McDougal Defense States Case

Susan McDougal’s defense attorney attacked the prosecution’s embezzlement case Monday as a trumped-up “ludicrous story” that took five years to build and two months to unravel.

“What you saw over the last eight weeks was the complete collapse and deterioration of a case right before your eyes,” defense attorney Mark Geragos said. He accused the prosecutor of being on a mission to convict McDougal.

For the first time at the protracted trial, the paper evidence was easy to follow, as Geragos used an overhead projector to illustrate his closing argument to the jury. So engaged were the jurors that some of them snickered at the defense attorney’s more sarcastic remarks about the prosecution.

“Show and tell is good. Jurors like show and tell,” said legal analyst Laurie Levenson, an associate dean at Loyola Law School.

And so the defense showed, and told, all day Monday as hundreds of checks, receipts, memos and ledger entries flashed on a large television monitor on the witness stand.

Geragos is expected to conclude his arguments today and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey Semow will follow with rebuttal. Superior Court Judge Leslie W. Light will then briefly instruct the jurors before handing them the case, which includes more than 225 exhibits covering about 40,000 pages of financial records.

The prosecution “turned criminal law on its head,” Geragos said, by making McDougal a suspect and then spending five years “trying to come up with a crime.” He said no crime was committed.

He repeatedly referred to the prosecution’s case as “the world according to Semow” and said it didn’t make sense.

At the end of the day, after jurors had left the courtroom, Light warned the defense attorney he was coming very close to turning his closing argument into a personal attack on Semow, drawing an angry retort from the prosecutor.

Although the lawyers quibbled, McDougal, a key figure in the Whitewater investigation, received an unexpected boost Monday as activist-actor Edward Asner joined her family and supporters in the spectator’s section. Asner, who long has embraced liberal causes, including McDougal’s, said he decided to attend Monday’s session after bumping into McDougal at the Santa Monica courthouse Friday. He was in court for a civil case, which was settled, he said.

Heads turned as Asner entered the courtroom following a mid-morning break. McDougal walked over from the defense table, reached into the spectators’ section, hugged the actor and exclaimed, “I can’t believe it. My hero!”

The feeling was mutual. Asner, popularly known for his role as television’s “Lou Grant,” said he signed a petition seeking McDougal’s release from jail earlier this year. He said he’s “in awe of her” for standing up to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

“She’s taken her lumps. She didn’t knuckle under while other people might have created a string of fantasies to ease the pain of their situation,” he told reporters.

McDougal spent over a year in jail rather than tell a grand jury about her business dealings with her Whitewater partners, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. After her embezzlement case ends, she still faces trial in federal court in Arkansas for obstruction of justice.

In the embezzlement case, Semow has accused McDougal of forging former employer Nancy Mehta’s signature on credit card receipts and checks and laundering cash to cover her tracks. She also is accused of evading state income taxes in 1990, ’91 and ‘92--the years she worked for conductor Zubin Mehta and his wife, Nancy.

McDougal has denied stealing from the Mehtas during her employment as Nancy Mehta’s personal assistant and bookkeeper. She maintains that every item she bought was with Nancy Mehta’s blessing, either as a gift or as compensation for her bookkeeping services.

“The world according to Semow” was how Geragos described what he portrayed as an overblown but under-investigated case that didn’t hold up under scrutiny once it reached a courtroom. “How dumb do they take us for?” he asked, drawing smirks and snickers from several jurors.

He compared the prosecution tactics to a “Japanese monster movie,” arguing that every time the defense refuted a suspicious transaction, the prosecution raised another one. “They keep marching on Susan, because they want to convict her,” Geragos said.

He argued that “the whole issue in this case” is Nancy Mehta’s credibility. She gave sometimes inconsistent testimony while claiming that McDougal stole from her by charging items on a credit card Mehta didn’t even know she had.

Refuting Mehta’s charge that she knew nothing about a Bank of America credit card in both her and McDougal’s names, the defense attorney showed jurors half a dozen receipts bearing Mehta’s signature. The receipts were discovered in a file drawer during a defense search of the Mehtas’ financial records, and Geragos suggested Nancy Mehta might have “squirreled them away” to bolster her case against McDougal.

He also said that Mehta had charged $30,000 to that card--making her story that she didn’t know about it preposterous.

“How in the world are you going to believe Nancy Mehta beyond a reasonable doubt when she flip-flops four times over receipts she’s got stored in her house on a card she claims she didn’t know existed?” Geragos said.