Jury selection for a lawsuit Kobe Bryant’s wife filed against Los Angeles County is starting more than two years after a helicopter disaster that killed the famous sports figure, his daughter, and seven other people in January 2020.
Vanessa Bryant claims in her complaint that the county sheriff’s office and the fire departments took pictures at the accident site, including pictures of her late husband’s remains, and disseminated them widely without the Bryant family’s permission.
Just over a mile from the Lakers arena where Kobe Bryant spent the most of his playing career, Vanessa Bryant’s invasion of privacy trial against the government is taking place in a U.S. District Court.
Bryant, who is suing for an undisclosed sum of money, alleges officers shared the images with the firemen who arrived at the collision site and did not remove them for investigation reasons.
According to the complaint, a deputy gave the images to bar guests and a fireman to off-duty coworkers.
Deputies were also charged with knowingly participating in a cover-up conspiracy to remove accident picture evidence at the sheriff’s direction.
Several weeks after the tragedy, a Los Angeles Times article broke the story of their purported agreement.
The complaint claims that Mrs. Bryant is sickened by the idea that sheriff’s officers, firemen, and members of the public have stared gratuitously at pictures of her murdered husband and child.
She always worries that she or her kids would come across horrifying pictures of their loved ones online.
The lawsuit went on to say that “internet trolls” and users of social media had made claims on online forums that they had “seen images of the victims’ remains.”
According to the statement, “Their accounts are plausible given the number of people who took and transmitted inappropriate photos, the simplicity with which cell phone photos are electronically shared and saved in cloud storage, and the egregious failure to take reasonable steps to prevent dissemination of the photos.”
Gianna, Kobe Bryant’s daughter who is 13 years old, and other parents and kids were travelling to a basketball competition when their private chopper crashed in the Calabasas hills outside of Los Angeles due to bad weather.
Federal safety experts attributed the accident to pilot error.
The helicopter charter business and the pilot’s estate have both been sued by Vanessa Bryant.
She and other relatives of those killed in the disaster have settled with the helicopter firm as of last summer.
The county has maintained that Bryant’s mental suffering was caused by the deaths, not the images that Sheriff Alex Villanueva ordered to be removed.
They said that the case is hypothetical and that the images have never been published in the media, online, or in any other way that would have allowed for public dissemination.
First responders are prohibited from photographing the dead at the site of an accident or crime, under legislation that was inspired by the collision.
The county already agreed to pay $2.5 million to resolve a complaint identical to this one filed by two families whose members perished in the disaster on January 26, 2020.
Bryant’s failure to reach a settlement shows that she is still demanding more.
The legal battle has sometimes been acrimonious.
Bryant’s attorneys condemned the county for using “scorched-earth discovery methods” to pressure her and other victims’ families to drop their claims when the county requested a psychiatric assessment of Bryant to establish if she experienced mental distress as a result of the images.
In response, the county labelled Bryant’s lawsuit a “money grab” and expressed sympathy for her losses.