A photographer told L.A. jurors yesterday that she fought off a drunken, violent Phil Spector in a posh Madison Avenue hotel as the musical madman threatened to shoot her.
Rock ‘n’ roll shutterbug Stephanie Jennings said she wanted to leave the producer’s room at The Carlyle, but he attacked her and forced her to give him a shove that sent the diminutive Spector tumbling into a bathtub.
He toppled over and the curtain rod hit him in the head.
“I don’t know if he slapped me or pushed me,” Jennings said on the witness stand. He got physical with me. In turn, I shoved him.”
Spector, creator of the legendary “wall of music” sound, is charged with murder in the 2003 shooting death of 40-year-old actress and club hostess Lana Clarkson.
Jennings, from Philadelphia, is one of four women who claim that Spector once pulled a gun on them. The prosecution hopes their testimony will show that the music genius is a gun-slinging psycho.
Jennings said that she was menaced after she shot pictures at an after-party to the 1995 Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony thrown by Spector at the Waldorf-Astoria. She said she saw him tossing drinks back and playing piano with Paul Shaffer and Stevie Wonder.
The drunk producer invited her back to his room at The Carlyle, she testified, and that’s when things got crazy. After a short time, she wanted to leave, but Spector didn’t let her, she claimed.
“He had a gun with him and put a chair in front of the door and said I wasn’t going anywhere,” Jennings said.
Deputy DA Alan Jackson asked her what she was thinking.
“That I was about to get shot,” she testified.
Jennings said she never pressed charges against Spector because she wanted to put the episode behind her.
Nevertheless, she admitted that she came back and took photos of Spector’s after-party the next year.
Also, on cross-examination, she admitted that she later told L.A. sheriff’s detectives – who interviewed her after Clarkson’s death – that she never thought he would kill her.
Later yesterday, the court heard testimony from yet another woman Spector allegedly menaced with a gun – then-New York waitress Melissa Grosvenor, who dated the music-industry icon.
Grosvenor said she visited Spector at his home in Pasadena, Calif., in late 1992. When Grosvenor wanted to leave, Spector went to get a gun and pointed it between her eyes, she told jurors.
“If you try to leave, I’m going to kill you,” Grosvenor quoted Spector. “I was shocked. I started to cry . . . There was no doubt in my mind he was going to kill me if I tried to leave.”
Grosvenor admitted to prosecutors that she was convicted on federal charges of bank fraud in 1989.
Under cross-examination, she also ‘fessed up to not revealing that conviction on job applications.