The Phil Spector Trial

When I'm home during the day, I like to have Court TV on, and of course they are currently covering the Phil Spector trial. The witness, Kathy Sullivan, who was on the stand yesterday afternoon and this morning makes me ill. She really does. She's a woman who claims to be a "platonic acquaintance" of Spector. And she was out for drinks with Spector earlier on the evening that Lana Clarkson was shot. So, it's obvious to me anyway, that it easily could have been her, rather than Clarkson. Of course, I suppose that statement implies that Clarkson's death wasn't suicide. Anyhow, this Sullivan woman is testifying as to the nature of her relationship with Spector and what they'd done earlier in the evening. And she's clearly turning this into her own 15 minutes. She's on the stand, acting all cute, cracking jokes (which the attorneys laugh at, by the way), turning this all into something about her, turning it into her chance to be on TV, to talk, to have attention. And it just makes me sick. I want to scream. I want to say, "Look, a woman is dead. Can you only think about yourself?" And it's not the normal thinking about self in the sense of saying, "Oh my gosh, this is terrifying. This could have been me." She seems not at all shaken by the whole think. It's friggin' unbelievable. And I use "friggin'" sparingly, so you can judge the severity of my reaction here.

The other weird thing that strikes me is this. And here I have to credit Lisa Bloom and Vinnie Politan for exploring some of this in their commentary. Spector seems to have this pattern of going out to dinner with a female friend, then picking up other women at the restaurant or bar and saying something like, "Hey, after my driver takes this woman home, do you want to join me for drinks?" There's something supremely creepy about that, in my opinion. And all these women he hangs out with claim that their relationship is merely platonic. Politan points out that "platonic" means that Spector was interested in a sexual relationship, but the women were like, "No thanks." If that's true, platonic must mean the women are like, "no thanks," until Spector drinks too much and then pulls a gun on them.

I don't know, rather like Anna Nicole's life and death, as Spector's story unfolds, I am struck by how supremely unbelievable it all is. I mean, I do believe it, and I think that the way that the prosecution is portraying him is reality. But if this were merely a movie and not real life, I think we'd all say, "That would never happen. That's totally unbelievable."