Killer in the Courtroom

Here's A mind game for Menendez watchers of all stripes and convictions: Start by thinking back to last winter's trial (rather than forward to the new one that will start soon, or the one after that, in which the horror of parricide may finally be leavened by the pathos of mid-life crisis). Next, clear the courtroom of all but the most vivid, compelling characters. Who remains? Perhaps Lyle, whispering the first details of abuse. Perhaps Erik, sobbing and scrunch-faced. Conceivably deputy district attorney Pamela Bozanich, deriding the proceedings as a cheap version of Divorce Court, or Judge Stanley Weisberg, chewing them over like a hunk of persimmon that he's bitten off and can't spit out. But surely, unavoidably, the spotlight of recollection shines on Leslie Abramson, the dominatrix-like prosecutor who wears her hair in a frizzy nimbus and her heart on her lips.

Prosecutor? That's right, in every way but the titular. When the trial began, the groundlessly self-assured Bozanich may have seen Abramson simply as Erik's lead defense attorney, a woman who, like Lyle's chief counsel, Jill Lansing, was highly regarded by her peers but doomed to defend an indefensible client. Yet Abramson quickly stole Bozanich's thunder, and Lansing's spotlight, by prosecuting the putative victims, Jose and Kitty Menendez, for crimes of malparenting that amounted to attempted pubescide and adolescicide.

Never mind that Jose and Kitty were dead, and dead under circumstances that might have struck some jurors as unseemly. Abramson went after her client's departed parents with the same mixture of wrath, scorn and moral outrage that she visited on Bozanich, the prosecutor representing the people of California; on Weisberg, the beleaguered judge; and on a string of cringing, befuddled witnesses. This was not the first time. In a 1988 trial in Los Angeles that foreshadowed the Menendez case in both circumstances and strategy, Abramson's client was Arnel Salvatierra, a 17-year-old who stood accused of murdering his father while the man slept. She prosecuted the dead parent for child abuse with such pitiless energy that the son got off with voluntary manslaughter. The judge, who placed Salvatierra on probation, said admiringly after the trial that Abramson's closing argument "made you want to go out and dig up that father and hang him."

The Menendez trial was Abramson's moment, and she seized it by the throat, by the balls, by any appendage, appurtenance or extremity that she could twist to the advantage of her client and, by extension, of herself. She flirted with contempt by taunting the judge, whom she obviously viewed as a sorry excuse for a Solomon. When he warned her to watch her mouth, she rolled her eyes and shook her head. She romanced a robotic camera, strutted her 4'11" stuff like some Madonna of Court TV (or, in the words of New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor, "the Bette Midler of the criminal courtroom") and gave great sound bites in the corridors. In the course of four grueling years on the case, she graduated from being Leslie Abramson, the first-rate criminal attorney she'd been for a decade, to the nation's most notable trial lawyer and a certified celebrity named Leslie. ABC hired her as an on-air legal expert during the O.J. Simpson preliminary hearing, giving her another nightly shot of fame. Now she plans to write a book, thinks about hosting her own talk show, tries out prolix versions of that show at dinner parties across the land and will soon be up to her old tricks, and some new ones, when the hitherto luckless People seek, yet again, to convict her client and his brother.

Leslie Abramson's newfound fame owes a lot to her client's address. If Erik and Lyle had been (continued on page 134) Leslie Abramson (continued from page 114) poor white trash from Elm Street in Podunk, TV would never have given them or their lawyers a glass-eyed glance. But rich kids from Elm Drive in Beverly Hills meant big bucks for broadcasters, plus a circulation bonanza for the supermarket tabloids, as well as for such publications as People magazine. The brothers were cast as fallen princes, while Abramson came on like Princess Leia, the spunky little heroine who stands up to the toughest customers in the cosmos.

In the process, Jm Lansing was case as the Invisible Woman. Combative Lawyer Leslie Abramson Fights to Save Erik and Lyle Menendez trumpeted the headline of People's simplistic profile. Nowhere did the piece mention Lansing, let alone give her credit as Abramson's equal in fashioning the brothers' defense. (Which was far from revolutionary, despite the furor over the relevance of child abuse. Given the fact that the boys had killed their parents, Abramson and Lansing began, as any competent lawyers would have, by looking at the relationship between killers and victims. Then they made the same decision that Abramson had made in the Salvatierra case: to go with a variation of the increasingly familiar battered woman defense. Lyle and Erik, they contended, killed out of a fear of their parents that justified finding the brothers guilty of manslaughter rather than murder.)

After the stunning outcome--two hung juries--reporters noted that Abramson, unlike Lansing, had split her jurors sharply on gender lines, with most women voting for manslaughter and the men for first- and second-degree murder. Indeed, her jury's deliberations were exceptionally rancorous, with the men shouting at the women for being blinded by their emotions, and the women denouncing the men for sexism and homophobia. But anyone carrying the analysis a step further would have observed that Abramson, with a more sympathetic and demonstrably less culpable client--Erik's big brother admitted to firing shots at close range--had done no better than Lansing. In fact, she didn't do as well when it came to individual jurors' votes for specific degrees of guilt.

If this selective star treatment was unfair, it was also inevitable. In court and out, Lansing's demeanor was calm and carefully nuanced--Dominick Dunne described her, in Vanity Fair, as having the elegance of Grace Kelly--though she also achieved eloquence and power when the occasion demanded it. By contast, Abramson brought to the courtroom, and to press conferences, the ferocious energy, riveting anger and plain old star quality of a consummate performer--Dunne and others drew the obvious parallel to Barbra Streisand. That meant nolo contendere in the fame game; a Barbra will upstage a Grace every time.

Yet Abramson's success in the courtroom, like Streisand's virtuosity onstage, owes little or nothing to the trappings of conventional celebrity. Her reputation, as distinct from her newfound fame, rests on her brilliance as a trial lawyer. In the 15 capital cases she has tried, only one of her clients has gone to death row. "I've seen a lot of lawyers in the 24 years I've been on the bench," says Los Angeles Superior Court Judge George Trammel, before whom the now-50-year-old Abramson successfully defended a security guard accused of rape and murder, "and I would certainly rate Leslie as one of the best from the standpoint of jury persuasion and her ability to represent her client. I don't know that I would ever look to anyone and say that they're the best, but she's right at the top of the list."

The same verdict is rendered by her adversaries, or those she sees as her enemies because they aren't her friends. One prominent name on her enemies list is Alan Dershowitz, a media star in his own right who has publicly denounced the so-called abuse excuse that proved so effective in the Menendez case. "Alan Dershowitz is jealous of me," Abramson reportedly announced with characteristic modesty at a social gathering in Los Angeles earlier this year, "because now I'm the most famous Jewish lawyer." But Dershowitz, denying jealousy and improbably claiming ignorance of Abramson's Jewishness, says he thinks she's terrific.

"I have only the highest praise for anybody who could pull off a hung jury in that case. What I have contempt for is the abuse-excuse defense, and I'm writing a book that uses Menendez as a paradigm of a situation where it shouldn't be allowed. But if I were in her place and if my client told me what I assume her client told her, I would have used the same defense, and probably not as successfully. You know, people used to go up to my mother on the street and say, 'I still think Claus von Bulow is guilty,' and she'd tell them, 'Well, that makes my son an even better lawyer.' I know the Menendez brothers are guilty, and that makes Leslie Abramson an even better lawyer. But someone should tell her she's not the most famous Jewish lawyer, or even the most famous woman lawyer. That title goes to Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

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Everyone who followed the Menedez trial on TV has a favorite Abramson moment. For some it was when Judge Weisberg, whom Abramson refers to among friends as Judge Iceberg, tried fruitlessly to stop her from mugging for the jury and the audience. "Are you inviting the court to find you in contempt?" he asked. "Because you are indicating that you are going to do contemptuous things."

"No, no," Abramson replied wearily but loftily, like Joan of Arc about to be singed by a gas log. "I'm only saying there's so much unfairness one can bear."

For others it was her cross-examination of Grant Walker, a painfully nervous, weirdly prissy pool repairman who testified for the prosecution about an argument between the boys and their parents shortly before the killings. Lyle, Walker claimed, had said a particularly vulgar thing.

"What vulgar thing did Lyle say?" asked Abramson, deadpan.

"Different words," Walker replied petulantly. "I don't choose to say them."

"Well, I'm asking you to say them."

"I'm just uncomfortable." Walker turned from Abramson, who was superbly comfortable, and appealed silently to the judge for help. The judge urged him to say the words.

"Fuck, and words similar to that."

Abramson's comfort level climbed another notch. "Is there a word similar to fuck?"

"Yes, there is."

"And they said fuck and they said shit," Abramson ventured briskly, dismissively.

"Yes."

"And you had never heard a teenage boy say fuck and shit before?"

"Yes, I have," replied the pool man. "But not to his parents."

Then there was the moment, at the start of an astonishing three-day (continued on page 159) Leslie Abramson(continued from page 134) closing argument, when Abramson walked up to a corkboard, took a box of tacks and stuck them, one by one, into a porn-tinged photo that Jose Menendez had taken of his naked younger son.

"You heard about some of the things he liked to do to his little boy," Abramson told the jury. "One of them was to stick tacks like this into his thighs and his butt and to run pins across his penis." At that moment, above all others, the trashy conventions of tabloid television intersected with Abramson's naked, righteous wrath.

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To find the wellsprings of that wrath, one must go back to Leslie Abramson's childhood in New York City. Born in 1943, she was the second of three children in a complicated family. Her father was out of the home, for the most part, after she was six. "No one," she has said, "would have accused me of being a happy child." (During the Menendez trial her mother died and she reconnected with her father after 34 years.) Although most of her extended family in Russia died in the Holocaust, she knew and took inspiration from her immigrant grandmother, Fanny Kaprow. A left-wing organizer for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Kaprow was, by Abramson's account, a willful, stubborn woman who believed in women making their own way.

Growing up poor in a Queens apartment, Leslie dreamed of making her way as a ballerina, an actress, an FBI agent and a fighter pilot in the Israeli army. But her childhood was also marked by a preoccupation that one psychologist later labeled a pattern of victimization. It's easy to see such a pattern emerging from what she heard in her home about the horrors of the gas chambers. This is a connection she willingly draws, and one that allows her to see her clients as victims. (For Abramson, observes Charles Lindner, a former president of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Association, "'gas chamber' does not mean San Quentin, it means Auschwitz.") But this pattern, with its resulting anger, could just as plausibly have been set by her fatherless upbringing. That connection would make her feel herself to be a victim, and it's one she doesn't discuss, at least not in public.

Abramson married a young pharmacist while still enrolled in Queens College, where she majored in medieval history and was captain of the cheerleading team. Soon after graduation she and her husband moved to Los Angeles, where, in 1965, she gave birth to a daughter, Laine, now an aspiring filmmaker who lives in San Francisco. The following year she entered UCLA School of Law, after which she divorced her husband and joined the Los Angeles public defender's office, in 1969. Seven years later she went into private practice. At first she thought she would handle divorce cases, but the pettiness of many litigants didn't fill her needs. "For Leslie," a colleague says, "life must be high drama, and if it isn't she creates it."

The California state legislature helped create it for her in 1977, when it voted to reinstate the death penalty. Suddenly Abramson found her métier, saving people from the gas chamber, and she has pursued it with furious energy. Her clients have included Dr. Khalid Parwez, a Pakistan-born gynecologist accused of strangling his son and cutting his body into more than 200 pieces (acquitted); Peter Chan, a 29-year-old Chinese immigrant involved in a Los Angeles China-town jewelry store robbery that left one police officer and two of the robbers dead (convicted of second-degree murder, which does not carry the threat of capital punishment); and Ricardo Sanders, one of two men whose robbery of a Bob's Big Boy restaurant ended with a hideously brutal series of killings (her only client on death row).

"All of my life, to me the greatest evil in the world was overreaching government," she told Maria Shriver on TV, "not what individuals do or can't do. I mean, I was raised on the Holocaust, and it imprinted in me forever the notion that things are truly horrible, and not the way God meant them to be, when governments and their power are out of control. So I defend individuals when government has turned the full force of its power on them. I understand that in this society there's this jumping up and down about crime, but not everybody who's accused of a crime is guilty."

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Force of nature that she is, Abramson doesn't defy description so much as she incites it. Consider Dominick Dunne's use of f-words to describe her: "flamboyant, feisty, formidable, fascinating and, occasionally, very funny. She is also, occasionally, truly frightening." (Abramson returned the compliment by calling him "that hack-romance-novelist prick," a tribute that, to his eternal credit, he reprinted in one of his Menendez pieces.) But she has definitely defeated efforts to capture her essence on TV, and no wonder; her emotions are scaled to grand opera, not movies of the week.

Margaret Whitton, the actress who played Abramson in the CBS version of the story, was forced to soften her subject's hard edges, to make her furtively likable, when the most likable thing about Abramson in court is her manifest indifference to being liked. Susan Blakely, the Leslie of the quickie version that the Fox network put on the air 30 seconds after the trial ended, had to cope with an underwritten script and little time to prepare a performance. "What I basically used," Blakely recalls, "was her superior, almost condescending attitude. More anger would have been great, but they gave all the biting legal jargon to the prosecutor. If you looked at our movie it was tough to see why Leslie did as well as she did."

More anger would always be great for the part of Leslie Abramson, though anger alone doesn't explain why she does well, in court or in life. An indispensable element of her success is her belief in her inalienable right to express herself fully and instantaneously, which means giving vent to love, hate, generosity, indulgence, annoyance, impatience, approval, disapproval, pleasure or any other feeling, consistent or contradictory, that happens to rise up in her gorge and demand equal time.

In the matter of Jerome Oziel, the Menendez brothers' Beverly Hills psychotherapist whose court appearance helped to broaden the definition of that job category, Abramson spat out to a television interviewer: "The notion of that man dicking with the lives of other people is so offensive, it's so wrong. God, I hope they get his license." Possibly afraid that she had not made her point with sufficient clarity, she added: "He's the sociopath of the case. He's the clear-cut sociopath. He's the worst." Asked at another moment for her assessment of the prosecutors, she replied: "You want my interpretation? They are outclassed, outmaneuvered and outlawyered." The truth is she was right.

"She says any damned thing she pleases," observes someone who knows her well. "Her words seem uncensored by any worries about decorum. She feels entitled to look you in the eye and say, 'I'm pissed off at you,' and to come back the next day and say, 'I really like your shoes.' She'll hurt people horribly and then expect that they'll like her, and often they do, because there's something special about her. It's all real. All her contradictions are real. There isn't a dishonest bone in her body. It's real when she tells you she thinks you're wonderful, and real when she says she can't stand being around you."

Someone else who knows her well, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, has seen her anger leveled at others but never at him. "It's hard to explain friendship," says Dunne, "but we clicked almost immediately when we met back in the Seventies, and we've been friends ever since." One threat to that friendship was a tough-talking left-wing lawyer named Leah who lit up Dunne's 1987 novel The Red White and Blue. Leah was based on Abramson, though also on Dunne's wife, the writer Joan Didion, and on Nora Ephron. "Leslie detested the character and said so," Dunne recalls, "but it never caused a ripple in our friendship."

More recently the friendship came under pressure from the several public savagings that Abramson has suffered at the hands of Dunne's brother Dominick. Here again though, John, Joan, Abramson and her genially scholarly second husband, Tim Rutten, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, have remained close. "Tim is as smart as anyone I've ever known," John Dunne says, "and Leslie is wonderfully smart too. That's what people sometimes forget. She's really good, which is why a tiny Jewish girl from New York could go to Los Angeles, become a lawyer, then a public defender and then become what she's become. You know, it's been said that she has destroyed more careers in the district attorney's office than booze."

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Wherever Leslie Abramson goes, tongues wag. People talk about her Jaguar and her diamond ring as if such amenities should be anadhema to a defender of the downtrodden. Perpetually on a diet, she urges everyone around her to indulge, and glows with pleasure when they turn out to be good eaters. Protective of her privacy when she isn't courting the media, she once repelled a TV cameraman--and won an unsolicited moment on-screen--by giving him the finger outside a Beverly Hills courtroom.

Three decades ago, when her daughter was born, Abramson's maternal instinct ran into stiff competition with the demands of law school, followed by a rigorous rite of passage in the public defender's office. Last year, with that instinct rekindled, or unabated, she and Rutten adopted a baby boy. The depth of her feeling about mid-life motherhood can be inferred from her uncharacteristic reluctance to discuss it in public. But the adoption took place during the Menendez trial, when another facet of her maternal instinct was on display for all the world to see.

This was her ostentatious and widely criticized mothering of her client in the courtroom. At studiously unguarded moments during the trial, the camera, like the jurors and the judge, would catch her caressing Erik's head, resting her hand on his back and picking lint or pills from his sweater.

Sometimes Abramson's urge to mother is indistinguishable from her urge to control. Sometimes it's benign and endearing. Stefani Sherwin, who filled in for a month as court clerk in the Menendez trial and who remembers her warmly as "one smart cookie," says Abramson took a dim view of Sherwin's blondishred hair (possibly because that meant there were two blondes in the TV picture). "She wanted me to meet her on a Saturday to go do something about it. But I liked the color of my hair, and I opted to keep it."

Shortly after her jury hung, Abramson gave an elaborate dinner party at her home for those she infelicitously dubbed "my jurors"--four of the women who had voted for manslaughter as opposed to first-degree murder, and two sympathetic alternates, one man and one woman. First Abramson took her jurors on a tour of the house and showed them her new baby. Next, her husband, an accomplished cook, prepared the dinner. Then Rutten took his leave so that his wife and her jurors could dish about the case and take turns talking with Erik, who called in from the county jail like some matinee idol who's filming abroad on Oscar night.

As soon as news of the dinner party got out, Abramson was portrayed in the press as a Svengali bent on adding sympathetic jurors to her collection of jewels. This perception was hardly dispelled when she continued to socialize with several of the women who had voted her way--the media referred to them as "Leslie's girls"--and to call the shots on which television shows they should or shouldn't appear on.

In defense of her dinner, Abramson has characterized it as a debriefing in a social setting. Lawyers always try to pick jurors' brains about which elements of their strategy worked well or badly, and she was facing the near certainty of a second trial. The female jurors, for their part, see the flap over their relationship with Abramson as unfair to her, and to themselves.

"We got slammed so often in the media for voting the way we did," says Tracy Miller, a bookstore clerk. "They called our half of the jury 'Erik's women,' as if Leslie told us how to vote and that's the way we voted." An ebullient, dark-skinned woman of 27 who describes herself as a "Judeo-Christian-Hungarian-African American"--she has a Jewish grandmother--Miller makes no apologies for her feelings about Abramson. "I didn't see anything wrong with a strong attorney mothering her client, and she's a great attorney. I told her after the trial that she was so good I worshiped her. She told me I shouldn't worship anybody, that no one was better than me.

"I've seen her several times since the trial, and yes, she picks lint off me too. She's always giving me advice. When I told her I'd found this really great dance club, she said dance clubs are dangerous and I should stay home instead of staying out so late. She's always at me about something. But we didn't vote the way we voted because she looked at us a lot, or because we were suckered by a strong woman making strong statements. All the grandstanding in the world isn't worth a thing if you can't prove a witness right or wrong. We voted because the prosecution couldn't prove its case."

Since Abramson neither picked off lint nor picked up votes from her male jurors, it's tempting to conclude that she antagonized the men to at least the same degree as she inspired the women. Even if that's true, though, none of the men will cop to it. Admitting they had been antagonized would be tantamount to admitting they had been intimidated, and what might that say about their cojones?

What's more, justice is supposed to be blind. If we're willing to believe that the women voted on the merits of the case, we must extend the same courtesy, or benefit of the doubt, to the men. That's not quite the position taken by one of the male jurors, a letter carrier named Robert Rakestraw. "I feel she had a great effect on the women," he says, "but none whatsoever on the men." All the same, he gives Abramson at least one backhanded compliment--"she was a master at turning things around"--and several forehanded ones. "She did a fantastic job, really. She was brilliant. She was the star of the show."

Another male juror, Richard Sartain, says he was "surprised at how abrasive she got," especially in her arguments with the judge. "I expected him to hold her in contempt and maybe throw her in jail overnight, and maybe he should have. But her tactics worked." For the women, he means. Like Rakestraw, Sartain, a retired Navy sonar technician, insists that Abramson's performance had no effect on his vote. "She made some mistakes, but the prosecution's mistakes were bigger. The women just beat us to death in the jury room over the fact that the prosecution didn't put on any expert witnesses to rebut hers."

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Abramson is often abrasive, sometimes shockingly so, and her behavior sometimes creates serious problems. Defense attorneys are, after all, officers of the court, and they can't be allowed to trash an already tarnished judicial process.

"From a judge's standpoint," says George Trammel, the Superior Court judge who presided over the case of the security guard accused of rape and murder, "Leslie is a pain in the rear end. As I listened to and read about the problems Stan Weisberg was having with her, they were exactly the same ones I had. Frankly, I don't look forward to having her in my courtroom because of those things. Stan was almost constantly battling for control of the trial, and I found that to be true as well.

"When push would come to shove, I'd have to talk to her out of the presence of the jury and say, 'Leslie'--not Ms. Abramson but Leslie--'this has gone far enough. I've admonished you ten times now and I'm serious, one more time and I'm going to find you in contempt.' Then she'd back off for a while. She's not one to have total contempt for a judge.

"Despite all that, there's something about Leslie. I can't say that in any way, shape or form I dislike her. She's dynamic in argument, she's an advocate. As a lawyer myself I'm very proud of her abilities."

Still, there may be a problem in logic here. If Abramson's brilliant theatrics in the Menendez case didn't blind the women to the facts, and if her shameless theatrics didn't sway the men, then what did she do?

The simple answer is that she got a hung jury by hook or by crook, and spared her client from you know what. Exactly how she managed to do it can never be known, since jurors themselves never know exactly what they respond to in the course of a complex trial, let alone a festival of media furies in which Croesus and Oedipus interact.

In the larger context of Abramson's career, what she has done is work a long string of miracles by keeping the reality of her situation firmly in mind--people are going to kill her client unless she stops them--and acting on this reality with all the intelligence and passion at her command. That's what every topnotch trial lawyer does in capital cases; it's what Jill Lansing did, in her own style and to equal effect, on Lyle's behalf. But Abramson's style is like no one else's.

"She's willing to break the conventions and accept the consequences with no complaints," Lansing says. "She stands up to authority figures. People who'd like to stand up to the IRS or their landlord or some department store clerk who's too superior to wait on them can live vicariously through her. Most of us hold back in some way, most of us hedge, most of us look for a way to save our dignity if we lose, but Leslie is willing to risk all. There's never an apology, never a look back. She goes out there with guns blazing."

"She came on like Princess Leia, the heroine who stands up to the toughest customers in the cosmos."

"When California reinstated the death penalty, she found her métier, saving people from the gas chamber."