Vanessa Bryant quietly sobbed in a Los Angeles courtroom Wednesday as her lawyer described for jurors the graphic nature of a photo that a sheriff’s deputy purportedly shared with random people at a bar two days after her NBA superstar husband Kobe Bryant and daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash alongside seven others in January 2020.

The lawyer, Luis Li, said a whistleblower who was at the Baja California Bar & Grill in Norwalk that night was so disturbed by Deputy Joey Cruz’s actions that he filed a formal complaint with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, claiming the deputy was “showing pictures of [Kobe’s] decapitated body.”

In his dramatic opening statement, Li showed jurors a video of Deputy Cruz seated at the bar and holding his cell phone up to a bartender to show him something. The bartender visibly recoils at what he sees and walks away.

“January 26, 2020, was and always will be the worst day of Vanessa Bryant’s life,” Li told the 10-member jury selected earlier Wednesday to hear the expected 10-day trial for the the grieving widow’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Los Angeles County. “County employees exploited the accident. They took and shared pictures of Kobe and Gianna as souvenirs. … They poured salt in an unhealable wound.”


“This case is about accountability. We’re going to prove to you that county employees took pictures and shared them widely,” Li argued, claiming the images were shared in so many ways to so many people, it’s impossible to guarantee a leak won’t happen sometime in the future.”

“Every single day since the county did what it did, Mrs. Bryant and Mr. Chester have the risk, have the fear, have the anxiety, have the terror that they might have to re-live the loss of their family members in the most excruciating way,” he said.

Vanessa Bryant filed her lawsuit eight months after the horrific Jan. 26, 2020, crash, saying she suffered severe emotional distress and became physically “ill” over the thought of strangers “gawking” at grisly images of her husband and 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, in the wreckage of the tragedy.

She alleges multiple sheriff’s deputies “pulled out their personal cell phones and snapped photos of the dead children, parents, and coaches” at the scene “for their own personal gratification.”

“The gratuitous images soon became talked about within the department, as deputies displayed them to colleagues in settings that had nothing to do with investigating the accident. One deputy even used his photos of the victims to try to impress a woman at a bar, bragging about how he had been at the crash site,” her filings allege.

She further claims a Los Angeles County fire official received crash scene photos from colleagues that he later shared with off-duty firefighters and their wives and girlfriends during an awards ceremony at a Hilton hotel in February 2020.

County officials argue the case has no legal merit because no photos ever leaked to the public.

“It is undisputed that the complained-of photos have never been in the media, on the Internet, or otherwise publicly disseminated. Plaintiff Vanessa Bryant has never seen County photos of her family members,” lawyers for the county have argued.

U.S. District Judge John Walter consolidated Bryant’s lawsuit with a similar one filed by Orange County financial adviser Chris Chester, who lost his wife Sarah, and the couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Payton, in the crash.


“This has always been about accountability. We look forward to presenting the facts to a jury,” Bryant’s lawyer Luis Li said to Rolling Stone in a previous statement.

“The fact remains that the county did not cause Ms. Bryant’s loss and, as was promised on the day of the crash, none of the county’s accident site photos were ever publicly disseminated. The county did its job and looks forward to showing that at trial,” Skip Miller, a lawyer representing L.A. County, said in a statement.

Kobe Bryant, 41, was traveling with his daughter and seven others to a youth basketball tournament when his chartered helicopter crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, California amid dense fog, killing all nine people on board.