Two years after Kobe's death, Vanessa Bryant's pain remains at issue in court

The widow of Kobe Bryant recently was asked a seemingly harmless question by an attorney in Los Angeles:

How was she doing?

Two years ago Wednesday, nine people perished in a helicopter crash in the hills northwest of Los Angeles, including the NBA legend and their 13-year-old daughter Gianna.

Vanessa Bryant and her three other daughters are among those who have been trying to cope ever since.

“Would you say you've been getting better or getting worse, you know?” the attorney asked her in a legal proceeding Oct. 12. “How do you feel?”

“Grief isn't linear,” Vanessa Bryant replied, according to a partial transcript of it filed in court last week. “It's – every day is different, and I try to my best to put a smile on my face for my little girls. I want them to live in the love and not in the loss. And I make a conscious effort to try to portray that everything's fine for them.”

The attorney, Skip Miller, had a reason for asking her this. He is outside counsel for Los Angeles County, which is being sued by Bryant for invasion of privacy and negligence. She accuses county fire and sheriff’s department employees of improperly taking and sharing photos of her dead husband and daughter from the crash scene. She claims to have suffered emotional distress because of those actions and is seeking millions of dollars in damages to help make up for it.

Two years after the crash, this makes her emotional pain an issue for the county – and an ongoing point of dispute in federal court.

What is causing that pain? And should the county have to pay for it?

It’s a deeply personal issue that’s been put on public display in court filings, including emotional testimony from her and an examination of her private therapy records by a psychiatric expert for the county.

'Ongoing stress and fear’

The county defendants plan to explore this and other aspects of her life since the crash at a trial scheduled for Feb. 22. Is she seeking retribution to pay for the pain she feels over the loss of her loved ones? If so, the county believes her lawsuit is misguided because the county didn’t cause the crash and therefore should not have to pay her damages for it.

Last year, Bryant reached a confidential settlement to end her lawsuit against the operator of the helicopter that crashed amid foggy conditions, killing everyone on board. Her lawsuit against the county is her last remaining public dispute between her and those involved with the events of Jan. 26, 2020.

“Will you agree with me, Ms. Bryant, that the loss of your husband and the loss of your daughter are the primary cause of your distress, your emotional distress, your upset?” Miller asked her during her deposition on Zoom, according to the transcript filed last week.

“There are – that is the greatest cause of my heartache,” she replied. “But the ongoing stress and the fear is because of your clients.”

Bryant’s attorney, Luis Li, said she is not granting interview requests. Her legal team says this case is about the distress Bryant suffered not from the tragedy itself but from what happened afterward, when it said “close-up photos of Gianna and Kobe’s remains were passed around” on at least 28 devices in the sheriff’s department and by at least a dozen firefighters.

Her lawsuit and her Instagram account also have provided a glimpse into her life since the tragedy, including vacations with her daughters, happy memories of her husband and seeing her oldest daughter off to college at the University of Southern California.

Understandable anguish persists. In her deposition testimony in October, Miller asked her if she still was seeing her previous therapist.

“I have stopped,” she replied, according to the partial transcript filed last week. “I don't like – I don't have the ability to talk to him because it puts me in a difficult space and I need to – I don't want to bring those feelings up to surface.”

She also said she didn’t start seeing another therapist because “I don't like talking about everything that happened. I internalize a lot.”

Her job and other lawsuits

She still is expected to testify about it at trial unless she agrees to settle the case beforehand. In its defense, the county has noted it has a duty to protect taxpayer money from lawsuits it believes have no merit such as this one. It notes that the photos were deleted, not posted online and were not “publicly disseminated” beyond a sheriff’s deputy showing photos to a bartender two days after the crash.

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"The County grieves with Ms. Bryant and the other families for the tragic loss of their loved ones," Miller said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports this week. "But the County did not cause the crash. We didn’t cause their loss. To the contrary, the County sent in its first responders — police and fire — who dealt with the aftermath of this disaster, documented the scene and secured the site from intruders, paparazzi and the public."

In court filings, the county notes Bryant’s “entire case" is about emotional distress.

"It is the only form of damages she is seeking,” the county’s attorneys stated in court documents filed Jan. 20. “In order to succeed, Plaintiff must prove that Defendants’ sharing of crash scene photos caused her 'severe emotional distress.’ Defendants are entitled to defend against such claims by showing that other factors in Plaintiff’s life caused her distress.”

For example, the county wants to introduce evidence and ask Bryant at trial about her taking over as CEO of her husband’s multimedia content company, Granity Studios, such as her job duties, the number of employees under her and hours she works.

The county also intends to examine her about the stress from this lawsuit, the lawsuit against the helicopter operators and the lawsuit filed against her by her mother, according to court records filed last week. Her mother reached a confidential settlement to end that lawsuit last year after claiming she was owed for her work as a nanny and personal assistant to her daughter’s family.

“All of this is fair game,” the county stated in court records. That includes examining Bryant “about her distress as a result of losing her husband and daughter in the crash.”

Despite the sensitive nature of this subject, this is probably the county’s best argument in this case, said Alfonso Estrada, a labor attorney and former prosecutor in Los Angeles who has been following the case but is not involved in it.

“If I was defending the county, I would make that argument too,” said Estrada of the firm Hanson Bridgett. “It’s a very difficult argument, especially because (Bryant) just lost her daughter and her husband and their friends in a horrific accident. Trying to pick and choose what she could have been damaged by is a really difficult nuanced argument to make, but it is the best argument the county has, because I do believe there is merit to it.”

In November, U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Eick granted the county’s request to access Bryant's therapy records, stating they were “plainly relevant” to the county’s defenses related to emotional distress.

The county then had a psychiatric expert, Dr. Marc Cohen, review text messages between her and her therapist before he issued an updated report in December. Cohen noted a number of her life experiences that could affect her trust in others, according to a partially redacted copy of the report filed in court last week. He noted that she didn’t have a relationship with her father since she was a little girl, that she was sued by her mother and once filed for divorce from Kobe before canceling those plans.

“Vanessa Bryant's imagination, informed by her life experiences and a variety of outside sources, including media accounts of the reported misuse of crash-site photographs, has led her to develop a sense of vulnerability and fear about crash-site images being publicly disclosed despite any reliable evidence indicating that such photographs even continue to exist,” Cohen’s report stated.

Untangling her distress

His report concluded that he found no evidence that Vanessa Bryant has been mentally harmed or emotionally damaged from “crash-scene photographs of her late husband and daughter being allegedly shared.”

The county wants Cohen to testify at trial to help the jury “untangle” the distress caused by the loss of her loved ones from the distress she claims is a result of the photos taken by the county. In response, her legal team is fighting it, arguing his opinions are unreliable and inadmissible while also noting Cohen has never examined or met Bryant.

The county also is urging the judge to let it tell the jury that the helicopter crash was not caused by the county and that any emotional distress Bryant suffered as a result of the crash is not the county’s fault. It wants to tell the jury about how Bryant previously sued and settled with the helicopter company in a wrongful death case.

In response, her legal team is opposing this, saying it’s irrelevant and “bound to distract and confuse the jury.”

A judge is expected to decide these pretrial disputes in the coming weeks. Bryant so far has refused to settle the case even after two other families who lost loved ones in the crash each agreed to accept $1.25 million payments from the county to end their own similar lawsuits over crash-scene photos.

Bryant also recently survived an attempt by the county to dismiss her lawsuit in summary judgment, giving her leverage to squeeze the county for a larger settlement if she’s inclined to avoid trial.

If not, the nature and degree of her pain are expected to remain a central issue in a federal case. The partial transcript filed in court last week showed a glimpse of it.

“I'm just trying to understand what's your mindset,” Miller said to her in her deposition. “The greatest stress and the greatest cause is the loss of your loved ones. Correct?”

After an objection from Li, Bryant answered.

“The greatest pain is the loss of my husband and child,” she said.

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. E-mail: bschrotenb@usatoday.com

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After Kobe Bryant's death, Vanessa Bryant's pain is at issue in court