Eastwood Denies Fraud in Film Deal for Former Lover

The courtroom battle between co-stars and former lovers Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke heated up Tuesday in Burbank as the previously laconic Eastwood grew animated on the witness stand, denying that he used his clout with Warner Bros. to sink Locke’s budding director’s career after their bitter breakup in 1989.

The messy split saddened him, Eastwood said, and Locke’s decision to slap him with a palimony suit and talk to the tabloids disappointed him. But, he testified, he has never deliberately put someone out of work and he never would have schemed to harm Locke, his companion for 14 years.

“I never intended to defraud anyone,” Eastwood testified. “I didn’t discourage them from making movies with Sondra Locke.”

Eastwood told the jury that the palimony suit and resultant publicity felt at the time like Locke and her lawyers “were holding a gun to my head.”

During her testimony last week, Locke placed Eastwood at the center of a story of Hollywood money, power and duplicity.

She alleged that Eastwood tricked her into dropping her palimony suit by dangling a three-year, $1.5-million development deal to direct at Warner Bros. She got an office on the studio lot and a parking place with her name on it, according to testimony, but she didn’t make any movies. She pitched more than 30 projects, and the studio passed on all of them.

Both sides agree that Eastwood never told Locke he had guaranteed to cover the studio’s costs if Locke didn’t make money for the studio. But the parties applied a different spin to Eastwood’s nondisclosure.

Locke and her lawyer, Peggy Garrity, allege that Eastwood was being deceitful and that she never would have accepted a deal financed by Eastwood because it sent a message to the studio and film industry that she wasn’t to be taken seriously.

But Eastwood testified Tuesday that he agreed to underwrite Locke’s development deal as the “icing on the cake” to convince studio Chairman Terry Semel to accept it.

While the 66-year-old actor testified in his own defense Tuesday, Eastwood’s curt demeanor differed from the previous day, when Garrity had called him as her final witness in a civil case in which Locke seeks damages in excess of $2 million.

Also on Tuesday, a state appellate court overturned Superior Court Judge David M. Schacter’s ruling excluding the public and media from all court proceedings held outside the jury’s presence at the civil trial.

The state Court of Appeal ruled that orders to exclude the media and public from civil trials should be the exception, not the norm.

Schacter last week had ordered reporters to wait outside while attorneys argued over evidence and other matters, noting that the jury was not sequestered and that he wanted to prevent them from hearing about evidence that might not be presented to them.

Several news organizations, including The Times, appealed Schacter’s order.

A three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeal ruled that Schacter had not sufficiently exhausted other remedies before excluding the media.