ABC's defense attorney in the "Desperate Housewives" trial said Wednesday in closing arguments that Nicollette Sheridan's case brought a certain word to mind.
"Desperate" is how Adam Levin characterized the plaintiffs in Sheridan's $6 million wrongful firing case.
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The actress says she was fired from the show in February 2009 as retaliation for complaining that the show's creator Marc Cherry had struck her in the head during a taping on Sept. 24, 2008. On Tuesday, a battery charge against Cherry was dropped from the case.
Cherry and former ABC Studios president Mark Pedowitz have testified that the decision to kill off Sheridan’s character Edie Britt came on May 22, 2008.
Levin told the jury that the suggestion by Sheridan's team that ABC's witness had all confirmed the same timeline for killing off her character as part of a conspiracy was laughable.
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"They would have you believe that 10 good citizens of California conspired together and committed perjury," he said.
Then he pointed to testimony from former NBC business affairs vice-president Mark Pedowitz and former ABC president Steve McPherson, both of whom said they had signed off on dispatching Sheridan's character four months before the alleged slapping incident.
"Mark Pedowitz is at the CW now, a rival of ABC's. What incentive would he have to lie and commit perjury?" Levin asked. "Steve McPherson is no longer working in entertainment. What incentive would he have?"
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Levin said the key to the case was the timeline, which he then presented to the court in a series of exhibits which included writers notes from May of 2008 that referred to the plan to kill off Edie Britt.
Cherry, he said, "wanted to kill her off for creative reasons — to shock and surprise the audience and perhaps increase viewership and water cooler talk, and ad revenue."
He noted further that Pedowitz has testified that Cherry had come to him with a plan to kill off Edie Britt back in the show's third season.
The plaintiffs' case was based on the testimony of two former writers on "Desperate Housewives" who disagreed on key facts, Levin said, referring to Lori Kirkland Baker and Jeff Greenstein.
"Baker said that there was no discussion of killing off Edie Britt prior to the fall of 2008," Levin noted. "Greenstein disagreed."
He noted that Greenstein was a friend of Sheridan's and that the two had even celebrated their shared birth dates together. He said that Baker had, prior to Sheridan's filing of the suit, sought out Sheridan's attorney Mark Baute to discuss her own suit against Cherry and ABC.
Levin also sought to shoot down the idea that Sheridan had been wronged financially. He noted that she had been paid $875,000 for five episodes following her character's death, "when she appeared for a total of 15 seconds" as the ghost of Edie Britt.
Levin was to continue his closing argument after the lunch break and, following short rebuttals from each side, the case could go to the jury this afternoon.
After the jury had left the courtroom, Sheridan's attorney Baute approached the bench told Judge Elizabeth Allen White that he thought that the jury had already made a decision.
"Do you know something I don't know?" the judge asked.
"Just a feeling," Baute said.