Final witness called in NCAA defamation trial

LOS ANGELES -- Following three weeks of testimony, evidence ended Thursday in former football coach Todd McNair's defamation trial against the NCAA -- setting the stage for closing arguments Friday.

Both sides rested their cases somewhat anticlimactically after playing for the jury a two-hour video deposition.

The witness, Patricia Ohlendorf, was a member of an appeals committee that upheld sanctions levied on the USC football program over gifts to then-star running back Reggie Bush.

Ohlendorf said the appeals committee determined that the original sanctioning body, the Committee on Infractions, had "sufficient information upon which to make a credibility call."

McNair was given a one-year show cause penalty after the NCAA committee determined he misled investigators regarding his knowledge about payments to Lloyd Lake, an acquaintance of Bush who hoped to be his professional agent.

McNair's attorneys from Greene, Broillet & Wheeler LLP took their case to the jury on a single defamation cause of action, seeking to show how the NCAA botched its investigation by allowing nonvoting committee members to influence voting members into implicating McNair. Doing so was a violation of NCAA bylaws, the plaintiff argued.

Lead trial counsel Bruce Broillet, who examined all the witnesses for the plaintiff, showed the jury a number of emails between committee members.

One email from nonvoting member Shepard Cooper called McNair "a lying, morally bankrupt criminal in my view and a hypocrite of the highest order."

Another from the lawyer tasked with defending the decision on appeal, Rodney Uphoff, wrote, "I haven't been able to sleep three nights because I fear the committee is going to be too lenient on USC on the football violations."

Just how much of an effect on the deliberations process those emails had was disputed throughout the trial. Nonvoting members testified that those emails were not part of the deliberations process, but protected speech, and voting members agreed. Voters testified they independently came to the determination that McNair lied about his relationship with Lake.

Speaking through tears, McNair told the jury last week he did not know Lake, whom he called a "gang banger," until news hit about the scandal in the media in 2006.

The three-week trial was split between six video depositions and seven live witnesses, many of them shared between the plaintiff and defense. McNair v. the National Collegiate Athletic Association, BC462891 (L.A. Super Ct., filed June 3, 2011).

And despite boxes of documents and reams of binders flooding Judge Frederick Shaller's fifth-floor courtroom in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, everything seemed to circle back around to a single, late night, two-and-a-half-minute phone call from Lake's phone to McNair's.

Defense attorneys said it was this phone call that served as the "linchpin" for implicating McNair. McNair testified that he doesn't remember it.

Lead defense trial attorney Kosta Stojilkovic of Wilkinson, Walsh & Eskovitz, said that phone call, whose contents are unknown, consisted of McNair urging Lake not to implicate USC in the scandal.

The defense also published a group photo of McNair and Lake taken in 2005, arguing it was evidence of a relationship between them.

Lake told the committee McNair knew about the benefits Bush received, but Lake was not called as a witness by either side in the trial.

At times, McNair looked more emotionless than the jury during the trial, except when it was his turn to take the stand.