Big news out of Los Angeles late Wednesday, as Vanessa Bryant won her lawsuit against the County of Los Angeles.
The ten-person jury ruled that Vanessa would continue to suffer emotional distress due to the death scene photos taken by sheriff’s deputies of the death scene when Kobe and their daughter Gigi were killed in a helicopter crash in January of 2020.
Some of those grisly photos were circulated internally in the Sheriff’s Department, and Vanessa was worried they would have made their way into the public.
The jury awarded Vanessa $16 million, and another man who lost his daughter and wife in the crash was awarded $15 million. After the verdict was read, Vanessa broke down in tears as both the Sheriff’s Department and the L.A. County Fire Department are on the hook for the judgment.
The trial lasted a total of two weeks, and the graphic nature of the presented evidence was so traumatic for Vanessa that she had to leave the courtroom multiple times.
The defendants claimed that the photos had been deleted and were not a threat to reach the public, but it was revealed that some of the deputies that took the photos had shared them with friends, family, and even strangers they met at a bar.
A sad irony was that Kobe would have turned 44 years old one day before the verdict was announced.
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