To update an old adage: those who can’t do, teach talk about it on TV.
I’m not really surprised. I thought FOX would snatch her up first, but I’m guessing NBC had an in given Savannah Gummy Guthrie’s husband worked as a consultant for Johnny’s legal team. And this fits in with NBC’s pattern of generally being terrible - see: Trump, Weinstein, Lauer et al. The much-ballyhooed “post-#MeToo” era doesn’t seem to be much different from what it was before. Go figure.
Anyway, I think this was the inevitable next step for Camille, since if the trial showed anything, she’s not that bright. Compared to Ben Chew, who was fine, Camille came off as a shrill Legally Blonde wannabe who watched too many an episode of Law & Order and delivered each question with the cadence of Elle Woods trying to catch Chutney in a shower slip-up, even when it resulted in embarrassment. But good ol’ misogyny and victim-blaming won out in the end, so she was able to keep her reputation and TikTok deification intact. Plus, people tend to put a lot of unnecessary stock in celebrity lawyers. It’s that whole “the best money can buy” fantasy, which is totally bogus. The late prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who put away Manson, tackled this brilliantly in his book about the O.J. case, Outrage, in the ‘90s. I took pictures of the relevant pages. If there were a PCD2009 book club, that would be at the top of the syllabus. A total must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of law, media, and celebrity.
In it, Bugliosi pointed out that O.J.’s acclaimed “Dream Team” was largely incompetent with an unimpressive track record going into the trial: Johnnie Cochran was mainly a civil lawyer whose last big case at the time was Michael Jackson’s child molestation drama, which he resolved with a $20 million dollar settlement from Michael to the little boy, and let’s face it, it doesn’t take expert legal maneuvering to tell someone to hand over a wad of cash; Robert Shapiro had never handled a murder trial before, bar the Christian Brando case, which ended with his client pleading guilty; F. Lee Bailey’s last big client was Patty Hearst, and he lost; and Alan Dershowitz wasn’t even a defense lawyer - he was only there to build an appeals case. Yet at the time, the media fell over themselves to praise these guys by noting their boldfaced clientele, not caring for the specifics of any of the cases or even if they won or lost them. Just by being associated with celebrities, they were decreed to be the best of the best.
The same applies here. By virtue of her being hired by a beloved movie star, Camille was assumed to be the “best” despite having no significant track record before taking the case. And because of this assumption, people elevated her performance in the courtroom to a stroke of brilliance, treating every line of questioning, no matter how inane (remember when she tried to ask Amber about her song choice for a Flipagram video?), like it was a masterclass in cross-examination. And chances are if you expect greatness, you’ll eventually convince yourself of it. We tend to see what we want to.
The converse is true, too. Because of Amber’s loss, a lot of people, including her supporters, point fingers at her lawyers and say they didn’t do a good enough job. I disagree. Even though the evidence was on her side, there was no winning with a jury who, by their own admission, thought she and Johnny ’abused each other’ but still decided against her; who said that if Amber kept her mouth shut, maybe Johnny would’ve helped her with her career, disregarding Johnny’s own text messages that were shown in court where he conspired to get Amber fired from Aquaman, ages before her op-ed was even published. You can’t win against stupid.