PHOENIX—Do you know who Jodi Arias is? No? Then you don't watch HLN. Or CNN. Or ABC News, Dateline, 48 Hours or Inside Edition.
You don't read People.com, or the National Enquirer or the Huffington Post. You don't follow the
#JodiArias hashtag.
In short, you have a life.
Jodi Arias is the new
Casey Anthony. And who begat Casey Anthony? Well,
O.J. Simpson, of course, the granddaddy of them all.
Unlike Simpson, Jodi Arias's story doesn't begin with fortune or celebrity. She wasn't a millionaire sporting icon or a Hollywood starlet — just a young woman who killed her ex-boyfriend.
But she is so much a part of the Internet,
MySpace and reality-TV generation that when she posed for a mugshot, she thought about the millions of people who would see it.
"I was like, 'Wow. I see this stuff on TV all the time,'" Arias says
in a jailhouse interview with 48 Hours, played for the jury during her first-degree murder trial. "I knew it would be all over the Internet, so why not?"
So Arias tilted her head and gave a half-smile — she says it was the look of an innocent person — but it could also be interpreted as the pose of an acutely self-aware young woman who perhaps understood that it could bring her the kind of viral exposure only possible in our digital age.
She'd be proven innocent, she was sure. So, she says, "in the meantime, smile and say cheese."
Fictional courtroom dramas have long been a television staple, but when Simpson, the former football star, stood in a Los Angeles courtroom and declared he was "absolutely, 100 per cent, not guilty" of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, the theatre of real-life justice became the ultimate in reality TV.
Simpson. Phil Spector. Various Jackson-related cases. And then, in 2011, the camera's lens focused on 27-year-old Casey Anthony, accused of killing her 3-year-old daughter, Caylee.
"You can't replicate anywhere else the human drama of a criminal trial, when people's lives are torn apart by the conduct of one person against another."
Beth Karas
legal commentator
She became the new daytime television star, and Arias has now stolen her unwanted crown. Because when crime meets cable, the result is a return to the bread and circuses of the Colosseum, and life and death has never been more entertaining.
"You can't replicate anywhere else the human drama of a criminal trial, when people's lives are torn apart by the conduct of one person against another," says legal commentator Beth Karas, sitting in an air-conditioned mobile television studio outside the Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ariz., during an Arias trial lunch break.
"Hundreds of years ago, everyone turned out to watch the trial, or watch the public hanging," adds Karas, who began her broadcasting career for Court TV and is covering the Arias trial for In Session, HLN and CNN. "To a certain extent, it's never changed."
The Arias case, which was due to culminate with closing arguments Thursday and Friday, is relatively simple. The charge is first-degree murder, the victim was her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander. The state is seeking the death penalty.
Arias, now 32, met Alexander in Las Vegas in late 2006. A California girl, she fell for him and even converted to Mormonism, his faith. By early the next year they were dating, but it didn't last.
Alexander's friends say he found Arias too clingy and that she stalked him. Arias says she tired of Alexander's untruthfulness.
Though they broke up, Arias moved from California to Arizona, where Alexander lived. She and Alexander continued to have sex, though intercourse outside wedlock is forbidden by their religion.
One of Arias' defence attorneys, Jennifer Willmott, told the jury: "Jodi was Travis's dirty little secret." Their relationship went underground; that's one reason no one knew Arias was at Alexander's house in Mesa, part of the sprawl of Phoenix, on the afternoon of June 4, 2008.
A few hours later, Alexander was dead. He had been stabbed 27 times, his throat was slashed and he was shot in the face.
Photos taken by investigators — and easily accessed online — show a terrible scene. Blood smears the floors and pools in the sink. Alexander's naked body was stuffed into the bottom of a shower stall.
After first denying involvement, and then admitting she was there but blaming unknown intruders, Arias now admits she killed Alexander, but says it was self-defence.
They took pictures of each other that day, and Arias says Alexander became enraged when she dropped his camera. She can't remember much of what happened, she says.
The state, represented by bullish prosecutor Juan Martinez, rejects that: Arias was jealous that Alexander was seeing other women and killed him in a fit of rage.
For networks like HLN, the Arias trial has been a gift. Arias is pretty — though her glamorous pre-trial image has been substantially toned down. Martinez is combative. The case involves the heady mix of jealousy, religion, murder and sex — lots and lots of sex. Extremely explicit photographs, text messages and audiotapes have all been entered into evidence.
And ratings are very good. A
news release from HLN said the channel had experienced "explosive" growth.
It devotes much of its day to testimony. Coverage is "gavel-to-gavel." Anchors tell viewers not to worry about the commercials because they are "pressing pause," so they "won't miss a minute."
Panels of experts join outspoken hosts like Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell to analyze the day's events. A new show, After Dark, has conducted reenactments to test Arias' in-court claims.
The case fascinates endlessly online, too. There's a
Justice4Travis Twitter account and — and, almost unbelievably, Arias has
a substantial cyber presence, too.
(She can't tweet from jail, so the understanding is one of her supporters does it on her instructions. The feed features quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mormon church leader Brigham Young, and even one that declares: "HLN is an acronym for Haters Love Negativity.")
"Yay! My #jodiarias addiction resumes! I will have to find a new addiction once this scumbag is handed the DP on a platter," tweeted @TxTrix in Texas, after a weekend break in testimony.
"What did I do before this trial?" tweeted Debbie in Illinois. "What will I do when it's over? I guess I'll get a life."
When the trial began Jan. 2, it moved at a decent clip. But when the defence took over, the pace became glacial, and at its centre was Arias, on the stand for a remarkable 18 days.
The week of Feb. 4, 2013, I was in a chilly hotel room in New Hampshire, reporting on another story. Television choices were limited and HLN was on in the background for company.
A trial was on, and a woman with bad glasses was on the stand. I paid little attention until the extraordinary testimony began to sink in. This, I soon found out, was Jodi Arias, testifying about the day of her baptism into the Mormon Church.
"I was in my church clothes, he was in his church clothes, the kissing got more passionate, more intense, and then he spun me around and, umm, he bent me over the bed," Arias testified. "He unzipped his pants and I guess he pulled them down, I didn't see, but he began to have anal sex with me."
What? This was on television! Cable, but still — television.
There was more. The court — and everyone else watching at home — would later hear a lengthy audiotape of a lurid conversation between Arias and Alexander. Still sitting on the stand as it was played for the court, and with cameras focused on her, Arias cried and hid her face behind a veil of dark hair.
"The sex really makes this salacious, and people can't get enough of it," Karas says. "You're hearing them having sex on the telephone . . . and that's the only time Travis Alexander came to life in this courtroom. You heard his voice.
"But . . . this kind of graphic sexual testimony is typically not something we televise. Or ever cover. And that's because most criminal cases don't involve this kind of sex — and if they do, it's a sex crime that is charged, and the laws on camera access in rapes and cases like that are very strict," Karas adds. "And so you just don't hear this stuff on TV."
Cameras aren't allowed in every courtroom in America, but they're common in places like Arizona, California and Florida.
And on the 23rd floor of an Orlando courthouse, Casey Anthony's trial captured the same kind of attention as the Phoenix case. Like Arias, Anthony was young and attractive. Like Arias, Anthony was charged with capital murder. And like Arias, Anthony's trial was a talk-show staple.
And Anthony, like Arias, provided rich material for HLN and other networks. In March, the New York Times "Media Decoder" column said "by some measures, the channel's ratings are almost back to where they were when Ms. Anthony stood accused of killing her daughter, Caylee. It seems that the HLN segment in January that asked 'Is Jodi Arias the next Casey Anthony?' has been answered, at least from the channel's point of view."
I went to Arizona to see the spectacle for myself. There are hints of drama — the public lining up to get seats, the three mobile television studios and various satellite trucks parked outside — but inside the cool, airy building, I found a decorous courtroom, helpful staff, professional reporters and attentive jurors.
It appears the circus is mainly in cyberspace.
On the first day in Judge Sherry Stephens' court, it all felt foreign, and I found myself constantly peeking at the cameras, trying to figure out what they were focused on. (Usually: witness, lawyers, defendant.) By Day 2, I'd forgotten they were there.
Canadian lawyers are generally against the idea of cameras in courtrooms and most look at what's going on south of the border with some disdain.
John Rosen defended Paul Bernardo in one of Canada's highest-profile murder trials and was initially in favour of the idea. He thought the camera's unwavering eye would force the legal profession to collectively raise its game. But O.J. Simpson, and now Jodi Arias, has convinced him otherwise.
"I was originally a proponent of cameras in the courtroom, because I thought people would rise to the occasion once they knew that this was being televised, especially judges and other lawyers, that they would prepare to do their best, that they would act responsibly," Rosen says. "And for me, O.J. was the case that convinced me cameras should not be in the courtroom. Because nobody rose to the occasion."
Greg Lafontaine, a Toronto lawyer who successfully defended former Nortel chief financial officer Douglas Beatty against charges of fraud, disagrees. He argues that lawyers who are there to grandstand and misbehave will do so no matter what kind of media is present — newspaper reporters, radio journalists or television cameras — and that competence will inevitably win the day.
But Aaron Harnett, who defended one of the women convicted of killing Toronto police officer William Hancox in 1998, worries the justice system itself could become the victim. When an audience inhales trial coverage for entertainment's sake and doesn't receive careful instructions given by the judge to a jury, their view could be skewed.
"They're being asked to play at home without being given the proper rules," Harnett says. "That creates an enormous problem for not only the perception of the administration of justice, but also our expectations of a justice system."
And the issue of playing along at home is in play in the Arias trial. The Maricopa County Superior Court is conveniently equipped with free, fast Wi-Fi, and in courtroom 5C, laptops and iPads are must-have reporting tools.
When court is in session, tweets with a #jodiarias hashtag roll like a river as thousands of people weigh in minute-by-minute: What is Arias wearing? Is she looking at her family? Whatever could she be writing in that notebook? Tweeters swap theories and debate legal strategy. They rail at her lawyers and cheer, loudly, for the prosecution.
"What's happening here is that you have these people who are not content to observe the trial," says Michael Kiefer, the Arizona Republic's legal affairs reporter. "They want to participate."
And there has been online backlash, perhaps most notably against Alyce LaViolette, a domestic violence expert who testified for the defence. After saying Arias was abused by Alexander, she was castigated online and suddenly there were thousands of negative reviews
on her Amazon author page.
"You sold your soul to the devil, Mrs. LaViolette. Hope that $300 bucks an hour was worth it," reads one. Another: "Alice, rot in hell."
Contrast that with the reaction to Janeen DeMarte's testimony. Brought on by the prosecution in part to rebut LaViolette's testimony, the Phoenix-based clinical psychologist testified that Arias didn't appear to be a battered woman, and that she has a borderline personality disorder.
"Such an inspiration," one woman in Syracuse tweeted. "A breath of fresh air," came from another in California. A third decided to send DeMarte a thank-you card for her testimony and urged others to do the same.
The social media chatter concerns David Chesnoff, a Las Vegas-based defence lawyer who has defended high-profile clients ranging from former boxer Mike Tyson to singer Bruno Mars and socialite Paris Hilton.
"I think the real danger with social media is the fear it could somehow contaminate the jury," Chesnoff says. "I really think it's very hard to control what happens when the jury is not on duty, and what I'm afraid it could lead to is more sequestered juries, which I find to be very bad for defendants."
The jurors in the Arias trial were not sequestered during testimony — they got to go home at night, but were supposed to avoid talking or reading about the case. As she dismissed them each day, Judge Stephens reminded them to "please, remember the admonition."
