CBS Draws Fire for Airing Clips of Rapist’s Videos

CBS aired an excerpt Wednesday night of videotapes that convicted rapist Andrew Luster made of his sexual encounters with drugged victims, provoking anger from victims’ families and fueling the latest debate over the ethics and legality of increasingly coarse prime-time TV programs.

The broadcast came as the networks’ sweeps season, which ends Wednesday, is building to a salacious, true-crime flourish. Critics say the networks are engaging in a feeding frenzy for celebrity-based crime stories at a time when the news divisions’ energies are needed for the possibility of war in the Persian Gulf.

In addition to the Luster broadcast on “48 Hours Investigates,” television has been awash in Michael Jackson’s exploits. And next week, ABC’s jailhouse interview with murder suspect Robert Blake is scheduled to air opposite CBS’ exclusive with “Preppy Murderer” Robert Chambers.

CBS’ decision to air excerpts of Luster’s tapes angered relatives of some of his victims. Two victims cooperated with the broadcast but were unaware that the network had copies of the tapes.

“I think it is appalling,” said the mother of one victim who cooperated. The mother spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid identifying her daughter.

“These girls have been through enough. If [the news crew] honestly found these tapes, they should have turned them over to the district attorney’s office and not used them for their TV ratings.”

Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of “48 Hours,” acknowledged that the Luster tapes are graphic but insisted that the network is being “extremely judicious in what we are showing,” focusing not on the women’s faces or sex acts but on what Luster is saying.

“We were extremely conscious of the privacy issues involved and have taken great pains not to show anything that would embarrass any of the girls,” said Betsy West, CBS News’ senior vice president of prime time.

West added that despite the pressure of February sweeps, “We would never do anything to compromise our journalistic integrity.”

The show included a tape of Luster sitting on a bed with a woman lying behind him, facing away from the camera. As the tape continues, Luster stands up and leans over the bed, touching the back of the girl’s upper leg and pulling up her skirt. The clip ends in mid-motion.

“I dream about this. A strawberry blond, beautiful girl passed out on my bed and basically there to do whatever I choose,” Luster says on the tape.

Luster, the great-grandson of cosmetics magnate Max Factor, videotaped himself raping, fondling and in one case sodomizing unconscious women at his beach home in Mussel Shoals in 1996 and 1997. Detectives found the tapes during a search of the house in July 2000 after a UC Santa Barbara student reported that he had raped her there. He asserted that the women had all agreed to have sex with him and be recorded.

He was convicted last month on 86 criminal counts after fleeing on $1-million bail during a trial recess and was sentenced Tuesday to 124 years in prison. He remains a fugitive.

The tapes, which were used as evidence in his trial, were restricted from public viewing by a court order. After Luster fled, they were apparently obtained by his mother, who passed them to CBS. But how Luster had them in his possession remains unclear.

Asked how the network justified using footage shot by a convicted rapist, Zirinsky said, “We obtained footage that was used in a court trial. Andrew Luster claimed that it was consensual; they had done drugs together. The minor amount of tape we use ... [was] to illustrate him and the truthfulness of what he is claiming.”

Network news divisions have always sought to boost ratings during sweeps, the key four-week windows in February, May and November that stations rely upon to negotiate advertising rates.

News executives said they accept the demands sweeps place upon them, understanding that they need to serve the broader needs of the network’s schedule.

NBC News President Neal Shapiro said this month’s influx of the famous and notorious is “more just a confluence of a lot of big ‘gets’ to get. They happened to fall in this time period. A couple of months ago, there weren’t any; it’s not that we stopped going after them.”

The competition for major “gets” -- exclusive interviews with elusive newsmakers -- has nevertheless produced plenty of finger-pointing among the networks.

NBC and ABC insiders say Chambers was demanding conditions they refused to meet -- asking for restrictions on the questions that could be asked as well as trying to limit any interviews with the family of victim Jennifer Levin.

He also asked for a private jet to take him and his family to the interview, and wanted the interview done “live to tape,” or not edited, which tends to give an interview subject more control.

At CBS, Zirinsky said that “the people we interview never control the content of our interviews.... There was no question we didn’t ask in this interview, no stone unturned.” She added that she has not felt any pressure to do anything that violates her standards.

Still, Cinny Kennard, a onetime CBS News correspondent who is an assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, contends that there has been a slide in news quality, driven in part by the fact that networks are part of huge media conglomerates that see news, in essence, not as a public trust but rather just another consumer product.

“If you look at any of these stories, the celebrity news person goes and gets the star interview,” she said. “It’s cheap and it’s easy” -- especially relative to more complicated issues, such as health care or education, which “are much more important than Michael Jackson and the way he behaves with his kids.... It’s a continuing decline of what a news division is supposed to be.”

Networks generally do not reap immediate financial benefits from heightened news ratings, given that blocks of commercial time are customarily sold to major sponsors over several nights and broadcasts.

If the networks don’t cash in directly, however, they do own large groups of television stations that function as enormous profit centers.

Those stations use data culled from sweeps -- particularly regarding young-adult viewers, which are available on a local basis only during those key months -- as currency with media buyers.

In addition to the debate over the ethics of sweeps season, there is also a question of how Luster’s tapes came into public view.

The tapes were sealed in July 2001 by Ventura County Superior Court Judge James Cloninger, who wrote, “No one else in the world has any legitimate need to see them” other than prosecutors, defense attorneys and the jury.

Last month, Luster’s mother, Liz Luster, apparently found a box of about 40 videotapes while cleaning out her son’s house.

She allowed the crew of “48 Hours Investigates” to view the tapes and make copies, but was unaware of their contents, defense attorney Kiana Sloan-Hillier said. The program interviewed Luster before he fled.

“Liz had no idea what these were,” Sloan-Hillier said Wednesday. “She was horrified when I told her.”

The tapes bore labels indicating that they were materials turned over to the defense as part of the discovery process before trial, Sloan-Hillier said.

She said neither she nor lead defense attorney Roger Diamond gave their client the tapes, and speculated that Luster may have taken a bag containing the materials from an anteroom at the courthouse where the defense team met and kept its evidence during the trial.

“My understanding of the protective order was that Andrew was not supposed to have the tapes,” Sloan-Hillier said.

“I have no personal knowledge of how Andrew got the tapes. I feel awful that this happened.”

Five defense attorneys and an investigator worked on Luster’s case at various times, and each could have had copies of the tapes without violating the judicial order.

Sloan-Hillier said she has possession of the box of tapes and plans to turn them over to the court to be destroyed. “I am protecting them with my life,” she said. “As a woman and a mother, I totally appreciate [the rape victims’] concerns.”

Ventura County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox said she may ask Superior Court Judge Ken Riley to consider holding Luster’s defense lawyers in contempt.

As for CBS, Fox said she is taking producers at their word that the network will not air sexually explicit footage. She has asked them to destroy the tapes afterward.

Legal experts agreed the victims would probably not have the ability to sue over the use of the tapes. The broadcast took care to ensure that the women could not be identified. Because the tapes were shown in open court and the victims testified, “there’s no basis for bringing an invasion of privacy suit,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of constitutional law at USC.

Fox added that she does not believe she had any legal recourse to prevent the network from showing the tapes based on the way the reporters acquired them.

“Cloninger’s court order sets up the parameters under which we could operate, but CBS isn’t a party to that order,” the prosecutor said.

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Times staff writers Geoffrey Mohan and Henry Weinstein and special correspondent Elizabeth Levin contributed to this report.