By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (20 page)

The same week that Brooke made her claim and the whole thing broke in the press, in December 2002,
Robbery Homicide Division
was canceled. It was critically acclaimed, but it just didn’t have the ratings to make it. I got the news from CBS executive Les Moonves, and then, two days later, I was arrested. The show wasn’t canceled because I was arrested but the personal drama I was involved in certainly didn’t help anything. Still, I thought the work I was doing was some of my best yet.

Michael Mann had asked me to stay away from Heidi before I even did
Black Hawk Down,
back when we were originally talking about
Robbery Homicide Division.
But at the time, that seemed like a lot to ask. Of course, he was right and my relationship with him was entirely destroyed because of her—a true tragedy because he’d really been something of a father figure to me.

My career was really on the line. A big part of an actor’s job is to stay, if not loved, at least well liked. And look, are you going to turn
on the TV and watch someone you think is a piece of shit who abuses women? No, you’re not.

Even though Heidi was already setting out to destroy me, she still managed to save my life one night when I had a horrible car accident in April 2003. Even though we’d broken up and she wasn’t living with me anymore—and even though, by any reasonable person’s logic, I should have been staying far, far away from her—Heidi and I were still meeting up. And one night after meeting up with her at a hotel, around 3:30
A.M.
, I turned a corner on Benedict Canyon, and I don’t know who was in whose lane but there was another car there and I swerved to avoid hitting it. I wasn’t intoxicated—just tired—and I was going fast. I was probably coming around that corner at 50 miles per hour, and you should be at 20. I couldn’t get control of the car, and I hit the gas to get out of the way, and then I crashed into a wall. My airbag deployed and my head went through the window. It was really cold up there, and all of a sudden, I felt this warmth coming down over my face—I didn’t know at the time it was blood, but that’s what brought me out of the semiconscious state I was in. I saw a light in my rearview mirror; the brake light of the car that I’d avoided. I waved my arm but right after I waved, I watched the brake light go from a very bright color to a pale color and then I watched it drive away. The driver went slow for about ten feet and then raced away. They left me there to die, which leads me to believe the driver must have been drunk, because who else would do something like that?

At that time in Benedict Canyon, all the houses were way off the street and most of them were behind gates. But when I got up and dragged myself over there, I saw that there was a house with no gate. I knocked really loudly but no one answered. I was screaming, “Hey, I need help, I need help, I’m bleeding badly, I’m going to die out here!” There was no response and I could feel myself getting weaker. I went
out to the street and yelled, “Help me!” as loud as I could and then I got to the side of the road and lay down.

That’s when I checked my pockets and realized I had pot on me. Even in that state, I was concerned about getting busted, but I could barely get up because I’d broken my ankle and fractured my leg. Still, I managed to get a golf club out of the trunk and use it as a cane. Blood was rolling off my face and I looked down and saw that the white T-shirt I’d been wearing was crimson. I started to cry and said out loud, “I’m gonna die.” But I clearly didn’t think so because I dug a hole with my hands, buried the dope in there, and tried to push it down with the golf club.

Then I saw a white light from probably thirty yards away cut through the dark and I yelled in its direction, “Help me!” It turns out that someone was building a small complex up there in the canyon and they had a guard shack to guard their materials. And this gentleman who was there had heard me and had gotten out a flashlight and was walking toward me. As he got closer, the beam of his flashlight got brighter.

This man’s reaction when he saw me was so horrifying that that’s when I knew how bad I must have looked. He started to call an ambulance but I didn’t think an ambulance would get me to a hospital in enough time. I knew Heidi was just down that hill, so I used his cell phone to call her. She got right up there and put me in her car and then she called her dad, who’s a doctor, and asked him to recommend a surgeon.

When we got to Century City Hospital, the surgeon came in and said, “We’re going to fix this—I’m the Michael Jordan of surgery. And you’re going to have to be the Michael Jordan of patients because I can’t give you any anesthetic at all—there’s too much glass in this cut. You have to be completely awake and with me.” I was crying and he said, “You have to stop crying, goddamn it. Otherwise, you’re going
to have a big gash on your forehead. Is that what you want?” He was tough on me, but I respond well to extreme pressure.

The surgery was nineteen hours long and it took three weeks for me to recuperate. I was making a movie called
Paparazzi
at the time and they had to shut down production for two weeks and then work around me for the week after. For those few weeks, I looked like Frankenstein, and when I healed and got back to work, I thought I’d survived the biggest ordeal of my life. I had no idea that the true ordeal was just about to hit.

PAPARAZZI
HAD BEEN
back in production for another three weeks when Mel Gibson, who was producing the movie, walked up to me one day on set.

“You’re about to be arrested,” he said. I asked for what and he said, “Heidi said you hit her.” I was sure he was kidding—I almost started to laugh—but I looked into his eyes and saw that he was entirely serious. A series of incidents flashed before me: different fights Heidi and I had gotten into, her threat that she would destroy my life, but also memories of how loving and supportive she’d been the night of my accident and so many other times. Even though I wasn’t high, in many ways I felt like I was: everything took on a veil of surreality. And I thought, “Well, this is all a misunderstanding. I’ll just clear this up—whatever it is—and maybe even laugh about it later.” But while the veil of surreality lasted, nothing ever got cleared up. Before I could even say anything to Mel, the cops were standing there in front of me. I guess they’d gone to my house first and my housekeeper had told them I was at work. They told me that they’d let me finish my day on the set but that I’d need to turn myself in later that evening.

I went into my work mode—where I just focused on my lines and dove into the character I was playing as much as I possibly could, while telling myself not to react until I had all of the facts. I called my attorney—someone CAA had recommended, named Michael Fitzgerald—and after work, he came and picked me up and took me to a Taco Bell parking lot nearby where the cops were waiting. I was booked and after I bailed out, Michael drove me home.

My relationship with Heidi had been passionate from the beginning: everything we did together was in extremes, from the drugs to the love to the eventual hatred. And because meth imbued so much of our relationship, everything was exacerbated and heightened. When we were angry, we both said a lot of things we didn’t mean and left each other angry messages when we were fighting. But I had never hit her and I assumed the truth would come out quickly or that she would drop her case. Heidi would not let that happen, however; she was determined to make me pay.

I didn’t call Heidi right away. It was only three weeks after she’d saved my life, and I was really in too much shock to talk to her. I could barely talk to anyone. The Brooke Ford accusation had been one thing—a claim by a random girl that was dropped. But Heidi had been deeply embedded in my world, had been someone I truly loved, and this was the deepest betrayal possible. Though part of me clung to this idea that the truth would come out and the whole mess would be over, another part of me knew that when Heidi set her mind to something, she didn’t let go. In a certain way, I understood that life as I knew it was over.

A
S THE SUMMER
of 2003 chugged along, Heidi added more fuel to her fire. I called to talk to her about her accusations and we ended up getting in another fight; she reported what I’d said during the conversation, labeling it witness intimidation, and I was arrested again. I began to realize that Heidi wasn’t just out to get revenge on
me
: she wanted to make me pay for every wrong that had ever been committed against her by anyone.

But I knew that I was telling the truth and so I went into the trial that August confident that her lies would be exposed. The trial is a bit of a blur. I just sat there for the eleven days, despondent over what my life had become. I was advised not to take the stand, and I didn’t. Heidi testified for three days, crying and saying that I’d left her ninety harassing phone calls and had beat her.

Most of the focus was on April 8, 2002, a night when Tom Jane was over at my house because I was showing him the pilot of a film Michael Madsen and I were putting together. The
National Enquirer
had run some story saying that I was sleeping with other women—something
Heidi knew about already—and she was pissed. We’d already fought about it. That night she called and started in about that again. We were arguing over the phone about it but clearly weren’t getting anywhere, so when I hung up, I disconnected the phone. That’s when she showed up, completely irate. We went outside and kept arguing while Tom Jane tried to intervene and get us to stop. I’m not going to lie—I was angry. I told her to give back the Porsche I’d given her as a gift and I wasn’t too gracious about it. And that upset her so much that when I headed back inside, she jumped on me and bit my ear. I flinched and she went flying off my back, falling onto the driveway. She claimed that I
threw
her onto the driveway, which was patently untrue. The truth is that she was completely out of control and I just wanted her out of my house. Tom tried to help as best as he could, giving her ice and ultimately driving her to her sister’s house. And during the trial, Tom explained all of that; he was out of town so he gave his testimony over video.

Heidi also claimed that I’d put a cigarette out on her and beat her at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York because she’d criticized
Black Hawk Down
on Howard Stern—despite the fact that there were no witnesses or medical records from this alleged incident. She also claimed that I’d punched her in the jaw at the Beverly Hills Hotel on April 8, which was literally five nights before she saved my life after my car accident. She said all sorts of ridiculous things. She claimed we had a contract that said that I’d pay her half a million dollars if I hit her. She also claimed that I destroyed her collection of china figurines with a baseball bat and threatened to kill her brother.

I was guilty—guilty of losing my temper and leaving her horrible messages both when we were in our fights and when I called to talk to her about her accusations. I heard every single one of those messages
during the trial because they played them in court. And I felt terrible—terrible when I left them and even more terrible when I heard them. The things I said were, without question, wrong. Heidi and I had a really twisted, drug-fueled, dysfunctional relationship, and the way we talked to each other was hardly delicate, but that didn’t give me license to say the things that I did.

There were a great many holes in Heidi’s testimony, but I was so far gone on the drugs at that point that I wasn’t able to focus on it. In fact, we were later able to argue that the pictures she presented as evidence were phony. In my petition for a writ of habeas corpus, a photo expert named Jeffrey Sedlik concluded that. Heidi had claimed a friend of hers named Tara Dabrizzi had shot the main photo being used as evidence and that the reason nobody could find this girl—because believe me, I tried—was that she’d left the country the next day. I knew that if we could prove that Heidi had taken the photo herself, we would be able to overturn my conviction.

I finally concluded that Tara Dabrizzi either was a fictional person or she was born in her home and essentially never left it—never having had a birth certificate, hospital record, Social Security number, driver’s license, health insurance, W-2, or utility bill—except for the day Heidi claimed the photos were taken that she presented in court as proof of my guilt, and never surfaced again. These were photos that irrevocably, drastically transformed my life and yet the fact that Dabrizzi probably didn’t actually exist never came up in my trial.

In the habeas corpus filing, Sedlik said that you could see it was Heidi taking the picture of herself—something that was obvious once you looked at the photo closely. He also said that the focus pattern was “an optical impossibility” because the bruise was in soft focus
while other parts of the photo, such as her hair and chin, were in sharp focus.

Nothing about what Heidi claimed during the trial made sense to me, and yet she was never really questioned on any of it. She claimed that I had punched her twice, but the photos she presented as evidence showed only one possible injury. And the day after the attack supposedly took place, Heidi spent the night with me at the Bel Air Hotel, which doesn’t make any sense if she was really, as she claimed, feeling like her life was in danger around me. Another thing that Sedlik figured out from examining the camera’s metadata is that the photos weren’t taken on April 13, which Heidi claimed was a few days after the supposed attack took place, but on May 12. Heidi was amazing with computers and photos and yet none of this was ever examined. And we’re talking about the testimony of someone who had been convicted of nine felonies.

Much later, in July 2007, another lawyer I hired ended up interviewing Dr. Michael Carden, the plastic surgeon who’d stitched me up the night of the car accident. Carden explained that Heidi didn’t have any bruises or any sign of injuries when he treated me, and that we clearly got along well. For the appeals that followed, I went through a slew of other attorneys. I essentially spent millions on these lawyers at a time when I wasn’t raking in millions anymore.