Celebrity Lawyer Says She's Being Wrongly Maligned

LOS ANGELES - Leslie Abramson, the most high-profile female defense lawyer in America thanks to the Menendez and Simpson trials, is on the defensive herself, accused of unethically manipulating evidence.

Abramson says she is being wrongly maligned because "people were looking for a reason to slam me and slam the defense bar."

The public, she says, is too willing to accept a defense psychiatrist's claim that she ordered him to change his records.

Abramson's colleagues see her travails as affecting all of them.

"I really think she's off the hook legally," said Harland Braun, a top Los Angeles lawyer. "It's a public relations nightmare but not a legal nightmare. Her problem is the bar will look at it scrupulously because of the high-profile nature of it."

"Because of O.J., everyone's down on lawyers," said Braun. "In Leslie's case, it was, `Oh boy, those lawyers are really tricky.' And then she took the Fifth (Amendment) and it made it worse."

The Fifth Amendment plea, later withdrawn, came in a hearing that interrupted the penalty phase of Erik and Lyle Menendez's murder trial.

The hearing, with the jury absent, was called after psychiatrist William Vicary testified that Abramson ordered him to alter his notes and threatened to take him off the case if he disobeyed.

The California State Bar will not take up the issue until all court proceedings in the Menendez trial are complete.

"We are not just going to leap into anything without giving people the due process that is deserved," California State Bar spokeswoman Anne Charles said Thursday.

The jury recommended life in prison without possibility of parole for Erik Menendez, 25, and Lyle Menendez, 28, who were convicted of murdering their parents. Sentencing is set for July 2.

Abramson represented Erik Menendez at two trials, the first of which ended in a deadlocked jury, and now that the trials are over and a gag order has been lifted, she's going public.

"Enough is enough," Abramson declared during a interview at her office. "This had no impact on the trial's outcome. The only thing it had an impact on was who I still call my friends."

She said Vicary's account was untrue.

"I never told him to disappear anything or evaporate anything or permanently eliminate anything from his notes," Abramson said.

She acknowledges asking him to clarify ambiguous statements and to redact notes that infringed on psychiatrist-patient privilege or concerned subjects already ruled out of the trial by the judge. By "redact," she said she meant to white out, black out or cover over sections of his report.

After the uproar over Vicary's testimony, speculation arose that Abramson had bonded so closely with Erik that she would have broken rules to save him.

"Whether I love the kid or don't love the kid, you don't do unethical things to win," said Abramson, who is married to Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten.

She thinks the flap was exaggerated because of her own celebrity, which soared with the first, televised Menendez case and then when she served as a commentator on the O.J. Simpson trial for ABC's "Nightline."

She said her persona seems to spark controversy.

"I'm Jewish, I'm feisty, I'm aggressive, I'm tough. I take no prisoners and I'm a defense lawyer. And I'm a girl and girls aren't supposed to be any of the above," the New York City native said in her fiery, staccato courtroom style.

Abramson says there is a lesson in her predicament:

"Where the light of celebrity falls is purely accidental and weird. But I was astonished at how vicious the reactions were when this happened and it reminded me of a saying I heard once: `If you raise your head above the crowd, somebody will try to cut it off.' "