- Vanessa Bryant settled her claims with LA County over illicit photos of Kobe Bryant's remains.
- Vanessa Bryant secured a $15 million verdict against the county after an August 2022 trial, but settled remaining claims.
Los Angeles County has agreed to pay Kobe Bryant's widow Vanessa Bryant $28.5 million as part of a settlement deal that brings Vanessa Bryant's longstanding case against county first responders who shared photos of Kobe Bryant's dead body to a close.
According to court documents released Tuesday, the county will pay Vanessa Bryant $28.5 million to settle all of her remaining claims. The lump sum reflects the $15 million Vanessa Bryant was awarded after an emotional trial in August 2022, as well as future claims from her daughters Natalia, 20, Bianka, 6, and Capri, 3.
A source close to the Bryant family told Insider that Vanessa Bryant intends to donate her portion of the settlement, $15 million, to the Mamba and Mambacita Sports Foundation, an organization that honors her husband and daughter by offering athletic services to underserved students.
At the trial, Vanessa Bryant and Los Angeles County first responders testified about the fallout from the grisly crash on January 26, 2020. She and Chris Chester, who lost his wife Sarah and daughter Peyton in the crash, had sued the county on constitutional privacy violations, seeking damages for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.
Ultimately, jurors found that the first responders from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles County Fire Department had improperly taken the crash site photos and Bryant's lawyers argued that only the NTSB and Coroner's office needed to take photos of the crash.
Bryant testified at the trial about the suicidal ideation she dealt with in the aftermath of the crash, compounded by learning about the photos first responders had taken and shared.
"Today marks the successful culmination of Mrs. Bryant's courageous battle to hold accountable those who engaged in this grotesque conduct. She fought for her husband, her daughter, and all those in the community whose deceased family were treated with similar disrespect," Luis Li, Bryant's attorney, told Insider in a statement. "We hope her victory at trial and this settlement will put an end to this practice."
Attorneys for the County said the settlement was "fair and reasonable."
"The $28,850,000 settlement includes the verdict awarded by the federal jury in August 2022, and further resolves all outstanding issues related to pending legal claims in state court, future claims by the Bryant children, and other costs, with each party responsible for its respective attorneys' fees," Mira Hashmall, partner at the Miller Barondess law firm and lead trial counsel for LA County in the Bryant-Chester case, told Insider in a statement. "We hope Ms. Bryant and her children continue to heal from their loss."
A landmark trial
Key to the case was Vanessa Bryant's pained testimony about learning via a Los Angeles Times news story that several of the first responders meant to tend to potential survivors at the crash site instead took photos of the victims' remains, with a handful of individuals sharing the photos.
"I ran to the side of the house and broke down — I wanted to run and scream," Bryant said on the stand. "It was like having the sensation of wanting to run off a pier into the ocean, but I can't escape my body."
After the leak, Bryant testified, she felt she had two choices: "try to live my life or end it."
Bryant said she felt "helpless, angry, disgusted" that strangers were gawking at the photos of her loved ones' corpses, and added that she and her daughters live in fear of the photos surfacing every day.
"The grief is from their loss," Bryant said. "The fear and anxiety is from those photos," adding that she still suffers panic attacks.
The trial also offered a roadmap for holding police accountable for illicit photography, from California to Memphis, Tennessee, after a Memphis PD officer took and shared a photo of Tyre Nichols as officers beat him to death in January.
The trial put a spotlight on law enforcement's use of site photography in California
The trial provided a window into macabre and cavalier elements of local law enforcement culture, featuring testimony from a private citizen and bartender who said that a Sheriff's Deputy had shown crash site photos while drinking, while another whistleblower testified that the photos were shared among firefighters at an awards gala.
Attorneys for the county maintained that the photos are "permanently deleted," and that first responders needed to take "site photography" to relay to the command post the nature of the scene, considering the crash, weather conditions, and ensuing media frenzy on the day of the crash.
Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva— who ordered staff to delete photos days after the crash and orchestrated a cover-up around the photos — testified that only 'God knows' if the photos still exist.
February 28, 2023: This article has been updated to reflect the amount of the settlement that Vanessa Bryant intends to donate to charity.