The Laundromat · Jodi Arias
Plus: Did you know about the sexual assault allegations against Edward James Olmos?
A true-crime series hosted by -- of all people -- Lorraine Bracco dropped last night. The show’s called The Dead Wives Club and I’ll bet you can guess what it’s about! Last night’s episode was a 90-minute look into the death of Natalie Wood, and this press release has a rundown of future episodes (the show runs through November 24 on HLN, and can be streamed on CNN’s app), all of which deal with dead wives whose cases are significantly lower-profile than Wood’s.
Bracco says she took on the series to send a message to domestic abusers. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Bracco said, “I believe that if we show the truth, it will deter men. It'll wake up women to know that it's not love if you're being abused, it's it's a form of control. I think those things are really important for women to understand and also for men to know that they're not going to fucking get away with it.”
Marketing speak and standard junket BS, sure, but before we dismiss Bracco’s motivations, I should mention something that the Mail (kind of surprisingly) did not: Bracco was married to Edward James Olmos from 1994-2002, during which Olmos faced multiple allegations of sexual assault.
Those allegations were a key part of a custody battle Bracco had with her longtime partner Harvey Keitel, with whom she had a daughter -- and remembering all this I just went back and reread John Lombardi’s great New York piece from 1998 that detailed both the claims against Olmos and how Keitel’s team leveraged the allegations in court. If you were previously unaware of the allegations against Olmos -- which involve his giving the family of a 14-year-old girl $150,000 in exchange for a promise not to pursue prosecution -- it might be time to check this 21-year-old article out. -- EB
Are you guys watching Limetown? I keep thinking I should, at least once, since it’s such a meta-take on the true-crime podcast genre, but then I remember it’s on Facebook Watch and I’m like, naaaaah. This review from The Guardian didn’t make me decide that its essential viewing -- after all, it’s fiction and I have loads of non-fiction to get through. If I’m reading its Britishisms correctly, however, critic Lucy Mangan finds it to be fun and addictive trash. If you have the bandwidth for “tosh of the highest quality” in these peak content days, more power to you. -- EB
Jodi Arias returned to court on Thursday. Her high-profile conviction for the 2008 slaying of Travis Alexander was the stuff of numerous true crime properties, including Jodi Arias: An American Murder Mystery, which was discussed on The Blotter Presents way back in January of 2018. Last week, her defense team claimed that that conviction was based on prosecutorial misconduct, the Arizona Republic reports, with attorney Cory Engle telling a three-judge panel on the Arizona Court of Appeals that “it's so pervasive and so persistent in this case.”
Assistant Attorney General Terry Crist, who -- to be clear -- is on the opposite side from Engle, agreed that Maricopa County prosecutor Juan Martinez broke the rules “occasionally,” but claimed that his transgressions aren’t enough to vacate the conviction. Pundits (like this one at KTAR News) say that while it’s possible that the judges on the panel might order a new trial for Arias, it’s pretty darned unlikely. -- EB
Despite a lawsuit filed last week to block its release, The Laundromat dropped on Netflix last Friday. I really meant to watch it over the weekend, but I was buried in work and didn’t watch anything fun! Did any of you check it out, and if so, what did you think? In terms of the legal action, a judge ruled that the suit against it, which was filed in Connecticut, should be moved to LA, the AP reports. It will be fun to follow this to see how attorneys Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca (who in the film are played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) follow up on their claims that the movie defames them! -- EB
Tuesday on Best Evidence: Another Ted Bundy show, are you kidding me?
What is this thing? This should help.
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