Rock producer Phil Spector, charged with murdering a B-movie actress at his home, accused police Friday of roughing him up during his arrest and used a crude remark to describe a prosecutor.
“He’s the one who proves you can have children through anal sex,” Spector loudly told his attorney, Leslie Abramson, as they left a courtroom following a hearing. The remark was in reference to one of two prosecutors in the case.
Abramson, who traded barbs with Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Doug Sortino during the hearing, shushed Spector and told him: “Phil, I get to be nasty, you don’t.”
The hard-charging attorney also told Spector not to speak as she conducted a press conference in the hallway, but the pioneering record producer several times injected remarks of his own.
As Abramson was describing Spector’s arrest in February 2003, following the shooting death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson in his foyer as unnecessarily rough, the “Wall of Sound” producer stepped forward to add charges of his own:
“Broken nose, two black eyes and 50,000 volts shot through me (with a Taser gun) after I invited the police into my home,” Spector said.
Questionable details? During the press conference he also took another swipe at prosecutors and their key witness, a limousine driver who told police that Spector emerged from his 33-room mock castle to exclaim: “I think I shot someone.”
“He is illegal,” Spector said. “He is an illegal alien threatened with deportation.”
Abramson said she believes the limousine driver, a native of Brazil with what she described as a limited command of English, may have misunderstood Spector and was being given immunity from deportation by prosecutors in exchange for his testimony.
Inside court little progress was made in the case, which has bogged down in pretrial squabbles between prosecutors and the defense over evidence.
No trial date has been set.
Prosecutors say that Spector shot the 40-year-old Clarkson, star of such films as “Amazon Women on the Moon” and “The Barbarian Queen,” for reasons that remain unclear.
Spector’s attorneys say that Clarkson committed suicide and point to an autopsy of the tall blond actress that found gunshot residue on her hands and concluded that the gun was in her mouth when it was fired.
Prosecutors say Spector also had gunshot residue on his hands, along with the victim’s blood. They say they also have evidence that the record producer wiped the murder weapon and moved it after the shooting.
After an eight-month investigation, Los Angeles County Coroner’s officials ruled last September that Clarkson’s death was a homicide.