LOS ANGELES — Kobe Bryant’s widow and a family friend deserve $75 million in damages for the emotional distress they’re enduring after emergency personnel shared grisly photos of a helicopter crash site where the former basketball star was killed, a jury was told.
Vanessa Bryant and Christopher Chester, an Orange County financial adviser who lost his wife and daughter in the crash, face the rest of their lives living in fear the photos of their deceased family members will appear somewhere in public or online, Vanessa Bryant’s lawyer Craig Lavoie told the nine members of the jury in Los Angeles federal court Tuesday.
“Either the photos will surface and their worst fears will have been realized or they will live in fear that day will come,” Lavoie said in closing arguments on the 10th day of the trial.
Bryant and Chester sued the Los Angeles sheriff’s and fire departments claiming their constitutional right was violated when emergency personnel attending the crash scene took photos with their phones and then circulated them to friends and colleagues.
Public dissemination of family members’ death images that “shocks the conscience” would violate due process rights in California. If the jury finds that occurred, it will then have to determine whether the departments had inadequate policies and training, or whether it was custom and practice for emergency personnel to take such pictures.
Lavoie told the jury evidence in the trial showed there were no policies in place and emergency personnel have been taking death images since the invention of the Polaroid to keep as mementos.
Los Angeles County will have an opportunity to rebut those claims in its arguments Wednesday.
Jerome Jackson, a lawyer for Chester, suggested to the jury that it should award each of the plaintiffs $2.5 million for their suffering in the past two years, and as much as $1 million a year for the rest of their lives. He calculated Chester, who is 48, should get $30 million, while Vanessa Bryant should be awarded $40 million in future damages.
Kobe Bryant, widely regarded as one of the best professional basketball players of all time who spent his 20-year career playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, was killed with his daughter and seven others when the helicopter they were traveling in crashed in cloudy weather in January 2020.
The closing arguments in the trial occurred on what would’ve been Kobe Bryant’s 44th birthday.
“We’re asking for justice and accountability on his behalf,” Lavoie told the jury.
The jury heard earlier in the trial that a sheriff’s deputy shared graphic photos from the scene with a fellow deputy while the two were playing the video game “Call of Duty.” Another deputy admitted showing pictures to a bartender while a firefighter showed photos on his phone to a small group of people who were attending an awards ceremony in February 2020.
Many of those involved in sharing the photos wiped or got rid of their phones, making it impossible to figure out if the pictures were disseminated further, Lavoie said.
Jackson said he got a voice message last week from a woman claiming she saw, or knew where photos of the crash scene were, and that someone had a link and would share them for a fee.
“It sent a chill down my spine,” Jackson told the jury.
The case is Bryant v. County of Los Angeles, 20-cv-09582, US District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).
