Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System

by Nancy Grace

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  by a cyclist. She was lying on her back with her legs spread. Her neck bore wounds indicating she was strangled to death. Levin also had bruises and bite marks suggesting she’d tried to fight back against her attacker.

  The morning police were called to the scene, a crowd had gathered and stood at a nearby wall. One witness, real estate broker Susan Bird, noticed a young man with “a nice face” among the onlookers.

  The next time Bird saw the man, it was when his photograph appeared in the papers in connection with the case. That man was Robert Chambers.

  Nineteen-year-old Chambers was dubbed the “Preppy Killer” because of his deceptively clean-cut looks and Upper East Side address.

  Once Chambers was charged with murder, his defense attorney, Jack Litman, based his defense on the hateful strategy that pitted the “party girl” Levin, who got what she asked for, against a handsome preppy who was simply defending himself from her sexual demands. It worked.

  The jury was deadlocked on the murder charge. Chambers pled guilty to manslaughter. He got fifteen years.

  Chambers walked free from New York’s Auburn Prison on February 14, 2003. He was scheduled for an even earlier release, but a long series of violations and infractions behind bars added several years to his release date. The Associated Press reported that between July 1988

  and June 1997, Chambers was docked seventy-five months of good time due to multiple violations of prison rules. Now that he is free, Chambers isn’t even under parole supervision. In the eyes of the law, he has paid his debt in full for the brutal choking of Jennifer Levin. As predicted by prosecutors, Robert Chambers was back in trouble with the law in no time following his release for the death of Jennifer Levin. On November 24, 2004, Chambers was arraigned on two misdemeanors—

  drug possession and driving with a suspended license. Chambers, naturally, claimed he had nothing to do with the crime and that he was once again a victim of circumstances.

  Chambers’s release is not the only disturbing aspect of the trial.

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  The long-term legacy of the so-called Preppy Murder is that it was the first highly publicized case where the victim was crucified to save the killer. The treatment of Levin by Chambers’s defense team, as well as by the media, was disgraceful. That’s the only word for it. Levin’s murder “entertained” New York City like no other. The reports of the killing in Central Park mesmerized the public with stories of

  “rough sex” and allegations of a promiscuous lifestyle among the city’s wealthy and pampered teens. The public frenzy was fueled by tabloids that ran headlines like JEN’S SEX DIARY, SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, KINKY SEX, EARLY DEATH, and HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH. For two years, those headlines, and others like them, seeped into the jury pool.

  The headlines somehow made these sleazy versions of Levin’s death official. All the nasty innuendo by the defense was given the stamp of believability simply because the papers reported it. Day in and day out, it was reported that Jennifer had caused her own murder.

  The seed was planted that a young girl who drinks in a bar with a man late at night and leaves with him deserves whatever she gets.

  By the time the trial began, defense attorney Litman’s venomous attack on Levin was going full speed, and the blame-the-victim defense was firmly established. Levin was trashed before the jury and in the media and portrayed as a drunken, promiscuous brat. Six-foot-four-inch Chambers claimed Levin, at five foot three inches and 120

  pounds, attacked him and roughed him up during sexual play outdoors in the chilly air behind Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He stated in a confession to police that he’d choked her to death in self-defense. The media devoured the story.

  During the trial, Chambers was routinely described as “handsome,” “promising,” and headed for an exciting future, except for that pesky speed bump of a murder trial. Even the media’s labeling of the case as the “Preppy Murder” was misleading. The dark side of Chambers’s personality, which included extensive drug abuse and a criminal history of burglary and theft, never came out at trial. Chambers O B J E C T I O N !

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  was not a preppy. He’d been thrown out of college. His entire scholastic record was one of failure and disappointment. After his poor performance in prep school, his mother somehow got him into Boston University, but there again his own behavior got him into trouble. Even before his second semester kicked off, Chambers was asked to leave the college over an issue with a stolen credit card. Alcohol and drugs eventually landed Chambers at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota.

  There were many stomach-churning moments during the trial, but one stands out in my memory to this day. A home video shot by a friend that wound up on a tabloid television program showed a downright scary Chambers smirking and ripping the head off a female doll, then turning to the camera, flashing a big smile, and saying, “Oops! I think I killed it.”

  Chambers has never shown remorse publicly. At one of his parole hearings he said, “I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again, but that’s not how I feel at the moment.” That says it all. Chambers is free, and Jennifer is dead and buried, leaving behind her devastated family and a tattered reputation. Her mother still grieves. As we’ve seen in the Bryant case, the Preppy Murder’s legacy of the blame-the-victim defense is alive and well and living in America’s courts.

  T H E C E N T R A L P A R K J O G G E R

  In her 2003 autobiography, I Am the Central Park Jogger, Trisha Meili wrote, “Shortly after 9 P.M. on April 19, 1989, a young woman, out for her run in New York’s Central Park, was bludgeoned, raped, sodomized, and beaten so savagely that doctors despaired for her life and a horrified nation cried out in pain and outrage.” New York City, and the world, reeled in shock as facts emerged surrounding the brutal gang rape of a woman who’d been left for dead and became known for years only as “the Central Park Jogger.”

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  N A N C Y G R A C E

  The 1989 trial made it clear that many of those in power were not interested in pursuing the prevention of violence against women. The victim’s reputation was beyond reproach. She was a successful investment banker. She’s wasn’t a drug addict, she was an executive who worked long hours every day. She was monogamous with one boyfriend.

  She was a fitness fanatic who worked out by running religiously. None of that mattered—she was still to blame.

  There are over two hundred rapes a day in this country—a fact that was rarely discussed in the press during the weeks and months following Meili’s attack and then at trial. These women are victims. Instead of recognizing Meili as part of that group, the defense in the case sent a chilling message to independent women everywhere by casting blame on the investment banker herself. “What was she doing in the park?”

  they asked. “Didn’t she know that a woman shouldn’t be on the street after dark? Didn’t she in some way ‘ask for it’?” Other attacks labeled her a workaholic, an anorexic, and a control freak who thought she owned the park. I found this absolutely outrageous. When the traditional attacks on rape victims didn’t work in this case, the defense dug deep to find a whole new way to crucify a rape victim. None of their slurs were true.

  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 l
ooked 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.

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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 a
cquitted 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.

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  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