LA officials are looking into potential legal falllout from an officer’s use of the LAPD computer network to get data about celebrities. The city recently paid the officer’s ex-girlfriend $387,500 to settle a lawsuit alleging that he used police computers to investigate her and hundreds of others, and sold the data to tabloids for a tidy profit.
For six years, Officer Kelly Chrisman used Los Angeles Police Department computers to look up confidential law enforcement records on celebrities and other high-profile people, including Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Sean Penn and Halle Berry.
Chrisman says he was just carrying out orders from superiors, but a lawsuit recently settled by the city for nearly $400,000 alleged that the officer had accessed the records to sell the information to tabloids. Now Los Angeles officials are assessing the city’s potential liability. According to internal LAPD documents, between 1994 and 2000 Chrisman tapped computer files on scores of celebrities, including Meg Ryan, Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson, Larry King, Drew Barrymore, Dionne Warwick, Farrah Fawcett, Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson and Berry Gordy.
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