Dan Abrams Seems Skeptical Of ‘I Thought It Was A Reality Show’ Defense In Fla. Hit Man Trial
Back in April, when Good Morning America first reported the murder solicitation case in which Dalia Dippolito claimed she only hired a hitman to kill her husband because she thought she was on a reality show, ABC News legal analyst and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams called the story “one of the craziest” he’d ever seen. It’s a couple of weeks later and things haven’t gotten any less strange. The police who arrested Dippolito are now saying they lied to get her to sign a waiver by saying her interrogation videos would be used for another reality show, Cops. Back on GMA, Abrams explained why that admission wouldn’t be as important here as it would in most cases.
The whole thing has more twists than any reality TV show ever could. Dippolito got a guy she knew to hook her up with a hitman. That guy then actually tipped off the police who sent an undercover officer to pretend to be the killer and get the money from Dippolito. The police then arrested her and pretended that her husband, Mike Dippolito, was dead. They recorded her reaction to both that news as well as the reveal of the undercover officer and her husband’s actual living status and got her to sign a waiver allowing them to use the footage by lying and saying it was for Cops. Now that the trial is underway, Dippolito is claiming she thought the whole thing was for a reality show and that the fake hit man idea was actually her husband’s who was in on it the whole time. To make things even better, as a teenager, she appeared on a real reality show, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, in a Candid Camera-style prank involving – you guessed it – a fake hit man. Forget reality TV, Charlie Kaufman couldn’t write this thing.
Anyway, the reason Abrams feels that the Cops lie won’t affect the case is that it will be completely overshadowed by Dippolito’s claims that she thought she was acting for a reality show the whole time.
“If the defense had just been about what the cops did here, that the cops were negligent, that the cops didn’t behave well, the cops didn’t do their job well, this would become a very significant point. And, I think, the more the defense can make this feel icky and muddle what the investigators and prosecutors did, the better off they are. But this defense is much more than ‘The cops were negligent.’ It’s ‘The cops were negligent and my husband, who I thought was dead for a second and now don’t think was dead and now is actually alive actually orchestrated this entire thing to make it seem like it was a reality show.’ So there’s a little bit more here than just ‘Did the cops do their job?'”
Abrams explained that the police would need to get some corroborating witnesses and, especially, Dippolito herself on the stand to explain this whole “reality TV defense.”
Watch Abrams discuss the strange story in the clip from ABC below:
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