Celebrity criminal defendants

SIGNIFICANCE: Although rare, the criminal trials of celebrities garner a great deal of media coverage. These highly publicized trials command great public attention but present distorted and unrealistic pictures of the daily workings of the criminal justice system.

“Celebrity” is by definition a social construct. People are celebrities because the media cover aspects of their lives that are presumably of interest to the general public. Celebrities typically include people who enjoy success in professional sports, entertainment, politics, or business. Celebrity can also be a result of criminal notoriety itself.

Celebrities Who Become Defendants

Celebrities charged with crimes rarely go to trial. Their wealth, power, and influence afford them many privileges, including absence from courtrooms. When they actually do go to trial, however, their cases typically saturate the news. Perhaps the best-known celebrity defendant of modern times to go to trial was former professional football star, actor, and sports commentator O. J. Simpson , who was tried for murdering his former wife and another man.

Other notable defendants have included boxer Mike Tyson who was tried for rape; televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, tried for fraud and conspiracy; corporate executive John DeLorean, actor Robert Downey Jr., and musician Bobby Brown, all of whom were tried for drug possession; Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards and Ohio congressman James Traficant Jr., both tried for racketeering; Panama’s President Manuel Noriega, tried on drug trafficking charges; home decorating guru Martha Stewart, tried for, among other charges, securities fraud ; and basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who was a criminal defendant in a rape case.

By 2014, accusations leveled by several women instigated one of the more high-profile celebrity trials of the twenty-first century. Famous, long-beloved comedian and television star Bill Cosby faced accusations from a number of different women who claimed that he had sexually assaulted and, in some cases, drugged them, that continued into 2015; later that year, he was officially brought up on charges for the one case that was still within the statute of limitations. After a mistrial was declared in the summer of 2017, a second trial began in April 2018 that ultimately led to a guilty verdict, with Cosby convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. In September, he was sentenced to three to ten years in a state prison. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in June 2021. Cosby was released from prison, but the following year faced a civil trial over charges that he had assaulted Judy Huth in 1975. Huth won the suit and the court ordered the comedian to pay her compensatory damages worth $500,000. In 2024, Chelan Lasha, who had testified at Cosby's 2018 sexual assault trial, filed a civil lawsuit against him for allegedly drugging and raping her in Las Vegas in 1986.

Cosby's 2018 guilty verdict was seen as a key milestone in what became known as the Me Too movement. The movement, a campaign to raise awareness of sexual assault in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, had gained considerable momentum in October 2017, after the New York Times published an in-depth investigation into allegations that Harvey Weinstein, an influential film producer, had sexually assaulted dozens of women, including prominent Hollywood celebrities. Weinstein was fired from The Weinstein Company in 2017 and arrested in 2018. In 2020 he was found guilty of rape and a criminal sex act and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. He was sentenced to another sixteen years in 2023 after being found guilty by a Los Angeles court of raping and sexually assaulting an Italian actor and model in 2013.

Defendants Who Become Celebrities

Far more numerous than celebrity defendants are “defendant-celebrities”—individuals who, while ordinary in many respects, found themselves celebrated because of the media coverage of their crimes and trials. This category includes people who go through most of their lives outside the media spotlight until they become defendants. Their newsworthiness can be attributed to a variety of things. Often, it is due to the heinousness of their alleged crimes or their victimization of public figures, but it may also include elements such as the defendants’ relatively privileged social standing, the locations of their alleged crimes, or the rarity or prurience of the crimes.

In many respects, the experiences of such people are dark manifestations of what artist Andy Warhol called everyone’s “fifteen minutes of fame.” This notorious category of defendants is the most diverse and populous of all celebrity criminal defendants and includes serial killers such as Charles Manson, organized-crime leaders such as John Gotti, high-priced sex-trade workers such as Heidi Fleiss, cold-blooded bombers such as Timothy McVeigh, would-be assassins such as John Hinckley Jr., celebrity stalkers such as Robert Hoskins, statutory rapists such as schoolteacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, and criminal bankers such as Michael Milken.

Political Dissidence and Celebrity

A final category, “political-celebrity defendants,” includes people who, while tried for street crimes, are thought by many to truly have been on trial for their political dissidence. This is to say that their status as criminal defendants has more to do with their controversial political activities than with their involvement in any form of criminal malfeasance. In the opinion of many scholars, these people are often unfairly persecuted by the criminal justice system. While the relative legal merits, not to mention public opinion, vary greatly from one case to the next, it is interesting to note that while many of these people are actually convicted in courtrooms, history—if not the criminal justice system—eventually exonerates them.

A notable example of a political-celebrity defendant was the young social activist Frank Tannenbaum, who was later to become a distinguished professor at Columbia University and the author of the criminology classic Crime and the Community (1938). In 1914, Tannenbaum was tried in New York City for inciting to riot. He was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison and a five-hundred-dollar fine.

Other notables include labor activists and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were tried, convicted, and executed in 1927 for their alleged robbery and murder of a paymaster and security guard in Massachusetts. Also among this group was the philosophy professor, Black Panther leader, and Communist Party member Angela Davis, who was tried for her alleged role in a failed hostage taking in 1970. American Indian activist Leonard Peltier received two life sentences for the alleged murders of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in South Dakota during a shoot-out in 1975; he subsequently received the International Human Rights Prize. Freelance journalist and community activist Mumia Abu-Jamal sat on death row in Pennsylvania for nearly thirty years for the alleged murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981; while he was removed from death row in late 2011, he remained in prison on a life sentence.

Contrary to the mediated images broadcast on television programs, the overwhelming majority of criminal convictions do not result from defendants being found guilty by judges or juries after lengthy trials with highly competent prosecutors, all-star defense teams, and weeks full of complex expert testimony. Unlike celebrity defendants, most criminal defendants do not even see insides of courtrooms for more than a few minutes, when they agree to plea bargains.

Bibliography

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