*Vanessa Bryant has scored a legal victory in her lawsuit against the four Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who shared gruesome photos of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and the seven others who died in the helicopter crash last year.
According to the Los Angeles Times, U.S. District Judge John F. Walter ruled that Vanessa can obtain the deputies’ names and add them to her lawsuit against the sheriff’s department and county. The L.A. County lawyers pushed to keep the names sealed to protect the deputies from online threats and harassment.
In his ruling, Walter wrote… “Indeed where the case involves allegations of police misconduct, the public has a vested interest in assessing the truthfulness of the allegations of official misconduct, and whether agencies that are responsible for investigating and adjudicating complaints of misconduct have acted properly and wisely.”
READ MORE: Vanessa Bryant Claps Back at Evan Rachel Wood for Calling Kobe a ‘Rapist’
Walter added, “Although the Court recognizes that this case has been the subject of public scrutiny and media attention and that the Deputy Defendants are legitimately concerned that they will encounter vitriol and social media attacks, such concerns, by themselves, are not sufficient to outweigh the public’s strong interest in access,” he wrote.
“Moreover, Defendants’ concern that hackers may attempt to seek out and gain access to the individual deputies’ devices to locate any photographs and publish them is totally inconsistent with their position that such photographs no longer exist,” Walter explained.
We previously reported, the Sheriff’s Dept. tried to keep the photo scandal under wraps, until reporters from the Los Angeles Times exposed the cover-up.
Vanessa filed her lawsuit in September 2020, seeking damages for negligence, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress.
Back in February, she publicly asked the sheriff’s department to release the deputies’ names, writing on Instagram: “They want their names to be exempt from the public,” she said. “Anyone else facing these allegations would be unprotected, named and released to the public.”
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