The go-to guy at Jackson trial

Here at the intersection of weird and weirder -- a.k.a. the People vs. Michael Jackson -- Peter Shaplen arrives for work in the courthouse parking lot each morning. That’s right: He is working in the parking lot. On the asphalt.

Shaplen, the son and grandson of distinguished journalists, is a former Bay Area television news director who is certainly accustomed to more comfortable accommodations. Here, on the windblown blacktop of the Santa Maria courthouse, though, he seems to have found something of a calling.

He is the media coordinator at the Jackson trial, a freelancer paid by a consortium of networks, funneling information and running interference between the courts, law enforcement agencies and scores of journalists, delicately maneuvering, making sure the media beast is sated each day while ensuring compliance with (or when necessary, battling) the sometimes rigid decorum orders of Judge Rodney S. Melville, in whose courtroom the case is being heard.

Shaplen performed the same task at the Scott Peterson murder trial, earning such high marks that he was called upon again for Jackson, almost immediately.

Others have done this work before. There was a media coordinator in the O.J. Simpson trial, and there was one -- a retired CBS technician -- for the Kobe Bryant case in Eagle, Colo. But no one has taken the job to this level -- helping negotiate the “media impact fee” required by the county of Santa Barbara, assigning courtroom seats for reporters and artists, helping a reporter on deadline recall an exact quote from the day’s testimony. “I think what makes Peter different is that it has gotten so complicated and he has been able to juggle everything from lost and found to helping shape media motions that go before the court,” says Jennifer Siebens, West Coast bureau chief for CBS and Shaplen’s de facto boss. “He handles editorial and logistical concerns. He is focused and he is very, very fair.” If Shaplen has alienated anyone along the way, they aren’t saying.

A veteran newsman, Shaplen is mindful of the paradox embodied in the daily ebb and flow of the latest celebrity criminal trial: the seamy particulars of the alleged crimes juxtaposed against the high-mindedness of the American judicial process. He is impatient with reporters from national news organizations who sometimes grumble about wasting their time here.

“I don’t think we can make this trial high justice,” Shaplen says. “It’s still a pedophilia case, which leaves you feeling just a little icky. But this county has spent 12 years in one fashion or another prosecuting this individual. This trial is costing taxpayers well into six figures ... the media’s contribution will be in the six figures. So excuse me, but if you don’t want to cover the story for the importance, or to illustrate the legal process, and almost the majesty of that, then maybe you’ve missed something.”

But Shaplen is not focused on those things, at least not at 7 on this chilly April morning. More immediate issues demand his attention. He must dole out the seven courtroom seats not already taken by local and national reporters, who have standing claim on 40 of 47 media seats. (Sheriff’s deputies hand out 45 public seats by lottery each morning at 6:30. A media overflow room nearby ensures that any reporter with a credential can cover the trial. Shaplen choreographs those passes in order to allow the maximum number of reporters into the courtroom.)

Before the day’s proceedings begin at 8:30 a.m. sharp, he will help a bewildered French television producer figure out how to apply for court credentials. After that, he’ll lend a semi-sympathetic ear to a local reporter whose credential has been yanked by bailiffs after he appeared to be chatting in court with Jackson’s brother, Tito, a violation of Judge Melville’s courtroom rules.

Later, he will welcome People magazine reporter Frank Swertlow, who is recovering from heart surgery, back into the fold. In the late afternoon, he’ll arrange what has become a Monday night tradition, a dinner of celebrity trial heavyweights that will include Swertlow, Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair, Roger Friedman of Fox.com, true crime author Aphrodite Jones, celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, and legal analysts Jim Moret of Inside Edition and Anne Bremner, a telegenic Seattle-based attorney.

Technically, Shaplen is the employee of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and Court TV, which pay his salary of $750 a day, plus expenses. In practice, however, he works for all the media, for the hundreds of reporters, photographers, producers, camera operators and legal analysts who have converged on Santa Maria for the trial, which has concluded its eighth week and is considered to be about half over. He spends a good deal of time billing news organizations for their shares of a “media impact fee” paid to Santa Barbara County. It started at $7,500 a day but has been reduced to $1,500 a day, since the anticipated crowds and congestion have not occurred. (TV networks who paid $325 a day now pay $45. Newspapers, such as The Times, started at $125 and now pay $14.)

“As a rule, in these big trials, you need somebody to coordinate between the media and the courts,” Siebens says.

Shaplen did so well at the Peterson trial in Redwood City, she says, that when the original media coordinator for the Jackson trial didn’t work out, she called him.

Peggy Thompson, executive officer of the San Mateo County Superior Court during the Peterson trial, worked closely with Shaplen. “In the end, largely due to Peter, it went as well as it could go,” she says. “He is an astounding fellow.” Shaplen, in fact, was the first media employee to learn that jurors had reached a verdict in the Peterson case, Thompson says. “The presiding judge trusted him; the trial judge trusted him.”

Chaos descends on town

At 6 feet 3, the 51-year-old Shaplen is easy to spot. He comfortably roams the courthouse complex with a two-way radio in his hand, sometimes in a floppy canvas hat. His “office,” carved out in a corner of the courthouse parking lot under a white canopy, seems in frequent danger of blowing away when the strong afternoon winds kick up. The married father of two grown children, he commutes here each week from Larkspur, just north of San Francisco, and stays at the Holiday Inn with much of the rest of the national press.

Shaplen, a graduate of Tufts, grew up in New York, where his father, Robert, was a Far East correspondent for the New Yorker, and his grandfather, Joseph, covered labor for the New York Times in the 1940s. Most of his career has been spent in television news; he once worked as a desk assistant for Walter Cronkite.

Shaplen was managing editor at San Francisco television station KRON and later spent three years as news director of ON24, an online company. As the principal of Peter Shaplen Productions (motto: Strategies for Successful Communications), his clients include business executives whose identities he declines to reveal. Whether his stint at the Peterson and Jackson trials turns into longer-term work depends on when and where the next monster trial happens. The media, he says, “would do their jobs well without me. I never lose sight of that. But I like to think that I make it better.”

For Darrel Parker, Santa Barbara County’s assistant trial courts executive officer, things definitely smoothed out when Shaplen hit town in late November. “When Peter was brought in,” says Parker, “I was cautiously optimistic.”

Parker had worked in Los Angeles Superior Court during the decade that brought Southern California the trials of O.J. Simpson, Heidi Fleiss and the police officers who were tried in the beating of Los Angeles driver Rodney G. King, and was not unfamiliar with the chaos that can descend when a criminal trial draws intense interest.

In Santa Maria, after consulting with his court administration counterpart on the Bryant case in Colorado and a book published by the National Center for State Courts called “Managing Notorious Trials,” Parker helped draft the decorum orders that govern the media’s behavior.

Although some in the media find the rules overly restrictive, Shaplen has helped educate the media about the court’s expectations. It hasn’t always been easy for either side.

“Media lives in swirl,” says Shaplen. “We love swirl. It’s what we do. Courts are all about process. And when swirl meets process, process recoils.” In Melville’s courtroom, process has recoiled to such an extent that a motion has been filed by a group of news outlets, including The Times, asking the judge to clarify what he meant when he ordered that no “interviews” take place in and around the court.

Media attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. has worked closely with Shaplen on the motion. “This is the first time where I have been on a case and there has been one person coordinating the way Peter is doing it, and it’s been very helpful from my perspective,” Boutrous says. “He is on the ground, he has established very good rapport with the sheriff’s staff and the court’s staff.... Some of the best reporters in the world are covering this trial, they are highly experienced and simply trying to do their jobs, and some of these restrictions are unnecessary.”

In a sworn declaration appended to the motion, Shaplen cited several instances in which journalists or legal analysts have been chastised by court personnel for seemingly innocuous behavior -- including giving a thumb’s up sign to a producer and merely looking at a defense attorney in a public area (“Don’t even think about it,” a sheriff’s deputy allegedly warned. “I know what you are thinking.”) Although Melville was scheduled to hear the motion this week, Boutrous says he thinks the matter will be amicably resolved without a formal hearing. Shaplen and Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Lt. Tom McKinny will try to reach a compromise.

Meanwhile, during each of the three 15-minute daily breaks in the trial -- at 9:45 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. -- reporters retrieve their cellphones from gray plastic trays next to the metal detector, then file outside into a little courtyard closed off with green plastic sheeting, dubbed “the Green Monster.” Reporters and producers watching the trial in the overflow room a short walk away hurry over to catch the show. Shaplen is at the courtroom door, choreographing the appearance of legal analysts at the pool camera set up in the Green Monster. He might scoot Moret or Bremner to the microphone for a few minutes for an analysis of what has just transpired in court and to answer reporter’s questions. Or he might give a local attorney a moment in the sun before a bigger gun is ready to talk.

At the end of the day, with a two-way radio still glued to his ear, Shaplen lets photographers and cameramen know where Jackson is so they can ready their shots. He has also trained reporters to come up with a single “question of the day” to lob at Jackson in hopes, usually futile, that he’ll stop and talk as he leaves court at 2:30 p.m. That innovation, Shaplen says, “is strategic. Michael is a performer. He is so used to walking down a red carpet, hearing ‘Michael, Michael Michael,’ that if we all scream he’s not going to acknowledge any one voice, and we only have about eight seconds to get to him.”

Jackson, who is under a gag order, usually keeps walking, often under a wide black umbrella in the bright sunshine, bodyguards at his side. The most reporters get is a high-pitched, “I’m sorry. I can’t talk. I love my fans. I love Santa Maria.”

At the end of each day, Shaplen packs up his alfresco office, stowing his computer and radios in a nearby truck, and compares notes about the day’s testimony with the small but intense community that brings the news from Santa Maria to the world.

“There’s important stuff to be done here,” says Shaplen, “no matter how scuzzy the topic.”