The Trials of Claus von Bülow: Was There Ever a Crime? — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

0:00What if upgrading your windows and doors didn't mean tightening your budget? Scratch that. What if it meant spending nothing today? For a limited time, Renewal by Anderson is offering no money down, no monthly payments, and no interest for 18 months on a minimum of six. That means beautiful, energy-efficient windows and doors while the payments wait. Visit RenewalByAndersonHome.com today and see how easy it is to buy now and pay later. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators.

0:39Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

1:00June 1985. On the 10th floor of the Harkness Pavilion inside Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, a woman lies in a private room she will never leave on her own. She's not on a respirator. She breathes without help. A tube feeds her through her nose. Private nurses watch her around the clock. And twice a week, someone washes and sets her hair. There are scented flowers on the table and music playing softly in the room. Her name is Martha Von Bulo. Everyone who loves her calls her Sonny, and she has not spoken a word since the winter of 1980. 90 miles away in Providence, a jury has just told the world that the man accused of putting her in that bed is not guilty.

1:48The Klaus Von Bulo trial is finally over, and he is not guilty. Von Bulo was tried twice in a soap opera setting for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife. The first jury found him guilty, but he won a new trial, and this time he was cleared. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty. So ended the second trial of Klaus von Bülow, accused of trying to murder his wife, longer but not as dramatic as the first trial three years ago. Tonight, Klaus von Bülow can go anywhere he likes. Sunny cannot turn her head. The murder trials are the part of this story that ends relatively quickly. Hers is the part that does not.

2:29Her two children from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala von Auerzberg, turn their grief into something that will outlast the case. In 1985, they helped found a national organization for the victims of crime, and they name it for their mother, the Sonny von Bulow National Victim Advocacy Center. In time, it drops her name, but it grows into one of the largest victims' rights groups in America, known today as the National Center for Victims of Crime. That becomes the legacy of Sonny von Bülow. That and the belief that whatever a Rhode Island jury says, someone put her there, condemned her to unconscious bed rest for the rest of her life.

3:11But Klaus does not walk away scot-free. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

3:44AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property. Then they can borrow against your equity or even sell your property long before you realize anything's even wrong. But let me tell you about Home Title Lock. They monitor your property's title 24-7, alert you of any changes, and if you are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to 1 million bucks restoring your title. So when's the last time you checked your title records? You can do it today. Use my promo code Megan at home title lock.com to get a free title history report plus a free trial of million dollar triple lock protection.

4:26So you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's home title lock.com promo code Megan, or use the link in our description. Klaus von Bülow's acquittal ends the state's case. It does not end his stepchildren's. Alexander and Allah cannot put him on trial for the crime again, so they do the one thing the law still allows. They sue him in federal court in Manhattan in a civil case. The number they seek is enormous,$56 million, and the claim behind it is the one the prosecution made twice that he tried to kill their mother for her money. The man who has just cleared his name in a criminal court now has to defend it again in a civil one.

5:08His appellate lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, laid out the stakes back in 1986. Yeah, we see each other all the time. We talk about his ongoing case. He's being sued by his stepchildren for$56 million. The case is not over. And indeed, the American public still remains undecided. One of the reasons I wrote this book is Klaus von Duhlo not only wanted to be acquitted, he wanted to be vindicated. In time, the civil case settles, and the settlement reads like a verdict of its own. Under its reported terms, Klaus gives up every claim to Sonny's fortune and agrees to divorce his wife, who will never know she has been divorced.

5:48In exchange, the lawsuit against him is dropped. He keeps his freedom. He gives up the money the state always said was his motive. One person is caught between the two sides of the family, Cosima, the only child of Klaus and Sonny, who stood by her father through both trials, and it cost her. Sonny's mother, Cosima's grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, cuts Cosima out of her will, an estate valued between$50 and more than$110 million. Cosima lost a share worth about$25 million. The exact figure was never the point. The rift was about a daughter's loyalty to a man the rest of the family believed had tried to kill her mother.

6:35The estrangement is real, and for years, it holds. Through both trials, Cosima and her half-sister, Ala, are not on speaking terms. On the last day of the second trial, Dominic Dunn watches the two of them pass in a courthouse corridor, the first time the two women have laid eyes on each other in three years, and neither one says a word. Later, Allah tells him, she's gotten so beautiful, my mother would be very proud of her. The affection is still there. The rupture is over money and loyalty, and a father the rest of the family cannot forgive. What finally closes the rift is not a scene of forgiveness.

7:17It's a legal document. In December 1987, the same settlement that ends the$56 million lawsuit against Klaus reinstates Cosima's inheritance. The grandmother who had cut Cosima out was dead and her will stood. Ala and Alexander say they have no quarrel with Cosima at this point, and they agreed to restore her to the one-third share their grandmother had first intended all three of them to have. The thing that had split the three of them, Klaus's treatment of Sunny and her money, is no longer a concern. The deeper reconciliation comes the way everything in this family finally does, through Sunny.

8:01Whatever the three of them feel about Klaus, they are bound to the silent woman in the hospital bed. And over the years, all three keep coming back to her room. When she dies in 2008, after 28 years in that bed, her children come together to bury her. Cosima would also spend years caring for her own father, financing and following him when he moves out of the country. She stays close to Klaus for the rest of his life. So what becomes of Klaus von Bülow? Free and stripped of the fortune that made him who he wanted to be, he does not retreat. He gives interviews. He goes to parties. He lets the notoriety settle over him and carries it almost with relish.

8:49The image that fixes him in the public mind comes from the trial itself. All through the second trial, while a jury is weighing whether or not he tried to murder his wife, Klaus spends his weekends back in New York. There, his lover and public relations strategist, Andrea Reynolds, has moved into Sonny's own 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. There, in rooms still full of Sonny's things, the couple entertains. Dominic Dunn, who travels in the same circles, sees what goes on inside. He described it in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. She had moved into Sonny Van Bula's apartment on Fifth Avenue, one of the most beautiful apartments, and they gave a lunch party.

9:36This is during a murder trial with butlers with white gloves and all this kind of stuff. Well, I mean, that's right up my alley, I have to tell you. I mean, and Helmut Newton, the great photographer, a wonderful man, a genius, I think, and a great friend of mine, he photographed Klaus and Andrea in black leather. I don't know if you remember those famous photographs during the trial. The audacity is the point. While on trial for trying to murder his wife, Klaus hosts a lunch party in her apartment with white-gloved butlers serving the guests, then poses in black leather for one of the world's most famous photographers.

10:25And when the acquittal comes, society does not shut its doors to him. In fact, it opens them. Klaus and Andrea make one of their first appearances at a party given by Lady Jean Campbell, a Duke's daughter and a former wife of Norman Mailer. They take a box at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday nights, the house's old society night, where white tie is still the custom, and the same families fill the same boxes they always have. Klaus and Andrea turn up at Mortimer's, the restaurant where Manhattan goes to be seen. Not everyone will have him. At one dinner, a magazine editor says she will walk out if she is seated at his table.

11:07But most of the charm circle takes him back. Dominic Dunn would write that Vambulo's dark and spacious place in social history has been assured. What if upgrading your windows and doors didn't mean tightening your budget? Scratch that. What if it meant spending nothing today? For a limited time, Renewal by Anderson is offering no money down, no monthly payments, and no interest for 18 months on a minimum of six. That means beautiful, energy-efficient windows and doors while the payments wait. Visit RenewalByAndersonHome.com today and see how easy it is to buy now and pay later. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza in Wilmette.

11:52Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. It is Reynolds who has stage managed this whole comeback. She's the one who decided that the cold aristocratic figure the first jury saw needed softening, and she remade his public image for the retrial.

12:32She calls their courtship a ballet of seduction and says he needs a witness to account for his every move. But the romance does not last. Within a few years of the verdict, Reynolds and Klaus quietly part ways. She goes on to marry an English aristocrat, the Honorable Sean Plunkett. Klaus does not stay in New York to be talked about. Dominic Dunn watches Klaus return to society and remains convinced the jury got it wrong. Here he is again with the Television Academy Foundation. In your opinion, guilty? Oh, yes. I felt so. And he hates me a lot, the way I wrote about him. So Klaus moves to London, the city where he first made his name, and settles back into its dinner parties and its opera boxes, as though the last five years had been a long, unpleasant weekend.

13:25He takes a job reviewing plays for a Catholic newspaper. He never again mounts a public campaign to prove his innocence, and by all appearances, he never needs to. He has his verdict, and he is received in the drawing rooms of London again, if not on the scale Sonny's money once paid for. He lives out his years quietly and comfortably, on Cosima's support. He follows the advice of his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, the same advice Alan's given every client who wins a case the public desperately wants them to lose. Alan told me this when we spoke. I gave advice, the same advice I gave O.J. Simpson when we won both cases.

14:05I said, disappear. Nobody wants to see your face. They hate your guts. Go away. and Klaus took my advice, went to England, stayed out of the public light. Through it all, Klaus's reinvention and interviews and parties, Sonny von Bulow does not change at all other than to age. While Klaus dines out first in New York and then in London, his wife lies in the same hospital bed and the argument over what she was and what was done to her carries on above her head and she cannot say a word. Her care costs a fortune, more than half a million dollars a year. Dr. Richard Stock, who has been her physician for nearly 30 years, comes to see her several times a week.

14:54Her room is kept as for a wife being welcomed home. Her own nightgowns, her own skin creams, music in the air, and her children keep watch. Alexander and Ala visit their mother often. When Allah's own daughter is small, she brings the little girl, named Sunny, for her grandmother, into the room, so that Sunny might somehow know she has a granddaughter. They talk to her. They touch her. They tell her about their lives. The years pass, far more of them than anyone imagined. In 1998, at age 67, Sunny is moved to a Manhattan nursing home. Her hair still set, her nightgowns still her own, fresh flowers still by the bed.

15:41And on December 6, 2008, Sunny dies there without ever having woken up. She is 76. Her children release a short statement calling her a woman of grace and dignity and the most loving mother imaginable. A woman lost 28 years of her life. Whoever decided to hurt Sonny von Bulow that day in 1980, this can't possibly have been the desired outcome. As for the public relations around her case, long before Sonny died, the case had already split into competing stories. Alan Dershowitz wrote the defense account in a book called Reversal of Fortune. Reporters like Dominic Dunn wrote the skeptical ones, among them Dunn's own Fatal Charm.

16:28And then came the version most people would remember, a Hollywood movie. The film, also called Reversal of Fortune, arrives in 1990. It does the one thing neither trial could. It gives Sunny a voice. The filmmakers let her narrate the story from inside the coma that silenced her. This was my body. On December 27, 1979, I lay in bed all day. Whether I was asleep or in a coma, later became a subject of dispute. Jeremy Irons plays Klaus and wins the Academy Award for it. He almost turned down the part. He explained why to the Hudson Union Society in 2009. When the movie, Reversal of Fortune, was offered to me, I thought it was a very tasteless idea, because most of the family was still alive and had been through a very difficult, awful time.

17:31And I thought to have a film made about that is a nightmare. So I passed on it a few times. And then my friend Glenn Close persuaded me, she said quite rightly, if I didn't do it, someone else would. Irons would go on to win the Oscar for Best Actor in a leading role in 1991. This is great. Thank you, my co-stars, Ron Silver and Glenn, for finally persuading me to do it. And lastly, if I may cut the call of a telephone to London, where my wife is trying to keep awake in a hotel bedroom, I wish you were here to help me carry this, because you helped me win it. Thank you all. The movie becomes the definitive version of the Von Bulow case.

18:24It makes Sonny famous all over again and dramatizes the doubt at the heart of everything, conveniently avoiding some of the more troubling facts for Klaus, like his quick return to the Newport home three days after Detective Reese asks him about insulin. What the movie fails to do is settle the doubt. No film could possibly answer what two juries could not. Those two juries did not judge the same case. The first heard the state's motive, the mistress, and the$14 million Klaus stood to inherit. The second jury heard none of that. The judge in the second trial barred testimony from the family banker about the will, citing a lack of foundation.

19:08She said there was insufficient evidence that Klaus's potential financial gain, quote, impelled him to allegedly harm Sonny. The move was widely criticized at the time. The second jury did hear a medical defense. The first jury never did. That the science behind the insulin reading was not reliable. That one of Sonny's comas may not have involved insulin at all. And that the needle with insulin found in the infamous black bag looked like it had been dipped in insulin, not used to inject an actual person. One jury convicted Klaus von Bülow. a higher court, threw out that conviction. A second jury acquitted him, and that verdict was final.

19:53Two juries, two opposite conclusions, and in the end, only the acquittal stood. Both were asked the same question. Did Klaus von Bülow try to kill his wife? Beneath that question, a harder one. Was either coma caused intentionally at all? Alan Dershowitz has never claimed to know the answer. The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted coma. That's the balance of evidence. Even if this were a civil case, not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence. The preponderance favors innocence. That doesn't mean he's innocent. That means the evidence isn't there to convict.

20:38I don't know whether he's guilty. Sonny von Bulow knew. She was in the room both times. The one witness who knew everything was unable to tell any of it, frozen instead in an unreachable state. This is all you can know. All you can be told. When you get where I am, you will know the rest. More than a century ago, an American writer published a story called The Lady or the Tiger. In the tale, a barbaric king decides guilt or innocence through a public spectacle. An accused person must choose between two identical doors. Behind one wastes a tiger that would kill him. Behind the other, a woman he must immediately marry.

21:29When the king discovers that his daughter is secretly in love with a young man on the royal court. He sends the man into the arena to choose between a tiger and a beautiful woman his daughter deeply resents. The princess learns which door is which. From inside the arena, her lover looks to her for guidance. She signals toward the door on the right, and he opens it without hesitation. The story ends without showing what lies beyond that open door. Did the princess save the man she loved, knowing he would marry another woman, or did jealousy cause her to send him to the tiger? The writer never tells us.

22:11Was it the lady or the tiger? The reader is left to decide. The Von Bulow case has its own two doors. Behind one is the defense's version, an unhappy, self-destructive woman whose medical crises became a murder case through fear, unreliable memory, and flawed science. Behind the prosecution's door, a husband who twice tried to kill his wife and whose money built a defense powerful enough to escape a second conviction. The two juries in this case opened two different doors, but neither could say what actually happened inside Clarendon Court. The answer stayed forever with Sonny and Klaus, who died in London in 2019.

22:59Of course, we all have our opinions. I have mine. What do you think happened to Sonny von Bulow? Send me an email at megan at megankelly.com. We'll be back Monday evening with another case, this one out of the nation's capital. For MK Confidential, I'm Megan Kelly.

23:23Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the education section of a resume, you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills First Hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars, skilled through alternative routes. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage, because hiring managers who start with skills are 60 % more likely to find a successful hire. Hire Skills First. Learn why at tearthepaperceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.