tab was started or that there was any arrangement between the star and the store.

So Geragos lost points here just as he did in another key battle. In early October, a few weeks before the trial began, he gave the prosecutor a sworn statement signed by one Dr. Jules Lusman, asserting that the doctor had provided Ryder (under the name Emily Thompson) with Oxycodone. The intention of this was to defuse one of the counts against Ryder—felony drug possession—because she had been carrying Oxycodone the day she shoplifted. The judge agreed.

It was not until sentencing that a report of the other drugs Ryder was carrying (liquid Demerol, liquid diazepam, Vicoprofen, Vicodin, Percodan, Valium, morphine sulfate, and Endocet) became part of the public record. A Medical Board of California report posted on the Smoking Gun website described Ryder as visiting Lusman a week before the alleged shoplifting. In November, Rundle petitioned Judge Fox to suppress Lusman’s statement, likely because if the jury knew that Ryder was in pain, or addicted to drugs, it might sway them to acquit. If there was even one person on the jury who had taken a painkiller, the result might be a hung jury or worse.

SA044291 was ultimately a trial about a celebrity shoplifting designer clothing, and journalists shifted from analyzing the witnesses’ testimony to deconstructing Ryder’s sartorial taste and demeanor in the courtroom. “This is not a film performance that is going to garner Winona Ryder any Oscar nominations,” one article began.
Slate’
s Dahlia Lithwick called Ryder “Felony Barbie.” According to some fashion writers, Ryder looked “splendid” in the courtroom, but because she chose to wear Marc Jacobs in court—Jacobs, among the designers whose clothing she had allegedly shoplifted—others thought that she was sneering at the proceedings. They also criticized her “demure” attire, including one dress with a faux collar and matching black Mary Jane shoes, a ladylike yellow dress, a black cardigan, a preppy hair band. She was trying too hard to play an innocent person, the logic went.

Geragos used Ryder’s style to argue that someone who dressed so well in court—who was herself wealthy—wouldn’t shoplift. He held up an Yves Saint Laurent blouse with holes in it from where the security tags had been ripped out to argue that his client could not possibly wear damaged merchandise. But the repetition of the most expensive items on Ryder’s designer shoplifting list—including a Marc Jacobs creamcolored thermal top ($760), a Natori handbag ($540), an Eric Javits hat ($220), the white, sleeveless Yves Saint Laurent blouse ($750), and a pair of Donna Karan tan cashmere socks ($80)—inflamed public opinion against Ryder. The full list of the items in the exhibits submitted by the prosecution, which included a turquoise bag, a beret, a Calvin Klein purse, a black beaded purse, a purse with flowers, a headband, a ponytail holder, a hair clip, a rhinestone hair bow, two pairs of gray Calvin Klein socks and one pair of purple Calvin Klein socks, one pair of brown DKNY socks, “handled” scissors, and sensor tags “with fabric attached,” was exhaustive in its evocation of waste and luxury.

In her closing argument, Rundle turned her adversary’s contentions about Hollywood on their head. “We’ve presented the truth; they’ve presented a story that could only be written in Hollywood.” She listed her “top ten of what the law does not say” about shoplifting, including “only poor people steal.” She alluded to a scene in
Girl, Interrupted
in which Ryder’s character, crouched in a dingy basement, whimpers, “Have you ever stolen something when you had the cash to pay for it?” as if life imitated art. “She came, she stole, she left.”

On November 7, 2002, after a day and a half of consideration, the jury declared Ryder guilty of grand theft and vandalism. In California, grand theft is shoplifting whose dollar value is more than $400. Vandalism and trespassing are lesser charges aimed to prevent shoplifters from returning to the stores they’ve stolen from. But the jury ruled Ryder not guilty on the most serious charge, second-degree commercial burglary, in which a person enters a store with the intent to steal.

A month later, at sentencing, Judge Fox gave Ryder 480 hours of community service, five years’ probation, and drug counseling—more or less standard for first-time shoplifting offenders. Once Ryder completed that sentence, he would reduce her charge to a misdemeanor.

In the fashion world, the crime raised Ryder’s status. Marc Jacobs hired her to represent his spring collection. The hyperreal images from German photographer Juergen Teller’s ad campaign are all staged in a brightly lit hotel room. In one, Ryder, grimacing, perches on an armchair, wearing a white terry-cloth robe and light-colored pumps. A Jacobs handbag rests at her feet. In another photo, a pair of scissors is placed on a nightstand. Ryder models a sweater next to a large bag full of clothing. Marc Jacobs president Robert Duffy told a London newspaper that the campaign would be “controversial but not in a negative way.” (A few years later, the Festival Market Mall in Pompano Beach, Florida, used the final minutes of the Saks surveillance video, when Ryder exits the store, along with the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free” in its ad. “Winona Knows. Why Pay Retail?” the caption reads.)

Not everyone found Ryder’s shoplifting amusing. In 2003, Woody Allen cast someone else in
Melinda and Melinda
after he failed to get insurance for Ryder. Five years later, after a series of lackluster roles, Ryder told
Vogue
that she had shoplifted because she was addicted to prescription drugs and because, being famous, she was allowed to take things out of stores without paying for them. She added that since she was iconic, she provided a distraction from 9/11. The following year, she divulged to British
Elle
that her family had shopped at the Salvation Army. New rumors about recent heists and new motives emerge every time she stars in a film.

Haute couture continues to use shoplifting as a sales tool. At Christmas of 2009, Karl Lagerfeld’s short video
Vol de Jour
appeared on Chanel News, an online magazine advertising the spring/summer 2010 collection. Dutch supermodel Lara Stone and French boy muse Baptiste Giabiconi zoom over cobblestoned Paris streets on a motorbike. The carefree beautiful people alight at several Chanel boutiques to shoplift. Accompanied by a spy movie soundtrack, they run through a dark hall, carrying the stolen clothes in a big white Chanel shopping bag. The leggy blonde’s stilettos clatter on the marble floor. At a second boutique, Stone grabs dresses and suits from the wall and drops them unceremoniously into the Chanel bag. The duo lopes by a salesclerk, stuffs the stolen goods in a car, and hops on their bike. In a final sequence, Stone tries on one slinky dress after another, tossing them to Giabiconi, who lets them fall into a bag. Again, the dresses wind up in the getaway car and the supermodels on their bike, leaving the non-fashionista viewer puzzled. In a world where haute couture is endangered, Lagerfeld treats supermodel shoplifting as an eccentricity, a taste to be indulged and a billboard for his own reinvention of the brand. Ordinary mortals need not apply.

 

 

At Ryder’s sentencing in 2003, the prosecution and the defense bickered over whether to burn or auction the allegedly shoplifted designer clothes. Geragos pointed out that they might fetch a good price on eBay and the profits could go to charity. A representative from Saks said, “Shoplifting is a serious crime” and told Judge Fox that the company lost $7 million the previous year because of shoplifting. “I certainly don’t want my children to think it’s not against the law to shoplift from Saks.”

Geragos decried Saks’s use of a “victim impact statement”—a tool that the state of California had designed for families of victims of violent crime—to bemoan the store’s woes. Profits were up, so for Saks to cast itself as victim was to make a mockery of real victims, he said, adding that Ryder had already been punished. “She will carry the scarlet letter S for shoplifter wherever she goes.”

In his sentencing statement Judge Fox asked the question judges have asked of wealthy shoplifters since the nineteenth century: “Why would Winona Ryder steal . . . when she has enough money to buy?”

But Ann Rundle complained that the presence of a real victim in the courtroom—Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, who had been murdered by a drifter in 1992—distracted the jury from the defendant’s alleged shoplifting. “What’s offensive to me is to trot out the body of a dead child,” she said.

Under the three-strikes laws the California legislature passed after the murder of Polly Klaas, shoplifters could be sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2002, there were about four thousand “three strikers” in prison in California for nonviolent offenses: Of these, 368 involved shoplifting. Although many states had passed three-strikes laws in the 1990s, California is the only one where the offender’s third strike can be a “wobbler”—a misdemeanor that can turn into a felony if the first two strikes are violent crimes, including robbery or burglary.

Two of these cases had just reached the Supreme Court. Leandro Andrade, a nine-year army veteran, father of three, and heroin addict, had been arrested in 1995 for shoplifting five children’s videotapes including
Batman Forever
and
Snow White
, worth a total of $84.70, from a Kmart in Ontario, California. He was arrested a second time for shoplifting four tapes worth $68.84 from a different Kmart, in Montclair, California. He had been arrested for burglaries in 1983. He either planned to give the videos to his nieces or resell them to buy drugs, depending on whom you believe. But none of his thefts added up to more than $150, and none of them were violent. The other defendant, Gary Ewing, a drug addict, shoplifted three golf clubs, a total of $1,200. He had many prior theft convictions, including one for robbery with a knife.