Vanessa Bryant’s lawsuit over graphic images from crash site headed for trial

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Vanessa Bryant's lawsuit against Los Angeles County over graphic photos of her dead husband and daughter taken and shared by LA County Sheriff's officers and firefighters should go before a jury, a federal judge ruled late Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge John Walter rejected a summary judgment request by the county, which argued based on undisputed evidence there was nothing for a jury decide. Without elaborating, the judge referred to the arguments Bryant brought up in her opposition to the county's request as enough of a controversy to place the case before a jury.

Bryant sued the county after reports that first responders at the Jan. 26, 2020, helicopter crash site had taken pictures on their personal cellphones of the bodies of her husband Kobe Bryant and their 13-year-old daughter Gianna, who were killed in a helicopter crash, and then forwarded these to their colleagues and showed them to others. The county argued the photos have been deleted and were never made public and that any harm to Vanessa Bryant was only "hypothetical."

"We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling," the county's attorney Skip Miller said. "The fact remains that the county did not cause Ms. Bryant’s loss and, as was promised on the day of the crash, none of the county’s accident site photos were ever publicly disseminated. The county did its job and looks forward to showing that at trial."

In her opposition to the county's motion for summary judgment, Vanessa Bryant argued the county's claim that all the illicit images taken at the crash site had been deleted on Sheriff Alex Villanueva's orders far from ends the case. Not only were the closeup photos of her daughter and husband passed around among at least 28 officer's devices and by at least a dozen firefighters, they were also shown in a bar by one officer and over cocktails at an awards gala three weeks after the crash, she said.

Moreover, the deletion of the photos by officers and firefighters and some of them wiping their phones clean or disposing of them means that it's impossible to know how widely the photos were disseminated, Vanessa Bryant argued.

"This destruction of evidence means that virtually all of the phones submitted for defendants’ highly-touted 'forensic examination' were not the devices used to take, send, or receive the photos in early 2020, rendering that forensic examination worthless," she said in her opposition.

In addition, almost all of the sheriff and fire department personnel refused to give their cloud storage passwords to the county's forensic examiner and no storage devices have been searches, she argued.

Vanessa Bryant also argued that cellphone records from officers show they texted pictures from the crash site to friends and that these texts were subsequently deleted.

A jury could fairly infer that the officer who wiped his cellphone clean destroyed evidence because he had something to hide, Vanessa Bryant argued. The same is true, she said, for three officers who disposed of their phones after she sued without taking steps to preserve relevant evidence before doing so.

"It is undisputed that county employees deleted vast quantities of data that would have been relevant to this case, but their motivations for doing so are hotly disputed," she said in her opposition. These are more than irregularities in the sheriff's department response to the illicit pictures that can "lead a reasonable jury to infer an improper purpose motivated the sheriff’s deletion order."

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