Palimony Trial Concludes With Show-Biz Touch : Courts: The attorney for the Mudd estate presents her ‘Top Ten’ reasons for rejecting the case. The opposing lawyer decries the tactic.

A titillating trial closed with a show-biz touch Thursday when an attorney arguing against a woman who wants $4.2 million in palimony from her late lover’s fortune unveiled “The Top Ten Reasons Why Lorraine Oliver Should Get Nothing From Henry T. Mudd’s Estate.”

“When I was younger, before this trial started, I used to stay up and watch David Letterman do the Top Ten charts because they were pretty funny,” Jamie Broder, an attorney for Mudd’s estate, told a Superior Court jury.

“I don’t think these are funny.”

Neither did Oliver’s attorney, celebrity palimony lawyer Marvin Mitchelson.

Mitchelson--arguing that Mudd broke a contract to give Oliver lifelong support and rights to live rent-free in a $600,000 Studio City house--countered Broder’s points and decried the way they were presented.

“This is not the David Letterman show,” Mitchelson said, his face flushed with emotion and his voice rising. “This is not the Johnny Carson show. And these are not the Ten Commandments.”

The attorneys’ closing arguments capped a three-week trial that has attracted international interest in the palimony case that Eleanor (Lorraine) Oliver brought against Mudd, the co-founder of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont. The trial has been covered by much of the tabloid-type news media and has attracted lawyers from other courtrooms and other spectators eager to hear the details of Mudd’s unusual sex life.

Testimony has revealed that Mudd at times had seven mistresses at once, lavishing the women with luxuries and paying some of them monthly allowances. His estate provided lifelong trust funds for some--but not Oliver.

Oliver, 41, contends she and Mudd had an unwritten contract during their 13-year relationship that she would provide marriage-like companionship. In return, she says, Mudd set up trusts to support her after his death and allow her to remain in the hillside house.

She contends that Mudd reneged on the contract after he married another mistress in 1990, broke up with Oliver and revoked the trusts. After Mudd died a few months later of complications of leukemia, executors for his estate said Oliver owed back rent and evicted her from the house.

The executors--Mudd’s widow Vanessa, his accountant Seymour Bond and First Interstate Bank--deny a contract existed. The three parties, who became the defendants in the palimony suit after Mudd’s death, say there are a number of reasons why Oliver deserves no money.

On Thursday, their attorney used a 3-by-4-foot chart to expound on “The Top Ten,” removing strips of black cardboard to reveal the points as she argued them one by one. “The No. 10 reason why Lorraine Oliver should take no money from Henry Mudd is Henry Mudd is entitled to leave his money and property to whomever he chooses,” Broder said.

She said Mudd set up money trusts to support the women after his death, but reserved the right to revoke most of them at any time. He did so with Oliver’s trusts, Broder said.

Broder said that Oliver and Mudd’s union was hardly marriage-like, arguing that Oliver was married to another man for nine of the 13 years she was seeing Mudd, that Oliver and Mudd never lived together and that Oliver was only one of several Mudd mistresses.

She said that Oliver and Mudd’s relationship was based primarily on sex and cautioned the jury that a sex-for-pay contract is illegal. During the time Oliver saw Mudd, Broder said, she was well-compensated.

“From 1986 to 1990, Henry Mudd paid Lorraine Oliver between $8,000 and $8,400 a month for spending one afternoon and one night a week . . .,” Broder said. “That is a very handsome salary for a part-time job.”

Broder argued that it was Oliver who ended the relationship with Mudd by hiring Mitchelson and threatening to sue the multimillionaire. But, the No. 1 reason she deserves no money, Broder said, was that Oliver was not a friend to Mudd at the time of his death. “Friends don’t sue their friends,” she said.

Mitchelson rebutted Broder’s arguments, pointing his finger at the jury and saying, “I don’t need those fancy charts.”

“I urge you on bended knee to treat this woman like Henry Mudd treated every other woman in his life and make him keep his promises,” Mitchelson said.

Mitchelson stressed that there was a contract between Oliver and Mudd and that their relationship went far beyond sex. Indeed, when Oliver stopped having sex with Mudd for two years so she could improve her marriage and have children with her husband, Mudd continued to give her support money, Mitchelson said.

Mudd was a good but autocratic man who told the mistresses “when to jump and how high to jump,” Mitchelson said. In 1990, Mudd breached his contract with Oliver by telling her after an argument “let’s get a divorce” and effectively ending their relationship, Mitchelson said. It was only then, Mitchelson said, that Oliver consulted an attorney.

Mitchelson asked the jury to award Oliver more than $4 million--a figure arrived at by computing the $8,400 a month Oliver says Mudd promised her for the duration of her life expectancy. He also asked them to award Oliver unspecified damages for emotional distress and to find that Mudd breached a contract to provide Oliver with a house for life.

“You may sit there and think, ‘Should someone get this kind of money for seeing someone two or three times a week? . . .Isn’t that a little too much? Don’t you really resent it?’ ” Mitchelson said.

But, he said: “If it was good enough for Henry, it’s good enough for you.”