The widow of basketball legend Kobe Bryant was dealt an emotional blow in her bid for damages related to her late husband’s and daughter’s deaths last year.
Vanessa Bryant will have to turn over records related to her therapy following the helicopter crash that killed Kobe and daughter Gianna in January of 2020, according to an NBC News report. In her lawsuit against Los Angeles County and sheriff’s deputies Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejia, Michael Russell and Raul Versales, Bryant alleges that gruesome pictures were taken of victims’ bodies at the crash scene and then circulated by the deputies.
From NBC News:
On Monday a federal magistrate judge granted a motion by the county, ruling that Bryant must turn over therapy records, according to online court documents.
Skip Miller, outside counsel for Los Angeles County, said earlier this month that the request for records was standard in such cases that claim damages from emotional distress.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the county’s defense lawyer wanted to force Bryant to turn over therapy records dating all the way back to 2010, a decade before her husband’s death, as evidence of her mental state. The judge ruled that Bryant only had to turn over records back as far as 2017, and had previously denied a defense attempt to force Bryant to undergo a mental evaluation.
Anybody smell trash?
Kobe Bryant was 41, and Gianna Bryant was 13 when they along with seven others, including the pilot, were killed in an early morning crash last year. They were traveling to a basketball tournament in dense fog at the time; investigators ruled that the pilot’s “spatial disorientation”—essentially an inability to tell where he was while flying with limited visibility—caused the fatal crash.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles County settled a lawsuit from the families of other crash victims for $2.5 million.