The Steal

by Rachel Shteir

  The most far-reaching consequence was that after “The Bess Mess,” the media outed more celebrity shoplifters than they had in all the previous decades in the twentieth century. Some of these were celebrities’ children, but a surprising number were adults. An incomplete list includes pool shark Minnesota Fats, a Miss Minnesota, gymnast Olga Korbut, tennis player Jennifer Capriati, ex-spy Felix Bloch, ex-secretary of the army John Shannon, Felicidad Noriega, Noelle Bush, and Al Goldstein. Since 2002, the Internet aggregator Notable Names Database (NNDB) has included shoplifting as a celebrity category—a criminal best-dressed list. NNDB lists which celebrities have allegedly shoplifted, when, where, and whether they pleaded guilty. What’s next, a Hollywood map of which boutiques shoplifting stars have hit and a reality TV show about the crime?

  WINONA RYDER—CARRYING “THE SCARLET LETTER S FOR SHOPLIFTER WHEREVER SHE GOES”—AND INJUSTICE

  From the Gilded Age, when Emma Goldman and Mark Twain ridiculed the light punishment for kleptomaniacs in comparison with the severe penalties for starving single mothers, there has been in America the idea that treating rich shoplifters as sick, not criminal, reveals an ugly class bias. But in the 2000s, the contrast between how rich and poor shoplifters were sentenced was amplified: Now rich shoplifters became fashion icons, and poor ones were given life sentences. At Christmastime of 2001, the case of Winona Ryder, or SA044291, as it was later known in the Los Angeles Superior Court, redefined celebrity shoplifting. This trial, examining the relationship between fame and shoplifting, trivialized the crime. Another case—a Supreme Court case involving shoplifters serving life sentences under California’s three-strikes law—magnified the sense of a double standard.

  “Anywhere else, this petty crime by a first-time offender would have quickly ended with a plea bargain,” a New York Times editorial concluded during Ryder’s trial, deploring the municipal resources squandered on it, which by some accounts added up to hundreds of times the amount typically spent on a shoplifting offense. The Ryder trial also provided a poignant contrast between decades of glamorizing shoplifting on the screen and the real-life tawdry crime.

  On December 12, 2001, when the Beverly Hills police arrested Ryder for allegedly shoplifting just under $6,000 worth of designer clothing from Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard near Rodeo Drive, she was a thirty-year-old icon. Like many earlier celebrity shoplifters, Ryder had transcended her beginnings. She started out as Winona Laura Horowitz from Minnesota and later Northern California, daughter of the rare-book dealer Michael Horowitz and goddaughter of Timothy Leary. She began acting at age twelve. In the 1980s, she became one of the young actors known as the Brat Pack, starring in Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, Little Women, and The Age of Innocence. At twenty, the actress lauded for her portrayal of characters on the edge and for her brown eyes was briefly hospitalized for depression. In 1999, she played Susanna, a mentally ill young woman in the movie adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. In one scene, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) tells the Ryder character, “You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy.” That description hung over the proceedings.

  Right away, Ryder’s case raised questions. It is company policy for Saks to call the police in instances of felony shoplifting. But it was not long before the district attorney’s office began to pursue the case with more prosecutorial zeal than some observers thought it merited. “Money Talks, Celebrities Walk” was the campaign slogan that got Steve Cooley elected, referring to the previous administration’s lax handling of the O.J. Simpson case. But in the Ryder case, a blooper made Cooley’s ferocity look vindictive or worse. The day after Ryder was arrested, Lieutenant Gary Gilmond, the spokesperson for the Beverly Hills Police Department, read a statement at a press conference: “The security officers observed both visually and by video Ms. Ryder to remove Sensormatic tags . . . and place the items in a bag that she had, and then she was observed to leave the store without paying for the items.” Based on Gilmond’s statement, Sandi Gibbons, the media relations person for the district attorney’s office, wrote a press release asserting that “the actress was seen on the store security camera using a pair of scissors to cut security tags off the merchandise.”

  On March 12, 2002, still eight months before the trial, a Los Angeles Times reporter viewed the video and discovered that Ryder was not seen anywhere cutting off tags. In May, the star used it all performing the monologue on Saturday Night Live with Tracy Morgan, producer Lorne Michaels, and the rest of the cast.

  Ryder: “They set up security cameras because of me?”

  Morgan: “No! No! No! No!”

  After the two stars scrutinize the cast in their dressing rooms with the security cameras, Morgan says: “See? They watch everybody. Nobody thinks you’re gonna take anything.” A video of Ryder thanking Lorne Michaels for inviting her on the show the previous day extends the joke. After Ryder exits, the camera catches Michaels checking to see if he still has his wallet. In a later skit, “Winona Loves Mango,” Ryder, Chris Kattan, and Moby go shopping at Barneys. After all of them confess to having left their wallets at home, the two men stare meaningfully at Ryder. Kattan, who is struggling to hold the heaps of clothing he supposedly intends to purchase, recommends that they shoplift, and Ryder announces, “Stealing is wrong,” twisting her face into a wry grin. A security guard swoops in to detain Mango (Kattan), who goes to jail. But not before he vogues for his mug shots in the stolen merch, including a Marabou bed jacket. He even blows kisses at the camera. Later Ryder visits him in jail.

  The jokes at the expense of the district attorney—at anyone who dared accuse Ryder of shoplifting—continued. Over the summer, Y-Que, a T-shirt company whose name in Spanish means “So what?” printed “Free Winona” T-shirts, which quickly became hipster best sellers. In June, Ryder vamped on W magazine’s cover in one of the shirts, which, as Y-Que’s founder Billy Wyatt pointed out, “hit a Warhol level of parody.”

  In September, after negotiations over Ryder’s plea halted, National Review columnist Joel Mowbray defended her as a victim of big government run amok: “According to an NBC News study of L.A. County records, none of the other 5,000 people prosecuted for shoplifting in the last two years has been hit with such harsh charges—and in two specific cases in Beverly Hills where the alleged amount stolen exceeded that in Ryder’s case, both defendants pleaded out with misdemeanors—something that prosecutors have adamantly refused to do for the movie star.”

  Asked about Mowbray’s allegation, Sandi Gibbons wrote in an e-mail:

  Ms. Ryder was not prosecuted for shoplifting, which is a misdemeanor charge. She was prosecuted on felony charges of grand theft and vandalism. A Superior Court jury in Beverly Hills heard all the evidence at trial and convicted her of the charged felony crimes—grand theft and vandalism. Those charges were reduced to misdemeanors after she successfully completed her probationary sentence.

  Gibbons said that Ryder declined the attempts of the district attorney’s office to strike a plea bargain. It was speculated at the time that one reason Saks pursued the case so assiduously was that the star was unwilling to plead guilty even to a misdemeanor.

  The trial was not televised. The 1,019-page transcript begins on October 24, with a hearing. Before the attorneys presented their motions, Ryder asked, “Your Honor, may I approach the bench?”

  The court: “Not at this point.”

  The defendant: “Do you have a gavel? I’ve never seen a gavel.”

  The court: “No gavels.”

  The defendant: “A real one. Really?”

  The court: “Judges don’t use gavels—honest . . .”

  The defendant: “It’s only on TV?”

  The court: “The only gavel I have is a crystal gavel, and that was a gift. I’d never bang that.”

  A few pages later, Deputy District Attorney Ann Rundle raised the question of Ryder’s two prior alleged acts of shoplifting, which she characterized as a “scheme”—a seri
es of linked crimes. According to police records, Ryder shoplifted three times in 2000 and 2001—twice at Barneys New York in Beverly Hills—and a third time at nearby Neiman Marcus. Arguing that these alleged thefts should be inadmissible, Ryder’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, contended that the security guards’ search of Ryder’s purse for the scissors she supposedly used to snip the tags from the clothing was illegal, since only police officers could legally conduct searches. After listening to Rundle read from the transcript in which one of the security guards asked Ryder to hand over the scissors (she supposedly said, “I need those scissors,” and Ryder allegedly reached into her pocket and took them out), Judge Elden Fox ruled the scissors in.

  Geragos’s final attempt at suppression involved one of Ryder’s alleged explanations for her shoplifting. At the hearing, Ann Rundle, riffling through the pages of her transcript, summarized them:

  At one point she indicates that she was doing research for a role as a kleptomaniac. At one point she indicates that her director had told her to do this, that she was very sorry, that she wasn’t very good at it. One point she claims to have been doing research for a part in a movie called White Jazz and that at another point she indicates that she is researching a role in a movie, I believe, called Shop Girl, written by Steve Martin.

  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.