McDougal Told Lies and Coveted Riches, Prosecutor Tells Jury

Susan McDougal “doesn’t deserve to be acquitted” of a laundry list of embezzlement, fraud and tax charges because she is a covetous liar who assassinated the character of Zubin and Nancy Mehta after she stole from them, a prosecutor told jurors Friday at the Whitewater figure’s trial.

“The people of the state of California [and] the Mehtas all deserve a verdict of guilty against Susan McDougal,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey Semow said as he concluded his closing argument in the nine-week Santa Monica Superior Court trial.

Semow portrayed McDougal as a woman so enamored with the money she had and lost as the wife of Arkansas banker, land developer and politician James McDougal that she would have done anything to become rich again.

Her opportunity came in 1989, when she went to work for the famed conductor and his wife at their home in Brentwood. Almost from the beginning, Semow said, McDougal was stealing.

And when she was caught, she lied, Semow said. Her most arrogant and disgraceful lies came during the trial, he added, with her “deliberate effort to make the Mehtas sound like indulgent, self-centered people who just lived to shop.”

The prosecutor mocked McDougal’s version of events as “a mind control defense in which Nancy Mehta ordered Susan McDougal to shop.” And countering McDougal’s portrayal of her employer as a controlling, demanding spendthrift, Semow told the jury that “Susan McDougal was not dominated and re-cloned by Nancy Mehta like she’d like you to believe. She liked Nancy Mehta. I’ll give Susan McDougal credit that she had a genuine affection for Nancy Mehta.”

So high was her regard for Mehta, Semow said, that McDougal copied her style, her blond hair color, her theatrical manner and, ultimately, her signature on hundreds of checks and credit card receipts.

“Susan McDougal wanted to be like Nancy Mehta. She wanted to live like her. She wanted to have what she had,” the prosecutor said. “By 1991, in effect she was saying, ‘I’m a better Nancy Mehta than you are. I can look like you and talk like you and I can sign your name.’ ”

McDougal, who spent more than a year in jail rather than testify about her Whitewater land deal business partners, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, is accused of embezzling more than $50,000 from the Mehtas while working as their bookkeeper and assistant from 1989 to mid-1992. She had come to California in 1988 to start over after her marriage to James McDougal collapsed under the weight of mountains of debt and failed business dealings.

She went to work for the Mehtas, first as a personal assistant to Nancy and later as a bookkeeper. When she started, Semow said, McDougal’s credit was so bad she “couldn’t even get a Blockbuster card in her own name.”

“Poverty is not a crime,” he added, “and many poor people don’t have a motive to steal.” But McDougal, he said, “is a woman who had a lot of money and was used to living well, and suddenly--Crash! Bang!--it’s gone. Rich people who suddenly become poor have more of a problem.”

And so, Semow alleged, McDougal launched an elaborate scheme to fraudulently obtain a credit card in her and Nancy Mehta’s name, and then went on massive spending sprees in Arkansas and Texas, covering her tracks by laundering cash and writing the charges off to household expenses.

McDougal’s pilfering began small and snowballed, he alleged. By the time she was fired in mid-1992, she was charging more of her own expenses than the Mehtas’ to their credit cards.

In the scam’s infancy, Semow said, McDougal was charging an average of $288 a month on herself compared to $3,079 for the Mehtas. By 1992, the prosecutor said, McDougal was charging $3,385 a month for herself compared to $1,613 for the Mehtas.

McDougal is accused of forging Nancy Mehta’s signature on checks, credit card receipts and an application for a credit card in both their names. She also is accused of evading state income taxes for the years she worked for the Mehtas.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos is expected to deliver his closing argument Monday before the jury retires to deliberate.

Superior Court Judge Leslie Light already has done some of the jurors’ work for them, finding insufficient evidence to support the prosecutor’s initial claim that McDougal had stolen more than $150,000 from the Mehtas. The judge also dismissed three of the original 12 counts, suggesting that the prosecution had overcharged the case.

McDougal testified that many of the credit card charges she made were in compensation for her bookkeeping services. She said Nancy Mehta lavished gifts on her, and authorized her to sign her name on checks and receipts. Mehta testified that she never authorized McDougal to sign her name to anything.