On Trial: Pellicano, Scat-Porn King Ira Isaacs, Designer Anand Jon

It wasn’t until September that original judge George King approved a government motion for a new trial. Diamond is presently appealing that ruling, which will run the clock out on the Bush Justice Department. Diamond and Isaacs have made no secret that they hope an Obama DOJ will not take up prosecuting pornographers.

Anand Jon, the L.A./N.Y.-based fashion designer, was convicted in L.A. Superior Court of 16 of the 23 sexual-assault charges leveled at him by seven of nine young women or underage girls. He and his family members listened in ashen-faced silence November 13 as jurors found him guilty of felonies that, according to prosecutor Francis Young, will keep him behind bars for 67 years before he is even eligible for parole.

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• Anthony Pellicano
• Lori Drew
• Alex Kozinski
• Trials
• Criminal Trials

Anand Jon’s five-lawyer defense team has pledged to appeal his convictions, but in order to do so they will have to present new evidence of his innocence. In the meantime, he faces sentencing on January 13, as well as new trials in New York and Texas. One odd development occurred December 2, when a Glendale polygraph agency declared that Jon had taken and “passed” a lie-detector test in which he was asked two yet-to-be-disclosed questions regarding his behavior toward victim Jessie B, whose accusations led to Jon being convicted of the trial’s one rape charge.

The designer’s family and supporters have made much of the polygraph test and are asking that Jessie B take one herself. Besides the fact that lie-detector tests aren’t admissible as evidence in court, Jon took his after his conviction, when passing such a test before the trial might’ve persuaded prosecutors to drop the charges involving Jessie B. As USC law professor Jean Rosenbluth told L.A. Weekly, “He could’ve taken this test before — it’s not going to get him very far.”

Cyber-bully: Lori Drew

Lori Drew, the matronly suspect accused of setting in motion a cyber-bullying scheme that ended in the suicide of a fragile 13-year-old girl, was never charged with culpability in Megan Meier’s 2006 death. In fact, Missouri authorities could find no statutes on which to arrest and try Drew, who believed Meier, a suburban neighbor, was badmouthing her daughter. Instead, the state passed a cyber-bullying law. Los Angeles–based U.S. Attorney Tom O’Brien, however, did think there were grounds on which to bring Drew to federal court – and got a grand jury to indict Drew on conspiracy and computer-fraud charges. In November she stood trial in downtown L.A., because MySpace’s corporate parent, Fox Interactive, is headquartered in Beverly Hills.

Drew’s jury only convicted her of misdemeanors, however, for helping to set up a MySpace account under a false identity – that of “Josh Evans,” an imaginary teen hunk whose taunts pushed Meier over the edge and led her to hang herself. In the end it was the federal government that seemed to have engaged in vindictive overkill, forcing a case that should have been left to Missouri’s civil courts.

So far, Drew has no scheduled sentencing date and the government has not yet decided whether to ask for a new trial (unlikely) on the deadlocked conspiracy charge. In the meantime, her defense lawyer, Dean Steward, still has a motion pending before the trial’s judge, George Wu, to dismiss all the charges because Drew didn’t intentionally violate MySpace contract prohibitions against creating fictitious accounts – because she didn’t read the long document. A hearing on that motion was scheduled for December 29.

Either way, it does not now seem probable that Drew will serve any time for the three misdemeanors, which carry one year apiece in prison. In December, however, came some related news from Missouri: Police had filed the first charge against a woman under the state’s new cyber-bullying law.