Los Angeles County Trying to Make Kobe Bryant's Widow Vanessa Take Psychiatric Exam

Los Angeles county is trying to make Vanessa Bryant take a psychiatric exam as part of its defense against her lawsuit for invasion of privacy and negligence.

Per USA Today's Brent Schrotenboer, the county is seeking a court order to force Bryant and other surviving family members of the helicopter crash that killed nine people to take the exams in an attempt to show they suffered emotional distress from the crash itself, and not because county fire and sheriff's department employees shared photos of their dead relatives afterward.

Kobe and Gianna Bryant were among the people killed in the crash in Calabasas, California, on Jan. 26, 2020.

Vanessa filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County sheriff in September 2020. The suit said that multiple deputies shared unauthorized photos from the scene of the crash. Bryant's attorney, Luis Li, said in a statement at the time:

"This lawsuit is about accountability and about preventing this disgraceful behavior from happening to other families in the future who have suffered loss. The department formally refused Mrs. Bryant's requests for information saying it was 'unable to assist' with any inquiry and had no legal obligation to do so. It's now for a court to tell the department what its obligations are."

In a statement filed in federal court last month in response to Bryant's lawsuit, Los Angeles county contended that the "plaintiffs' emotional distress was not caused by (the county defendants), who have neither published nor publicly disseminated any accident site photographs."

In response to the attempt to compel exams, the attorneys for Bryant and other plaintiffs said the county has "resorted to scorched-earth discovery tactics designed to bully Plaintiffs into abandoning their pursuit of accountability."

Bryant's lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages.

The helicopter was taking Kobe and Gianna, along with six others, to a basketball game at the Mamba Sports Academy.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the crash was from spatial disorientation due to the pilot flying the helicopter into thick clouds that led to a loss of control of the aircraft.