Maurice “Mo” Brighthaupt is a big man, and Thursday morning all 6-feet-6 inches of him lumbered into Department 104’s witness seat in the second of three days of testimony.
Anna Nicole Smith’s former bodyguard was here as a reluctant prosecution witness for the preliminary hearings that will determine if there is enough evidence to send three members of Smith’s posse to trial.
Those intimates include Smith’s attorney-cum-lover, Howard K. Stern; her psychiatrist, Dr. Khristine Eroshevich and Dr. Sandeep Kapoor.The three were indicted last March on multiple charges for allegedly keeping Smith, the deeply troubled reality TV star and former model, illegally supplied with a nonstop buffet of prescription pain killers and sedatives that included Dilaudid, Methadone, Xanax and chloro hydrate.
Smith’s Feb. 8, 2007, death was attributed to a combined overdose of several drugs, though the accused are not charged with her death.
As a member of Smith’s inner circle, Brighthaupt (pictured above at wedding of Smith and Stern) was able to provide an eyewitness account of Smith’s voracious appetite for drugs and her state of mind during the last days of Smith’s life.
Under Deputy District Attorney Renee Rose’s prodding, Brighthaupt, in a languid drawl, tersely revealed that Smith had become so overcome by drugs that she would occasionally lose control of her bowels while passed out.
During one such incident in the Bahamas, Smith fell into her home’s swimming pool and sank to the bottom, forcing Brighthaupt, a trained paramedic, to dive into the effluence to retrieve and revive her with CPR.
Brighthaupt also recalled how Stern would prepare a tray with a fistful of pills for Smith to consume at specific intervals.
The cause of Smith’s pain, Brighthaupt told both Rose and Eroshevich’s attorney, Adam Braun, was the death of her son, Daniel, and the recent Caesarian delivery her daughter, Dannielynn.
“She was a woman in pain,” Brighthaupt said.
The object of a preliminary hearing is to establish that there is at least enough evidence to warrant a trial. From a distance, with their format of examination and cross-examination, such hearings look like trials, but are somewhat less formal.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys are granted more latitude in their questioning and judges will also, typically, ask witnesses their own questions or attempt to clarify the questions of attorneys.
In this way the hearing most resembles a TV-show version of a criminal trial -- especially when witnesses are permitted to offer extended commentaries of their own.
Still, Superior Court Judge Robert Perry would not allow the questioning to focus on some of the case’s more salacious aspects.
Perry in particular slapped down Rose’s insistence on establishing that Eroshevich was romantically involved with Smith; nor would Perry countenance much digging into an extramarital affair that Brighthaupt admitted to having had at the time of Smith’s death.
Instead, he refocused the questioning on Smith’s drug use.
Smith, Brighthaupt said, often resorted to ingesting the powerful sedative chloro hydrate -- sometimes by “taking a swig” directly from the bottle or with a spoon -- a very large spoon.
