1980: Socialite Jean Harris, headmistress of a private school for girls, kills her boyfriend, Scarsdale Diet author, Dr. Herman Tarnower, in his suburban New York home. The subsequent trial becomes a media sensation owing to the celebrity of its victim and social standing of the accused. Remember,
Law & Order (original recipe), where such scenarios are routine, won't debut until 1990, and the O.J. Simpson and Martha Stewart trials are 15 and 24 years away, respectively.
Her defense is that the killing was accidental, but after a trial lasting 14 weeks, the jury doesn't believe Harris's story that her gun went off accidentally four times.
Harris is convicted of second-degree murder and gets a sentence of 15-to-life in a minimum-security prison. This shocking injustice has the upper crust's knickers all in a twist and kicks off a decade-long PR campaign waged on Harris's behalf that includes books, TV-movies and countless magazine articles that portray Tarnower as a creepy philanderer, Harris as a good woman scorned, her lawyer as inadequate and/or incompetent and the jury as mouth-breathing proles too thick to understand that she just isn't the kind of person you send to jail.
Finally, in 1992, Governor Mario Cuomo grants Harris a pardon, in exchange for the promise by New York Magazine to stop doing cover stories on her and go back to writing about snotty restaurants. She goes free and everybody lives happily ever after, except maybe for Tarnower who, last we heard, was still dead.
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