breaks up with one and goes to the other only after great deliberation and inner turmoil and consultation with her bestest of friends. These are guys who are much older than her who use her for sex and tell her what to do. And in Mulrenin's case, manipulate her with money and drugs like only a pro can, and Scott cannot compete with. And Mandi feels physically threatened by them. The basic narrative of Mandi's defense, was that Mandi was hanging out with a new guy, running free, meeting new friends at the strip club where Scott does not want her to be. And Scott is some angry dominant violent guy who tracked her down and came and got her and took her back. And Mandi is a total submissive, who fell in line. The basic principal of that is true, just not to the extreme degree Mandi's lawyers represented. First, nobody tried to tie anybody up. And so Scott was not as psycho and aggressive a woman beater as Mandi's lawyers described. But there was a technical reason Mandi's laywers went with that narrative, which I will get to later. Second, Mandi did not choose to leave Scott and go to Mulrenin and have sex with him, and then go back to Scott, in the sort of standard romantic sense that jurors would assume, and found hard to believe. It wasn’t clear the kind of relationships Mandi was involved in. Mandi is a stripper and former teenage hooker with a brain injury. She went to Mulrenin and had sex with him because she has a fetish to have sex with old guys for cocaine or money, or just because she likes to have sex with every person she remotely likes, and to be raped. And she went back to Scott because she has no job and no place else to go and nobody else to go to, and still needed a place to keep her dog. And because psychologically, it is easy for someone like Scott to convince someone like Mandi that everything which happens to him is her fault for cheating on him, and she is in debt to him. And Mandi is eager to please everyone, whoever she is with. Third, Mulrenin is an aggressive asshole sex addict who brings home employees all the time, and would very likely escalate if Scott knocked on his door. Mulrenin would probably even punch Mandi. So Mandi did not leave behind as much of a saint as the jury was led to believe, to go back to as much of a monster as the jury was led to believe. So if Scott was not quite as much of a monster as Mandi's lawyers described, and Mandi is 10,000 times easier than the jurors would ever have guessed, and exercises a lot less discretion than most girls would going from guy to guy, and Mulrenin started a fight that got him shot in the leg and jumped off his own balcony for no reason, it makes a lot more sense that Mandi went from Scott to Mulrenin and back to Scott like nothing happened. Jurors took it as totally trying to blame Scott for everything, when Mandi should have been more angry with him in the crazy narrative described. And more serious, not using credit cards. Like Bark was portraying Mandi to be more of a helpless innocent angel than they believed her to be. Though they didn't have that same problem with how Bark portrayed Mulrenin. And if Mandi really thinks Scott is such a monster and disagrees with what he did and liked Mulrenin, then why did she go back to Scott? Is she really that much of a helpless thing? Why would she want to hang out with a psycho? Even the way Mandi really looked the part in court, was not enough to convince them. The jurors did not look so great themselves. Mandi looked stupid and helpless, but she looked smart relative to some of the people in the jury box. That is why there are 12 jurors, they can't all be stupid. I thought there must be two or three in there smart and thoughtful enough to understand what really happened, and at the very least get a hung jury. Though I couldn't say which ones just by looking at them. But I thought they were in there. I wasn’t remembering the little problem that jealous boyfriends don't usually show up in booties. Smart people know that. When I pointed out Smolarek’s new lie about the gloves, Mandi's lawyer Bark said "Yeah, but it doesn't matter because none of it's Mandi's DNA." It doesn't matter if the jury thinks Scott showed up wearing gloves and booties like zeroth degree murder? In the end it did matter. Bark was worried there wouldn’t be a single juror smart enough to understand who Mandi was, and the subtle points of his narrative, and the concept of reasonable doubt. What if you are just smart enough to remember the booties? It was a distracting bump on the road up Mount Smart. The way Alison Smolarek said "Hi" to Mandi's lawyer Carrie in court, I think Carrie just didn't want to go after her friend in the local community. The prosecutor will lie zealously about some little slut from Orange County all day. IV-76