Celebrity trials: Juicy distraction in serious times

As October drifts toward the delights of Halloween, baseball fans can focus on the World Series. Celebrity-watchers have the Winona Ryder trial. They can’t count on a regular season of play, but such trials are a major spectator sport nonetheless.

Press interest in the Ryder case was so feverish in its early stages that the defendant’s right elbow was fractured outside a hearing on June 3, when a cameraman accidentally bopped her with his video gear. L.A. County Superior Court received requests for courtroom seats from 31 media outlets, including a German news agency and the BBC.

Angels fans follow deconstructions of the sniper hunt and still root for their team. Curiosity about a celebrity in trouble may be diminished right now, but everyone needs a little distraction, which is what celebrity trials provide. In the year of O.J., no one in L.A. was strapped for conversation. The Simpson trial was a reliable topic, about which everyone had an opinion. It might have been a “Who cares,” the feeling that too much attention was paid. Yet celebrity trials have become so much a part of our public discourse that they’ve taken on a Zen aspect: To not have a position on them is to have a position.

They are as polarizing as ketchup on cottage cheese. Henry Schleiff, chairman and chief executive of Court TV, says, “Each trial is a small soap opera. Our viewers either love the plaintiff or love their lawyers or hate the defendant or the defendant’s lawyers. People feel passionate, one way or the other.”

Does a celebrity get a better or worse day in court than an anonymous defendant? The consensus among experienced trial watchers is that Ryder, facing three felony counts, has been overcharged. Dan Abrams, NBC’s chief legal correspondent and host of “The Abrams Report” on MSNBC, has, for the last 10 years, covered every major celebrity trial. “The prosecutors sometimes do come down harder on celebrities,” he says. “They deny it, but they do. There is no question that Winona Ryder is being treated more harshly than an everyday [alleged] shoplifter. I’m surprised the case hasn’t pled out, and that it’s being treated as a felony. Prosecutors try to send a message to the community with high-profile cases. They want that person standing in the department store considering whether to stick a sweater under their shirt to think: If even Winona Ryder was treated so seriously, what would happen to me?”

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, says, “This case has been handled like any other case of its type.”

Whether justice is served depends on juries as well as prosecutors. For good or ill, juries share history with celebrities. Over time, they come to believe they know things about people they’ve never met. Tom Hanks is a nice guy. Elizabeth Hurley is a diva. Such judgments might be based on reports of off-camera behavior. More often, an image results from the successful presentation of a carefully crafted persona, or the confusion of a role with the person paid to play it.

“Depending on who they are, celebrities will often get a presumption of innocence that defendant X, Y or Z doesn’t get,” Abrams says. “Jurors don’t want to believe that a celebrity they like committed a crime. If a celebrity has a bad reputation, that can hurt them with juries too.”

Only in Los Angeles can celebrities really get juries of their peers. Producer Peter Guber was in the courthouse Thursday on jury duty and was called as part of the Ryder panel. Wearing a Mandalay Pictures polo shirt and denim carpenter pants, he said to a packed elevator, “I have about as much chance of getting on this jury as the man in the moon. I only made three pictures with the lady.”

Celebrity trials can create their own celebrities, who become heroes or villains. (Either can get book contracts and wind up with their own talk shows.) Linda Deutsch, the dean of trial reporters and the legal affairs correspondent for Associated Press, says, “The prosecutor in the Manson trial capitalized on it. The Sam Sheppard trial set the stage for F. Lee Bailey’s career. Jury consultants have made their mark more recently. The talking heads, experts and commentators were all a product of the O.J. Simpson case.”

When Ryder appeared in court this week, the proceedings weren’t much more compelling than watching corn flakes get soggy. On Thursday, about 50 members of the media were exiled to the hallway outside the courtroom. Late in the afternoon, reporters were allowed in, and they listened to Judge Elden Fox’s instructions to prospective jurors. Yet the digest of events presented that evening on Entertainment Tonight/Access Hollywood/E! News Daily, etc., acquired a slickly packaged gloss. Audiences used to fast-paced episodes of “Law & Order” expect no less. “Fictional courtroom dramas are a highlights reel of a process that is slow and complex,” Schleiff says. “The wheels of justice move slowly. Reality doesn’t take place in 30 minutes.”

The star of the latest real courtroom drama, doe-eyed and waif-like, fits no one’s idea of a public enemy. She even starred in “The Age of Innocence,” playing, incidentally, an ingenue as dumb as a fox. The fact that she had prescription painkillers in her purse when she sashayed around Saks in Beverly Hills probably helped her case. Fans would rather see her as stoned, or confused by debilitating pain than soberly in the wrong.

Accusing Ryder of shoplifting is akin to busting Hugh Grant for employing a hooker. It’s wicked fun to talk about these cases in which no one was killed, no great tragedy occurred. Both incidents are embarrassing and titillating, but the future of the republic hardly rests on their prosecution. Sure, sure, “shrinkage,” the retail industry’s euphemism for theft, is a big problem that law-abiding consumers ultimately pay for. But in an overtaxed criminal justice system, the question of how resources should be allocated looms. It costs $9,459 a day to run a criminal trial, according to a Superior Court spokesperson.

It is possible to see cases that fall into the category of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s cop-slapping trial as ultimately pretty harmless, in part because fans and especially Hollywood have historically been forgiving. Director Roman Polanski, who fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to one count of having sex with a minor, became neither a personal nor a professional pariah. Robert Downey Jr. received enough votes from his peers for an Emmy nomination after repeated arrests for possessing drugs. Tolerance for overweight and aging can be harder to come by, but celebrities have redeemed themselves from almost everything short of cannibalism.

“Of course, we don’t know if Winona is guilty,” says KTLA Morning News producer Marcia Brandwynne, “but people are interested in cases like hers because they wonder about what would make a person so unhappy that they would behave self-destructively, when they seem to have riches and fame, everything most Americans dream about. Those questions won’t be answered till she goes on Barbara Walters.”

Gossip is our universal language, the mother tongue. What better to yak about than the foibles of the stars? Celebrity courtroom dramas are a preferred amusement in an era when schadenfreude, an obscure German term describing the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others, has found a place in the American lexicon. Proof that the mighty have, if not fallen, then at least slipped, is both an antidote to and a byproduct of envy. The stars we sometimes worship are beautiful, wealthy, famous and talented, but they aren’t happy, are they? What a satisfying thought. Or at least it used to be.

Humorist Christopher Buckley’s new comic novel, “No Way to Treat a First Lady,” (Random House, 2002) concerns the Trial of the Millennium, wherein the first lady is accused of murdering the philanderer in chief by beaning him with a silver Paul Revere spittoon. Buckley admits to having been completely caught up in the Simpson trial. “Anything that tells us about our national psyche, as these trials do, is ripe for satire,” he says. “These things become absurdist pageants, where all our venalities are on display. I don’t know if Winona Ryder is a nice person or not, but I feel sorry for her. I can’t even work up any enthusiasm about enjoying the Martha Stewart spectacle. I’m not suggesting we start a prayer vigil or light candles for them, but I’m losing a bit of the old piss and vinegar. I’m not enjoying their pain.”

At the end of the day, all these trials are rather sad. Someone got hurt or a reputation is wounded. The chestnut that no publicity is bad just isn’t true. Anyone would want to be remembered for her good work, not for personal screw-ups. How many of those dishing Ryder bought tickets to her last few movies? The irony is that if she had a dollar for every person gossiping about her legal troubles, she could, well, go shopping.