“Were Kobe Bryant’s remains among the photos?” Bryant’s attorney Louis Lee asked before Jordan cut him off. “I need a break, I need a break,” Jordan said as he stood up. “Excuse me your honor,” he said as he left the stand for the first of three times. At one point, Lee noted under questioning that Jordan left with his lawyer each time. Steven Haney, Jordan’s attorney, told CNN that his client’s exits from the courtroom were not about legal issues, but a reaction to “a medical condition related to attending the crash scene that is causing him trauma.” Jordan has repeatedly said he doesn’t remember taking photos because his memory has been turned off since he retired in early 2021. Later, when asked by another plaintiff’s attorney about whether he took pictures of specific body parts, Jordan said, “The way the whole scene looked, it’s going to haunt me forever and excuse me because I’m going to take another break.” At times Jordan deflected pointed questions from lawyers about what exactly he was photographing that day and why. “The only reason I’m sitting here is because somebody put my name in this whole thing,” Jordan said on the witness stand. He says a supervisor asked him to photograph the scene as part of the fire department’s response to the crash. “Maybe that was the day I should have been defiant,” Jordan said defiantly. At one point, Haney, Jordan’s attorney who is not one of the attorneys representing the LA County defendant, objected from near the courtroom to a question asked by the plaintiffs, saying “ask and answer.” When the judge realized who was making the objection, he instructed Haney to make no further objections. Vanessa Bryant’s federal civil lawsuit alleges the county invaded her privacy and failed to fully restrict the dissemination of the photos, leaving her living in fear that the photos could be released online at any time. Los Angeles County argues that the photos were part of the required accident scene photography and that it adequately contained their dissemination, arguing that the photos never appeared online. The testimony continued with a series of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies receiving and sharing the sensitive photos with each other, one of whom was a trainee who showed the photos to a bartender he considered a friend. “Looking back, do you think there was any reason to get those photos of the accident?” plaintiff attorney Craig Lavoie asked. “Looking at it today, no.” Deputy Joey Cruz said, though he claimed he initially accepted them thinking he might later be assigned to write a report on the incident.
Of the bartender, Cruz added, “He’s a close friend that I hang out with… I took it too far, which I shouldn’t have done.” Cruz will return to the witness stand on Tuesday.