Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (44 page)

T
hrough it all, Jodi sat fiddling at the defense table. Jodi seemed to relish the experts; they were here for her, supporting her side of the story with technical terms and educated assumptions, while their presence validated her and stroked her ego. They were even willing to fall on the sword of Juan Martinez to do so. For a very limited amount of time, Jodi could fantasize that she was understood and was even winning. Dressed in a brown shirt beneath an ivory V-neck sweater, she appeared pleased to see the next defense witness, a domestic violence expert with a national reputation.

Alyce LaViolette was a psychotherapist who was in court to support Jodi’s claims of abuse. Until this trial, LaViolette had a great reputation as an advocate for abused women. Her lengthy and impressive résumé spanned twenty pages and included lists of her projects—both paid and volunteer—on behalf of victims of spousal abuse. One of her initiatives,
Alternatives to Violence,
was one of the first programs in the United States for men who were abusing their domestic partners. LaViolette had developed domestic violence training programs for the Departments of Children and Family Services in both Los Angeles and Orange County, California, had published numerous articles on the topic, and had received awards for her work on behalf of women. What’s unclear is whether she initially knew she was risking her reputation by taking the stand in support of the defendant in a case that had become increasingly emotionally charged as the testimony progressed.

Testifying at the
State of Arizona v. Jodi Ann Arias
trial would not be her first time in the witness box. She had occasionally served as an expert witness in both criminal and civil court. She had first been contacted by Jodi’s attorneys in September 2011, after Jodi had claimed she had killed Travis in self-defense, in a “justifiable murder.” Jodi’s attorneys had wanted LaViolette to establish that, at the hands of Travis, Jodi was an abused woman, and thus she believed her life was in imminent danger. The plan was to make it seem reasonable for Jodi to believe the words Travis allegedly spoke in the bathroom—“I’m gonna fucking kill you”—while supposedly lunging at her. However, it was unclear whether LaViolette truly understood the stakes at play in the trial. By putting herself in the position of defending a habitual liar, she ran a risk—to herself professionally and to the cause she’d spent a lifetime supporting—and in the process she would soon be accused of betraying the millions of genuine victims of domestic violence.

LaViolette was not a psychologist, so she was not licensed to administer psychological tests. She reached her conclusion that Jodi was abused by analyzing the defendant’s journals, as well as a few of Travis’s. She had also examined some of their texts, emails, and IM exchanges and the statements Jodi had made to authorities. Finally, she and Jodi had spent more than forty-four hours in private conversation, and she would use those conversations as well.

LaViolette was going to run into a lot of the same problems that tripped up the witness before her, Richard Samuels. Critics say like Samuels, she, too, had bought hook, line, and sinker into the sex, lies, and audiotapes propagated as the truth by Jodi. Juan Martinez, aware of where she was going, was already chomping at the bit to grill her. Alyce took the stand on the afternoon of Day 36, March 25, looking confident in a bright blue blazer, her gray hair trimmed short. She may have later rued the day.

After being sworn in, the middle-aged professional took her place in the witness box. Soon she was giving the jury a tutorial in domestic violence using a chart called the “Continuum of Aggression and Abuse,” a tool she had developed that she used in her assessment of domestic violence. She broke down her continuum into five columns, each labeled with a type of domestic abuse, increasing in severity from left to right. They are: “Common Couple Argument,” “High Conflict,” “Abuse,” “Battering,” and “Terrorism.”

LaViolette spent nearly two days defining a range of abusive behavior exhibited at each level. She also laid out the basics of “what is a battered woman?” and “why someone battered would stay.”

“When someone who loves us is tearing us apart, nothing hurts worse than that,” she said. It wasn’t until her third day of testimony that LaViolette started to apply her continuum to Jodi and Travis, and according to her, the most severe that seemed to apply to them was the third column, “Abuse,” considered low-level domestic violence, although she would testify to some characteristics at the next level, “Battering.” There was some corroborative evidence of severe name calling in late May 2008, which LaViolette said was character assassination, but there were extenuating circumstances that LaViolette apparently didn’t consider. Beyond that, it was all Jodi’s word and her word just didn’t count for much. On television, there was a lot of debate over whether in treating Jodi like a truth teller this witness threatened her own credibility in a big way.

Willmott first asked the witness what she knew about Jodi’s childhood.

“I learned that in Jodi’s family there was a certain amount of physical discipline, some, which I would consider went over the line and some that didn’t . . . when you leave welts on a child, and that was information that I was given, that they were hit with spoons . . . between Jodi’s mother and father. Jodi’s father was controlling and manipulative and made derogatory statements if her mother gained weight . . . he was jealous and didn’t want [Jodi’s mother] to spend time with family members, particularly her sisters,” LaViolette reported, saying she had found support for this description of Jodi’s father in statements from some family members. Given the lack of other corroboration of Jodi’s claims, one has to wonder if some members of Jodi’s family were inclined to try to lend support to her claim of abuse because her life was on the line.

LaViolette also said that she read interviews with Jodi’s family members, and according to her, Jodi’s father had supposedly made sexually inappropriate comments to Jodi about her breasts and butt. “He would talk about Jodi’s body, about her boobs being too small, her friend had a smaller booty than she did,” LaViolette recounted.

According to LaViolette, Jodi also explained that her mother had taught her to stay in a relationship, even if it wasn’t what she wanted. “Through thick and thin,” LaViolette said. She added that Jodi’s grandparents believed that Jodi had issues with her mother, because Sandy Arias had not protected her daughter from her father.

The defense expert next described Jodi and Travis’s first meeting at the PPL conference in Las Vegas. “He pursued her and it was pretty exciting, and I believe that was when he told her that he was Mormon and she was very impressed with the family values of the Mormon faith . . . she was very disappointed that she wasn’t married and didn’t have children,” she said, remarking on the “power difference” between the two. “When someone has power, when someone is a high roller, when someone is prestigious in their faith, when someone courts you and woos you and pulls you into a situation, there’s a power difference.” LaViolette had already told the jurors that when she does couples counseling she looks for power differences. That dynamic can foster abuse, and she had found such an imbalance between Jodi and Travis.

Jodi was in the market for a husband when she met Travis, LaViolette recounted. At first the relationship had not been abusive, but Jodi was particularly vulnerable around the time she met him, having just gotten out of a long-term relationship and wanting to please Travis. LaViolette opined that may have been why she didn’t say no to the oral sex that first weekend at the Hugheses’ house, accepting the story as Jodi had painted it.

“I think that one of the things that happens is, for many young women it is very difficult to say no, especially if they’re attracted to someone . . . when they feel pressured, they’re not sure how to stand up for themselves. This certainly isn’t every woman. I’m not trying to say that at all. But when you’re a more vulnerable woman, when you’re not an assertive woman and maybe when your boundaries aren’t good, you’re much more likely,” the defense expert suggested. Given that the court and the country had just watched Jodi go toe to toe with one of the toughest prosecutors in anyone’s memory, this statement struck some as absurd. It didn’t fit that Jodi could be so dismissive and insolent with the prosecutor and still be considered non-assertive.

LaViolette weighed in on Jodi’s spirituality. “Ms. Arias’s baptism was very important to her,” LaViolette said. Jodi told her it was extraordinarily special to her that Travis baptized her personally. They were sharing a spiritual experience, and it demonstrated a connection between the two, she said. Some journalists taking notes began to squirm, as they had been studying Jodi for months, a couple of them for years. Perhaps this expert would have fared better had she given Jodi a lie detector test first. Her wide-eyed acceptance of Jodi’s stories rankled not just the Alexander family but even some reporters and TV producers who found her analysis wildly naïve or perhaps even willfully naïve.

LaViolette explained how Jodi told her that she and Travis engaged in anal sex after the baptism, something Travis’s friends doubt occurred on such a sacred day. “The conflict is, there is sex and she’s now part of that. She’s in a sexual relationship, she’s not supposed to be sexual in the same way, but she’s got a spiritual mentor who’s telling her that the sex isn’t so bad and they can do this and so she’s now implicated, she’s now part of it,” she said.

The next piece of testimony was a potential bombshell for the defense, perhaps the biggest yet. The prosecution had tried to keep the email exchange between Travis and his best friends, Chris and Sky Hughes, in January 2007 out of evidence. LaViolette said the exchange pointed to a pattern of Travis’s emotional abuse of women. Although the jury would not see and read the actual email, the judge did allow LaViolette to paraphrase it.

Sky had written that Travis had issues with women, and if her sister wanted to date Travis she would forbid it. “There was reference to a particular woman and his manipulation of that woman,” LaViolette recalled. “There was information about Mr. Alexander calling Ms. Arias a skank and then acting like it was a joke. There was information about the way he ignored her in public places and would not allow her to put pictures of them up in places where other people could see them. Just basic ways he treated her, or they felt he mistreated her . . . that they indicated were abusive, that he called rough around the edges and they called abusive.”

When testimony resumed the following day, LaViolette picked up where she had left off the day before. There was no doubt in her opinion that Jodi’s relationship with Travis fit the pattern of an abuse victim and abuser. First, the Hugheses suggested in January 2007 that she “move out of the relationship” with Travis based on his history with women. Then, six months later, Jodi discovered he was cheating on her. Still, she held out hope that they’d be together forever one day. LaViolette described Travis as “jealous, controlling, deceptive, and manipulative” and theorized the abuse escalated over the course of their relationship.

From Jodi’s testimony, the jury was already familiar with Jodi’s four claims of physical abuse at the hands of Travis, but LaViolette walked through them all once more—from the first occasion in October 2007, when, after a terrific argument, she said he shoved her, pushing her to her knees, to the last encounter in April of 2008, when he purportedly choked her until she nearly lost consciousness after she claimed she handed him a mental health services pamphlet to address his supposed affinity for boys. After itemizing these examples of supposed abuse LaViolette put forth an explanation for Jodi’s overkill of Travis. “When somebody is defending their life, I think sometimes people do more than they need to do,” she explained at one point during her testimony.

What many found flawed about her assessment was her uncritical assumption that Jodi had been truthful when she had detailed a handful of violent encounters with Travis. Critics complained that she simply accepted Jodi’s words as the truth; even when Travis’s own words offered stunning clues that there was another side of the story, LaViolette refused to wade into territory that might shatter her pat theories.

Case in point, LaViolette concluded that Travis had committed character assassination against Jodi, particularly on May 26, 2008, during Travis and Jodi’s now infamous text and instant message argument nine days before she killed him. On that day Travis berated Jodi relentlessly, calling her a “freaking whore, cheap whore, corrupted carcass, and a three-hole wonder,” said LaViolette, referring to his sixteen-page instant message diatribe. He had called her names before, but never as angrily as on May 26. The defense got LaViolette to read some of the text and instant messages out loud. Travis had called Jodi a “sociopath” and “evil” and said to her “you are sick and you have scammed me.”

What went unsaid in LaViolette’s testimony, and indeed the whole trial, was speculation about what had caused Travis to get so upset. Travis’s friends had studied his comments during this fight and had come up with their plausible theory about why he would tell Jodi “You have betrayed me worse than any example I could conjur [
sic
],” without mentioning exactly how she had betrayed him. To them, the fact that Travis never clearly says what he was so upset about was telling. Since Jodi had broken into his social media accounts before, it was it’s unlikely that another hacking would have provoked such intense indignation. Only something new, it seems, would have sparked the kind of anger he displayed during this exchange.

One wonders if the defense experts had stopped to ponder the very real possibility that Jodi had informed Travis that she had a tape with his voice, clear as day, indulging in sexual fantasies that would have given his Bishop a coronary. The speculation made sense. After all, it was never made clear why Jodi recorded that sex tape in the first place or whom she intended to play it for. Given that Jodi was clearly capable of slitting someone’s throat ear to ear, it seemed equally possible that she was capable of saying,
Hey, Travis, are you sure you don’t want to take me to Cancún as your date, instead of Mimi Hall? I have something that just might convince you to change your mind. Mimi or Lisa or Deanna or the Bishop would certainly be shocked to hear this. Listen.
A threat like that certainly would have justified Travis’s response when—hurt, angry, and betrayed—he told Jodi, “You are the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” adding that he wanted nothing ever to do with her again. With everything that the American public knew about Jodi’s life, none of this seemed like a stretch. Neither did the fact that two days after this fight erupted over texts and instant messages, the burglary at Jodi’s grandfather’s home occurred, a burglary that resulted in a “stolen” gun of the exact same caliber as the bullet that was found in the head of Travis Alexander.