The ex-lawyers of “That ’70s Present” actor and convicted rapist Danny Masterson have been sanctioned Wednesday for leaking confidential discovery materials about his victims to the Church of Scientology — which has been accused of harassing the ladies for a number of years.
Los Angeles Superior Court docket Choose Charlaine Olmedo dominated that protection attorneys Tom Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum despatched discovery from Masterson’s felony case to Church of Scientology lawyer Vicki Podberesky in violation of a courtroom order and a regulation defending victims’ private data, the Los Angeles Instances reported.
Podberesky is representing the church in a civil swimsuit filed by Masterson’s victims, former members of the church who say they have been threatened by the group’s officers to not report their assaults.
The invention supplies contained delicate details about the sexual assault victims, together with their addresses and correspondence with police.
Masterson, a training Scientologist, was convicted final month of raping two of the ladies at his Los Angeles residence within the early 2000s.
In a civil case separate from the felony case, the victims have accused Masterson and the church of stalking, harassing and intimidating them for years with the intention to scare them from talking out about Masterson’s abuse.
Deputy District Legal professional Reinhold Mueller, who first alerted the decide of the leaked supplies, mentioned an e mail from Podberesky associated to the civil case consists of 570 pages of the folks’s discovery in attachments, the Instances reported.
“Emails between regulation enforcement and victims. Textual content messages. Police studies. Photographs,” Mueller mentioned have been included, based on Radar On-line. “We weren’t capable of get via all of the attachments, but it surely’s extraordinarily troubling that each one of our redacted discovery we turned over to the protection is now within the fingers of Scientology.”
Podberesky apparently used the confidential data to say that prosecutors have been soliciting false testimony from victims to convict the actor.
Nonetheless, Olmedo mentioned that Podberesky’s criticism was “demonstrably false” as she sanctioned the 2 legal professionals.
She ordered the pair — who have been dropped from Masterson’s authorized workforce and changed with new attorneys in Might 2022 — to pay $950 every in sanctions, based on the LA Instances.
A protection lawyer for the celeb lawyer Mesereau claimed Olmedo by no means put a protecting order barring the invention supplies in query from being shared, however the decide rejected that argument. She mentioned she advised the attorneys to not share any discovery with legal professionals within the ongoing civil case repeatedly all through the trial.
Masterson, 47, was first charged with rape in 2020 and now faces as much as 30 years to life in jail. He will likely be sentenced on Aug. 4.
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