Battle Over Use of Simpson Trial Photos, Round 2

Every picture tells a story . . . Stormy skies at KCAL . . . An actor says a wall’s in his space.

Former prosecutor Marcia Clark and two retired Los Angeles Police Department investigators say they were legally entitled to use crime scene and autopsy photos in books they wrote about the O.J. Simpson murder trial because the pictures belong to the public.

Attorneys for Clark and retired homicide Dets. Tom Lange and Philip L. Vannatter argued in court papers that they are protected by the 1st Amendment’s free speech guarantee, even though Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito sealed the photos from public release during the trial. In case you missed it, the trial resulted in Simpson’s acquittal on charges that he murdered former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Attorneys Wayne M. Barsky and Timothy L. Alger are asking Superior Court Judge Alan Buckner to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Laguna Beach attorney Merritt Lori McKeon. A hearing is set for next month.

An author and advocate for battered women, McKeon sued Clark last year on behalf of “the People of the State of California,” alleging that she had no right to publish the graphic photos. McKeon later included Lange and Vannatter in her suit. She alleges that Clark and the detectives sold the photographs as part of their story about the failed prosecution of the former football hero.

Clark, who was paid a reported $4.2 million for her book, has since left the district attorney’s office and is now a TV legal analyst. Lange and Vannatter have retired from the LAPD.

YOU OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES: Photographer David Goldman thought he had snagged the opportunity of a lifetime when he was asked last year to be first assistant to uber-photographer Annie Leibovitz.

After all, her photos of celebrities in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair made her a celebrity in her own right, and one of the most powerful people in photography.

But as Goldman sat in his living room in Los Angeles, ready to load his packed belongings into a U-Haul for the move to New York, he received a call from Leibovitz. He says she told him she had changed her mind about hiring him. It turns out, Goldman alleges in his Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, that Leibovitz had been interviewing other candidates all along. If anything, he was the backup, Goldman says.

“Plying him with promises of world travel, instant credibility in the photographic community [and] a guaranteed two-year contract as her first assistant . . . Leibovitz induced Goldman to give up his apartment in Los Angeles, throw away his photography career in California and secure an apartment in New York,” the suit states. He seeks $2 million in damages.

A call to Leibovitz’s studios in New York for a response was not returned.

EL NINO ON BOARD: Dianne Barone loves talking about the weather. For seven years, she made a career out of it as the daytime weather reporter for KCAL-TV Channel 9. Then she became pregnant. For that, she says, KCAL hazed her, then fired her during maternity leave.

Within a week of announcing her pregnancy, Barone contends in her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, she was ordered to deliver the 2 p.m. weather report from the station’s roof during El Nino’s worst. To get to her perch, Barone, who is 39, had to walk up “more than 50 dangerously steep stairs” and push open a heavy fire door, she alleged.

Ten days before she was to return from maternity leave, Barone says, KCAL fired her. Barone is a meteorologist and has won several Golden Mike awards, but according to her court papers those credentials mattered little in the plans of the station’s new owner to “transform its female reporting staff to fit a ‘young and sexy’ stereotype.” Young Broadcasting Co. bought the station from Disney in November 1996.

Barone charges that women at KCAL are held back by management’s “unfounded and erroneous belief that women who became pregnant would not appeal to viewers.” A call to KCAL’s legal department was not returned.

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: Good walls don’t always make good neighbors, even in Brentwood. Consider the lawsuit filed recently in Superior Court in Santa Monica by actor Conrad Bain and his wife, Monica, who say the neighbors built a stone wall 32 feet onto their property.

“The Bains did not consent to the encroachment,” states the suit, which asks the court to order Eugene and Patty Shales to dismantle the offending wall. The Bains also object to a tall “metal cylinder” erected last year on the Shales’ land, which abuts their property.

The Shales could not be reached for comment, and it was not clear from the court papers whether this cylinder, which is taller than the roof line, might be a silo or a work of art.

Bain, who most recently has been active in local theater productions, played wealthy father figure Phil Drummond for eight years on the sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes.” Before that, he starred on “Maude.”