Danny Masterson's ex-lawyers sanctioned for leaking rape case discovery to Scientology
A judge said the Scientology lawyer who obtained the discovery tried to improperly influence the criminal trial through complaints about prosecutors and investigators.
A judge on Wednesday sanctioned two former lawyers for actor Danny Masterson for illegally disclosing confidential discovery in his rape case to the Church of Scientology.
Sharon Appelbaum and her former co-counsel Tom Mesereau, the celebrity lawyer whose client list includes Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby, won’t immediately have to pay the $950 each as they appeal the order.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo issued it nearly one month after prosecutors said a lawyer for the Church included a link to the discovery in an email to the District Attorney’s Office complaining about the case against Masterson.
The $950 that Olmedo ordered Appelbaum and Mesereau to each pay is short of prosecutors’ request for at least $1,000, which is the threshold needed to require them to report the sanctions to the California State Bar.
The judge said the discovery at issue pertained to Masterson’s victims’ claims that the Church of Scientology is harassing them. It includes messages between the women and investigators as well as identifying information about homes and addresses in police reports that prosecutors believe the Church will use to further harass them.
“This was the concern that these victims had all along,” Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller told Olmedo on Wednesday. “This was their fear for years, that the Church was going to harass and intimate them” for reporting Masterson, who is a second-generation Scientologist.
Mueller said he’s “not aware of any authority to just carte blanche turn this over to a third party, especially knowing who this third party is and what that third party’s relationship is to these victims.”
“These are experienced lawyers. They know this. These are rules that have been around for a long time,” Mueller said.
Mesereau’s lawyer, Edith Matthai, told Olmedo that while discovery isn’t to be disseminated publicly, no laws prohibit it from being disclosed to certain people “if appropriate under the circumstances.” She also said the protected information was already redacted from the reports. If anything improper was obtained, “There’s a difference between a redaction order and willfully turning over something that shouldn’t be turned over.”
Matthai and Applebaum’s lawyer, Michael Crowley, said Olmedo hadn’t offered Mesereau and Appelbaum proper due process, and they pushed for written briefing that the judge wouldn’t allow.
“We do not know what the basis of this hearing is,” said Matthai, a go-to lawyer for California judges and lawyers in trouble. “There is not a statute that we are aware of that has ever been articulated to us that has been violated. … Everyone agrees that there was no protective order in place in this case.”
But Judge Olmedo said the disclosure of the discovery violated the victims’ rights statute Marsy’s Law, California criminal discovery statute Penal Code 1054, as well as several orders she issued during pre-trial litigation.
“People who oversee Scientology are not part of this case and do not stand in the same shoes as Mr. Masterson, who was a defendant,” Olmedo said, though Matthai noted Masterson also is a defendant in a civil case brought by the victims.
Judge signals for colleague in civil case to sanction, too
Olmedo said the lawyer who obtained the discovery, Vicki Podberesky, repeatedly tried to improperly influence Masterson’s trial, including by making a “calculated” complaint to Los Angeles police Chief Michel Moore shortly before a detective was to testify. The judge said Podberesky also made a “demonstrably false” complaint about the trial prosecutors to their District Attorney’s Office supervisors.
Olmedo said the Church could use the illegally obtained information to defend itself in the lawsuit brought by the victims against Masterson and the Church as well as Church leader David Miscavige.
But Olmedo said she doesn’t have the power to sanction Podberesky because Podberesky isn’t formally involved in Masterson’s criminal case, so she invited the judge handling the civil case to determine “the impact or effect” of the illegal disclosure on his proceedings and if sanctions are warranted.
Olmedo didn’t name him, but the judge is Judge Upinder S. Kalra, who was appointed in 2010 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Olmedo is a 2002 Gov. Gray Davis appointee and a former assistant U.S. attorney.
The civil case reached the nation’s highest court last year: The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 3 declining to consider a writ petition Scientology lawyers filed that challenged a California appellate court ruling that said the church’s arbitration requirements aren’t applicable to the lawsuit
Podberesky and her firm Andrues/Podberesky in Santa Monica are defending the Church in the lawsuit, along with Miscavige and Masterson.
Podberesky’s courtroom presence became an issue in trial after one of the victims told prosecutors that Podberesky was staring at her from the gallery during her testimony and causing her to lose concentration. Olmedo allowed prosecutors to question the victim about Podberesky’s presence and how it affected her state of mind.
A licensed California attorney since 1986, Podberesky did not return an email from Legal Affairs and Trials seeking comment on Olmedo’s ruling, which was issued Wednesday after an approximately three-hour hearing at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in downtown Los Angeles. The Church also has not yet responded to a request for comment.
The civil litigation had been on hold pending Masterson’s criminal case, but it’s resuming again now that he’s been convicted of two counts of forcible rape for raping two women at his Hollywood Hills home in 2003. At the time, he was starring as Steve Hyde on the TV show That ‘70s Show.
The jurors who convicted him also heard from a woman who said Masterson raped her while in Toronto, Canada, to film the movie Dracula 2000. They returned the guilty verdicts on their eighth day of deliberations on May 31 after a 15-day trial. It was Masterson’s second trial: A jury in November hung in favor of acquittal for each of his three charges. The second jury also deadlocked on the charge involving Masterson’s former girlfriend of six years, but the split favored prosecutors, with eight favoring guilty and four not guilty.
The 47-year-old had been free on $3.3 million bond, but he rose from his seat at the defense table and was handcuffed by a sheriff’s deputy after Olmedo’s clerk read the verdict. He’s currently incarcerated at the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles without bond. He faces 30 years to life in prison at sentencing, which Judge Olmedo on Wednesday scheduled for Aug. 4. He did not attend Wednesday’s hearing.
Sanctions follow trial with increased focus on Scientology
Founded in 1953, the Church is recognized as a tax-exempt religious organization by the Internal Revenue Service but has long been dogged by accusations that it’s a cult, including from many former members. The three women Masterson was accused of raping each were Scientologists at the time of the crimes, and each testified about Scientology’s efforts to silence them when they tried to report Masterson.
Before the first trial, Judge Olmedo ruled Scientology could be mentioned for five reasons: Why the victims didn’t contact police sooner; their fears of being declared a “suppressive person” within Scientology; the alleged harassment they’re experiencing by the Church of Scientology; and past and present ties to Scientology as it relates to their current state of mind. Jurors were told that testimony about the harassment was to be considered not for the truth but for the effect on the witnesses.
That same order applied to the second trial. Additionally, prosecutors brought in former high-ranking Scientologist Claire Headley to testify as an expert witness in the second trial. Headley’s testimony. corroborated the victims’ testimony about the Church’s altneraive justice system that they said protected Masterson when they tried to report him.
One of the women he was convicted of raping attending Wednesday’s hearing alongside actress Leah Remini, a former Scientologist who now leads an organization that helps people leave Scientology and transition to mainstream life.
Masterson’s current lawyers, Philip Cohen and Shawn Holley, also attended the hearing, but Olmedo concluded neither was involved in the disclosure.
The judge’s order reads:
“THE COURT FINDS that from at least September 18, 2020, through November 2, 2021, defendant’s criminal defense attorneys Thomas Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum had sole possession of the criminal discovery in the instant case provided by the People. THE COURT FURTHER FINDS that criminal defense attorneys Thomas Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum, along with additional defense counsel, continued to represent defendant through May 31, 2022. Thus, criminal defense attorneys Thomas Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum were notified and aware of this Court’s repeated directives and orders to refrain from providing criminal discovery to litigants and attorneys in the civil case.”
Olmedo initially considered asking the attorneys questions that she said wouldn’t violate attorney-client or work product privileges but could have led to them invoking their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. She decided not to after considering the issue further during a 15-minute break in chambers.
“I’m glad to hear that the court has decided not to question my client, because we do believe that attorney-client and work product privileges are quite tied up in this matter,” Matthai said.
‘An attempt to intimidate the law enforcement officers’
Mueller said Wednesday that Podberesky revealed the discovery in a May 2 email. He said prosecutors “don’t know if this was inadvertently left on this particular email or if it was intentional.”
But when they accessed the link, it took them to 12 letters with Church of Scientology letterhead dated April 24, 2023, Mueller said, the day of opening statements in the second trial. They recognized approximately 570 pages of documents “to be the People’s criminal discovery in this case.
The Church was requesting “a criminal investigation be conducted” into four investigators involved in Masterson’s case, Mueller said. Mueller also said a Los Angeles police captain told him Chief Moore wanted him “to reach out to me to let me know that there was a request to have a criminal investigation done” into the case investigators.
“There’s an attempt to intimidate the law enforcement officers. There’s an attempt to intimidate the complaining victims in this case,” Mueller said.
Mueller also said Podebersky was trying to make an “end run” around discovery laws, and Olmedo agreed.
“Specifically, the Court repeatedly admonished the criminal attorneys that the criminal defense team was attempting to use the criminal discovery process to obtain discovery for the civil case, material that the civil defendants were not entitled to, and that criminal discovery process would not be used for such a purpose,” according to the judge’s 30-page written order.
Matthai’s and Crowley’s argument that no laws were broken “flies in the face of both statutory and caselaw authority thwarts Marsy’s law, legislative intent, governmental and privacy interests; and most importantly is contrary to this Court’s previous findings and orders.”
“Non-parties to a criminal case do not have an inherent right to access discovery materials, and thus the dissemination of such information to non-parties is inherently prohibited,” Judge Olmedo wrote.
The defense is essentially saying that a criminal defendant has “a proprietary interest in the information, and so long as there is no expressly written protective order in place, he or she can do with the information as he or she wishes.”
“Arguably, a criminal defendant could sell the information to a tabloid, publish it in a local newspaper, give it to other individuals with adverse interests to those of the victims or witnesses such as an ex-spouse, or as here, share it with other litigants in other noncriminal legal matters who otherwise would not be able to obtain the same information,” according to the order.
Previous coverage:
May 31: Jury convicts actor and Scientologist Danny Masterson of raping two women in 2003
May 4: Ex-Scientologist's 'brouhaha' with priest leads to jury restrictions in Danny Masterson's retrial
April 25: Actor Danny Masterson’s rape retrial opens as prosecutor implicates Church of Scientology
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