When it was first reported that Bahamian Senator Pleasant Bridgewater (49) and ambulance driver Tarino Lightbourne (47) were arrested for attempting to extort $25 million from John Travolta, I’m sure we all thought they had something truly compromising on him (like pictures of the Hollywood actor in flagrante delicto … with another man).
Therefore, imagine the consternation when Travolta testified at their trial in The Bahamas on Wednesday that Lightbourne was threatening to use a document related to his son’s treatment:
… to imply that the death of my son was intentional and I was culpable in some way.
After all, the only thing this purportedly compromising document implies is that Travolta was desperate to get his dying son the best possible care as quickly as possible. For it merely released local medical personnel from liability if Travolta decided to fly his son to Florida for emergency medical care instead of having him treated in The Bahamas.
In any event, Travolta testified that, on that fateful day, he and his wife, Kelly Preston, rushed to their son’s side after they were awakened by a nanny pounding on their bedroom door. He continued movingly as follows:
My son was autistic and he suffered from seizure disorder every 5 to 10 days… I took the place of the woman who was doing CPR. We continued the CPR and my wife was holding my son’s head at this point…
I spoke with the ambulance driver and asked him if he would take us to the airport… I received a liability of release document. I signed it. I did not read it. Time was of the essence.
Frankly, if I were faced with Travolta’s dilemma (of having to decide whether to have the ambulance driver take me either to a local hospital or to the airport so that I could fly my private plane to Florida – where my son might get better care), I too would have signed that release! Especially since the time involved in both cases was roughly the same.
However, Travolta testified that, en route to the airport, he and his wife had second thoughts and diverted the ambulance driver to the hospital. There they were told that their son was effectively dead on arrival.
More to the point, though, these two nincompoops on trial had to have been utterly blinded by greed, as well as (mis)guided by stupidity to think that Travolta would be so worried about them making this plainly “irrelevant” document public that he would pay $25 million….
Indeed, the delusional grandeur of Lightbourne thinking that news organizations like CNN, FOX and TIME would be interested in making tabloid fodder out of this document is surpassed only by the damning ignorance of Bridgewater thinking that she’s not guilty because she was only negotiating the terms of this extortion on Lightbourne’s behalf.
Anyway, given the testimony that has already been presented, I suspect the only uncertainty that remains is about what sentence the judge will impose upon them.
But, as a member of the Bahamas Bar Association, I am dismayed that Bridgewater hasn’t already been disbarred for acting to further this conspiracy as far as she did. In fact, when asked if she ever told Bridgewater during their “negotiations” that what she was doing was illegal, Allyson Maynard-Gibson, Travolta’s Bahamian attorney and a senator herself, testified that:
I said to Pleasant [Bridgewater] you know what you are doing is wrong.
Imagine that! But I digress….
Actually, suspicion still surrounds the role Obie Wilchcombe MP, a former Minister of Tourism and self-proclaimed “close friend” of Travolta, played in this criminal farce. He was arrested, but not charged.
Yet there’s no denying that his admitted behavior is almost as indefensible as that of Bridgewater – who just happened to have been his business partner.
Here, in part, is how Wilchcombe testified about his role a week ago today:
Knowing all that we did to protect the image of the country and knowing my relationship with the Travoltas, [Bridgewater] thought she would bring [the extortion scheme] to my attention… I told her she should tell her client to jump off a roof and kill himself.
Her Client?! I submit that only a criminally conflicted mind would refer to a man who retains a lawyer to help perpetrate an extortion as a “client”.
At any rate, here’s how I expressed my suspicion in this respect last January:
Obie and Pleasant insist, with indignation, that this is all a misunderstanding, and both have pointed the finger at Tarino as the “one single individual” who they were trying to prevent from extorting Travolta and “embarrassing our country.”
But if this was truly their motivation, I challenge them to answer the following:
When you got word that he was trying to perpetrate this outrageous extortion, why didn’t you report it to the Bahamian police instead of agreeing to facilitate it [as Pleasant clearly did] or rushing to “do the noble thing by giving Travolta’s people a heads up” [as Obie claims he did]?
[Conspiracy in The Bahamas to extort John Travolta, TIJ, January 26, 2009]
Alas, prosecutors never asked Wilchcombe this consciousness-of-guilt question, and neither he nor Bridgewater has ever addressed it.
NOTE: A lot of American media attention has been focused on this trial, and understandably so. But, despite the defensive utterings of Wilchcombe and others, Bahamians should be no more embarrassed by this attempted extortion than Americans will be by reports today that someone in New York attempted to extort millions from talk show host David Letterman over his (admitted) affairs with female employees.
Related commentaries:
Conspiracy in The Bahamas to extort…
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