Facing the Court of Public Opinion

When the bright, unforgiving glare of the media fell on attorney Leslie Abramson, she received a painful lesson about the difference between the law and L.A. law.

Regular law is what she used to practice, before the Menendez trial made her famous, before “Nightline” and her book contract. Now, Abramson is caught up in L.A. law, where celebrity is more important than the statutes and stardom descends on a few, magnifying their successes and failures all out of proportion.

“What I would really like to do,” she told me Thursday, “is become completely invisible for the rest of my life because I don’t find celebrity very much fun. But, you know, I have to make a living, somehow.”

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We chatted in her office on the ninth floor of a Mid-Wilshire office building. Abramson has been a friend since long before she was famous, as is her husband, Tim Rutten, a Times colleague.

I was there because her current scrape was a hot story on the part of my beat that involves commenting on the uncomfortable relationship between the media and the legal system. In the final days of the Menendez trial, Erik Menendez’s psychiatrist, Dr. William Vicary, testified that he rewrote a portion of notes he took while treating the young man. He said he did this at the request of Abramson, who he said told him the “material was prejudicial, and it was out of bounds and it was not necessary.”

When asked about the allegations in court, Abramson invoked her 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Her attorney, Dennis Fisher, had warned her she would take a “big hit” in the press by seeking the protection of an amendment that, in the public’s mind, is usually associated with mobsters and, in the old days, with accused Communists.

She withdrew her request for protection during the next court session, but it wasn’t soon enough to stop the media from jumping on a story with a sure-fire, simple point: “Famed Attorney Takes the 5th.”

“I didn’t know how big a hit it was,” Abramson said. “I know it must have been really bad. I was getting phone calls from people I haven’t heard from for 20 years wanting to know if I was OK. So I assured them the cops were not at the door.

“That’s what told me it must have really been bad. I didn’t think I would hear people talking about ruin. How disgusting. How stupid.”

Without the 5th Amendment angle, the story wouldn’t have been so hot. But with the 5th, it exploded. The approach was a simplistic way of dealing with a complex legal situation and a complicated person.

Abramson is known as an uncompromising lawyer who fights fiercely for her clients, many of whom tend to be the kind of people the public hates. No matter how awful they are, she publicly takes the view they are entitled to a defense and are of value to society.

When she represented an especially cruel killer earlier in her career, a friend said, “I don’t mind her defending the triggerman in the Bob’s Big Boy massacre, but she doesn’t have to make him sound like one of the Scottsboro Boys.” The Scottsboro Boys were poor black defendants falsely accused of raping two white women, an epic case in civil rights history.

It’s surprising to meet her relaxing at home on a rare weekend when she is not working. There, if nobody brings up one of her cases, she is a warm and friendly hostess and mom who enjoys her family and her home. This is the other Leslie.

She’s tangled in a legal controversy that involves a complex area of the law--the prosecution’s right to discover, or have access to, the defense’s material.

Abramson told me that it was within the law and professional ethics for her to ask Vicary to make revisions to his notes to clarify them. Vicary, she said, had told her the notes did not accurately reflect his conversations with Eric Menendez. “I don’t think anyone will say that asking someone to clarify their notes is, in any way, shape or form, improper,” she said. “You can’t go up there with sloppy work.”

But the chief public defender of San Francisco, Jeff Brown, said the law requires the defense to turn over the original, unchanged notes. “Under the discovery laws, you have to turn over all the statements of the psychiatrist,” he said. “The great consensus of opinion is that if you have an expert, the prosecution gets to see the report and the notes.”

But even if Abramson violated a regulation or law, the offense is not major, said Terry Kay Diggs, an attorney and a professor at the University of California’s Hastings School of Law in San Francisco.

If she did it, Diggs said, “it is a discovery violation. It is not treason. It is not baby rape.” Other lawyers view it as a more serious matter.

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It is likely that the issue will come up before the State Bar. It would then be up to its judges to decide Abramson’s fate.

If this were just law, that would be the end of it.

But this is L.A. law, post O.J., where celebrity reigns, a world that Abramson probably never imagined when she began work in the Los Angeles County public defender’s office many years ago.

For most of that time, she disdained publicity and treated most reporters with scorn.

“I have always felt that publicity and exposure to these cases and scrutiny is bad,” she said. “Not because we are trying to hide anything but because it is too complicated to report accurately.”

But after Menendez, she joined the media hoard she scorned as an O.J. Simpson trial commentator on ABC’s “Nightline”

She said that reinforced her view that the press has trouble with complexities. Abramson fears this as she begins a series of interviews to rehabilitate herself in the public’s eyes. “I have a great interest in restoring my reputation because my family depends on me,” she said.

But it won’t be easy. “I’m no Shirley Temple,” she said. “Everyone won’t love me.”

That may be too complicated for the media-dominated world of L.A. law, where you’re either a hero or a bum.