So I’m looking at the Associated Press dispatch on all the lawsuit-related hoopla Rita Cosby has stirred up with her Anna Nicole Smith book, Blonde Ambition, which apparently has Howard Stern and Larry Birkhead upset because it suggested that not only did they team up to exploit Smith like Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon in Wild Things (only without Neve Campbell and Denise Richards), but that if their story had had a shower scene, too, it would’ve been a lot steamier. Naturally, they both deny everything, including the existence of a Birkhead/Stern sex tape, and are planning to sue separately, with Birkhead claiming he’s going to get “one of the most expensive lawsuit settlements in book-publishing history.” But it was when Stern’s attorney, L. Lin Wood, said that he was “convinced…[Cosby] has, as a practical matter, authored a work of pure fiction” that my spidey sense started tingling. L. Lin Wood? Ah, yes… the infamous “attorney for the damned,” who has pursued defamation claims for Richard Jewell, Gary Condit, and the Ramseys.
Funnily enough, Wood also plays a part in another book that is reaching stores this week: Wendy Murphy‘s And Justice for Some, described in the subtitle as “an exposé of the lawyers and judges you hate—and the dirty tricks they don’t want you to know about.” Murphy, a former prosecutor turned victim’s rights advocate, describes how he contacted her on behalf of the Ramseys after she appeared on a cable news show and told her, “I just heard you accuse my client of abusing and killing his daughter, and if I ever hear you say that again, you won’t be ex-prosecutor Wendy Murphy, you’ll be defendant Wendy Murphy in my lawsuit. Check my record!” She goes on to accuse Wood of using the threat of legal action to suppress the public articulation of opinions on matters of public interest that reflect poorly on his clients, “not unlike what fascist extremists do when they try to maintain political power and control people by telling them about all the horrible things that will happen if they don’t speak and think a certain way.”