McDougal’s Embezzlement Trial Upstaged by Sideshow

It was another busy day in court for Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, and once again the sideshow at her Santa Monica embezzlement trial eclipsed the testimony for excitement value.

Cyber gossip Matt Drudge and conservative columnist Arianna Huffington dropped by to catch a few moments of testimony. The prosecutor asked the judge to order McDougal to stop calling Zubin Mehta’s daughter, but the judge responded that she had a right to seek out witnesses. And McDougal and her former friend and employer, Nancy Mehta, faced each other in court for a second day.

McDougal worked as an assistant to Mehta, wife of conductor Zubin Mehta, from 1989 to 1992--before she gained fame as the martyr who chose to spend 18 months in prison rather than tell a grand jury about President Clinton’s involvement in Whitewater, a 20-year-old failed Arkansas land deal.

She is accused of embezzling $150,000 from the Mehtas and with failing to file state tax returns in 1990, 1991 and 1992.

Mehta said she trusted McDougal “implicitly” and had no reason to suspect her until mid-1992. Mehta was in Italy and McDougal was in Texas when Mehta said she received a call from a fraud officer at a Wells Fargo bank who told her that signatures on some of her checks seemed to be forged.

When she returned home about three weeks later, she received a call from a fraud officer at another bank, seeking her permission to extend the credit limit on another credit card. She said she didn’t even know about the card, held in her name and McDougal’s.

She said she realized then that McDougal was stealing from her and ran to the bank branch as it was closing and pounded on the windows until she was admitted.

Mehta, a retired actress, gave a check-by-check and receipt-by-receipt recitation of what she did and didn’t authorize McDougal to purchase.

The entries ranged from $30 lunches to an $8,000 computer, a Swiss mattress to a Barbie doll.

No, Mehta testified, she did not buy a Barbie for her foster child, Darla Motley. “I didn’t permit her to have Barbie dolls,” she said disdainfully in her theatrical voice.

And, no, she never authorized medical or dental expenditures for McDougal, or hotel and other travel expenses. No, she said, she did not pay to fix the teeth of McDougal’s mother, or to put her up at a hotel in Los Angeles.

After the jury left the courtroom for a break, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey Semow said he had received a complaint from Zubin Mehta’s daughter, Alexendra Payne, who reported that McDougal had called her several times trying to persuade her to testify.

The prosecutor asked the judge to order McDougal to keep away from Payne.

Judge Leslie Light declined. “I have enough rocks to turn over in my own garden without getting into someone else’s,” he said, pointing out that McDougal, like all defendants, has a right to contact potential witnesses.

McDougal snubbed the columnist when they were introduced by defense attorney Mark Geragos during a court break. The introduction occurred at the request of Huffington, who has been critical of McDougal in her syndicated column.

McDougal took Huffington’s extended hand and said “Hello, thank you for coming.” Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving a stunned Huffington standing in a courthouse corridor with her hand extended.