4.2.12 WC: 191694
Claus Von Bulow
After we won the case, Claus and his then girlfriend decided to host a dinner party. I told them I would not come if it was a victory party, since I have a policy of not going to victory parties of criminal defendants. He assured me that it was merely a dinner for several interesting people. He told me among his other guests would be the novelist Norman Mailer and his wife. When the dinner began, Claus regaled everybody with stories from the trial and I explained why the evidence seemed to point to his innocence. About halfway through the dinner, Mailer grabbed his wife’s arm and said, “Let’s get out of here. I think this guy is innocent. I thought we were going to be having dinner with a man who actually tried to kill his wife. This is boring.” In fact, many of my most exciting cases involved very boring people, though Claus was not one of them. When the movie came out, Claus refused to go to see it insisting that he would never watch Jeremy Irons play him. Several months later I was having lunch with Claus and his most recent girlfriend who I had never previously met. After about an hour of conversation with me, she turned to Claus and said, “Now that I’ve met Alan I believe that Ron Silver really didn’t do him justice. He overplayed him.” Claus immediately shook his head in agreement saying, “You’re right my dear, I too think he overplayed him.” This from a man who claimed he didn’t see the film.
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