A woman close to Phil Spector in the 1980s testified at his murder trial Monday that once he suddenly turned “demonic,” forced her at gunpoint into his bedroom and tried to have sex with her.
Veteran music talent coordinator Dianne Ogden told of the 1989 incident in which the famed record producer seemed to undergo a personality change as she tried to leave his mansion in Pasadena after a party.
“He was screaming at me, the F-word,” she said. “He wasn’t my Phil, not the man I loved. It wasn’t him. He was demonic. It scared the hell out of me.”
Ogden was the second woman called by prosecutors trying to prove that Spector’s pattern of threatening women with guns led to the killing of actress Lana Clarkson, who was shot through the mouth at his Alhambra mansion in 2003.
Spector, 67, has pleaded not guilty in the shooting. Defense attorneys have argued she shot herself.
Ogden testified that Spector tried to have sex with her, but did not. At some point, she said, he told her over and over that he was going to blow her brains out.
The next morning she awoke to Spector singing in the shower “like nothing had happened,” she said. Ogden forgave him because she thought he had a drinking problem, she said.
“I really did care about him and if we were going to make love I didn’t want it to be like that,” she said.
Another time, she said, she went to his house for a gathering with two friends and when she got up to leave, Spector again tried to keep her from going. “He said, ’I have an Uzi with me and I’m going to kill you,”’ she said.
Ogden said he ran after her with the Uzi in his hand but she jumped into her car and gunned the engine. She never saw him again after that, she testified.
She said she never told her story to law enforcement and was only speaking Monday because she was under subpoena.
Defense attorney Bruce Cutler suggested Ogden added things to her testimony that she had not told investigators.
Earlier in the trial, former Spector girlfriend Dorothy Melvin testified that he threatened her with a gun and hit her on the head when she tried to leave his Pasadena home. She said she called police after fleeing but didn’t press charges.
On Monday, jurors heard expletive-laced phone messages from Spector to Melvin, telling her “be careful what you say to me because nothing you say is worth your life.”
There were also several messages in which Spector apologized for his behavior.
Spector rose to fame in the 1960s and ’70s, changing rock music with what became known as the “Wall of Sound” recording technique. Clarkson, who was a hostess at the House of Blues when she met Spector, was best known for a 1980s role in Roger Corman’s “Barbarian Queen.”