Howard K. Stern on Drug Trial Dismissal: 'I Feel Anna's Vindicated'
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Last week, two conspiracy felony charges against Howard K. Stern in the Anna Nicole Smith drug case were dismissed. Now, Stern sits down exclusively with ET's Mark Steines to share his feelings about the experience.
"I feel vindicated," says Stern. "I feel Anna's vindicated. The truth about her came out, as opposed to the fiction and the lies that the prosecution was trying to show."
Stern, along with doctors Sandeep Kapoor and Khristine Eroshevich, was accused of illegally providing drugs to Smith. All pleaded not guilty to the charges. On Thursday, a Los Angeles judge ruled there was no evidence that Stern intended fraud or deception when he got drugs for his former client/girlfriend under fake names. Smith passed away of an accidental overdose in a Florida hotel in 2007 at the age of 39.
"This case should have never been brought [to trial]. It was brought for improper reasons. It was brought for publicity, for politics, at any cost," says Stern. "The toll that this has taken on my parents, there's no way to describe the damage, it's irreparable. You can't get back these years, and the lies that we have lived through."
Of the picture the prosecution painted of Anna Nicole's state of being in the days leading up to her death, Stern comments, "I was angry. Extremely angry with the way that they wanted to portray her as basically cowering, locked up in a room. It's so far from the truth, and they essentially discounted entirely the effect of [her son] Daniel's death on her, and how emotional she was, and they discounted her pain, her real pain. And they just basically said … she's just an addict, and the whole story they were trying to put on was a lie."
Now that the judge has dismissed the conspiracy felony charges, Stern contemplates his next movie.
"I kind of have to let it all sink in, and then see what's left, but one of the things I've been thinking about is doing some criminal defense work, because I see how prosecutors can be," he says. "When it comes to a person's life, there should be an objectivity, and it shocked me that there wasn't. What [my lawyers] did for me, I'd like to do for somebody else."
