Anna Nicole Smith's Doctors Warned Of "Pharmaceutical Suicide"
LOS ANGELES — The attorney for a doctor who treated the late model Anna Nicole Smith says Dr. Sandeep Kapoor is openly gay and that she is outraged by claims in search warrant affidavits that he had a sexual relationship with Smith.
Attorney Ellyn Garafalo told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Kapoor never had a sexual or social relationship with his patient, and a picture of them together which is cited in the affidavits was taken at a gay pride celebration they both attended.
"These search warrant affidavits are based on insufficient information and they are wrong in material respects," Garafalo said in an interview with the AP. "The prime example is that Dr. Kapoor is openly gay and never slept with Anna Nicole Smith or any other woman"
A series of recently unsealed search warrants refers to a video cassette clip shown on the TV show "Inside Edition."
Those documents say the clip "showed Dr. Kapoor and Anna Nicole Smith in a reclined position in a nightclub-type setting. Dr. Kapoor had his shirt off, his arms was around Anna Nicole Smith, and he was kissing and nuzzling Anna Nicole Smith's neck." They quote a consultant to the state medical board as saying the contact on the video "went beyond any therapeutic touching and appeared sexual in nature."
Garafalo said the doctor and patient encountered each other in a bar after a gay pride parade, but did not have an ongoing social relationship.
Garafalo said the mistaken interpretation of the photo is an example of errors that permeated the decision to charge Kapoor with illegally providing Smith with controlled drugs. She said evidence in the case will exonerate Kapoor.
District attorney spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons declined comment saying, "The case has not yet gone to preliminary hearing and it would be inappropriate for us to be making comments outside court."
Another defendant, psychiatrist Khristine Eroshevich, also is accused of an improper sexual relationship with the former Playboy model based on photographs found on a computer of the two women naked together in a bathtub "in various intimate embraces."
Eroshevich's lawyer, Adam Braun, declined to comment directly on the pictures but said that the relationship between Smith and the psychiatrist began as one of friendship and evolved into a patient-doctor relationship. He said they were next door neighbors before Smith moved to the Bahamas.
The complaint against Kapoor and Eroshevich also names Smith's former attorney, Howard K. Stern, as conspiring with the doctors to provide illegal drugs to Smith.
The search warrant affidavits suggest Stern put his name on prescriptions for drugs that were given to Smith, and claim that a total of 44 different medications were prescribed for Smith under a number of other names, including Stern's.
Smith died in Feb. 8, 2007 in Florida of "acute combined drug intoxication" with the autopsy showing drugs that caused her death were chloral hydrate combined with Benadryl, clonazepam, diazepam and lorazepam. She had also been prescribed high doses of Methadone and other drugs.
Affidavits filed with the search warrants in 2007 depicted Eroshovich as prescribing ever-increasing doses of controlled substances including powerful sleep medications and antidepressants. A pharmacist who was asked to fill prescriptions transmitted for Eroshevich by Kapoor refused the request and said he thought, "They are going to kill her with this."
The pharmacist, Ira Freeman, told investigators he was so concerned that he called Dr. Greg Thompson, a former director of the Drug and Poison Control Center at the University of Southern California, to get his opinion of the list of drugs.
"Ira Freeman read him the list over the phone and from what he recalled the dosages were 'outrageously high.' Dr. Thompson stated they might work for a drug addict under supervised care or with a dying cancer patient in a hospital or "if you were going to kill someone."
The investigator who interviewed Thompson said that when he was shown the fax Eroshovich sent to Freeman with the list of requested drugs, he commented, "crazy" and "that's insane."
Braun said Eroshevich's defense would be based on her friendship with Smith and her desire to help her after Smith's son died in the Bahamas.
"Dr. Eroshevich tried her best to help her friend and patient Anna to get through a very difficult personal tragedy, the loss of a child," said Braun.
He said that even Thompson acknowledged that the psychiatrist was "well intentioned" but was operating outside her field of expertise.
The affidavit said that a nanny who worked for Smith after the birth of her daughter claimed that Stern and Eroshevich "would crush pills, heat them to turn them into liquid and inject Anna Nicole Smith." After the injections, she said, Smith would be " like you were drunk," falling in the house and sleeping for two or three days at a time.
A declaration from Dr. Jill Klessig, the district medical consultant for the Medical Board of the California department of consumer Affairs, said the only way to correctly determine if the concerns about the prescriptions are correct is to obtain complete medical records for Smith.
Garafalo said she was dismayed that the conclusions reached in 2007 were released when it took two and half more years for authorities to examine records and issue a complaint.
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LINDA DEUTSCH | 09/22/09 10:08 PM |