The Megyn Kelly Show - July 31, 2026


The Trials of Claus von Bülow： Was There Ever a Crime？ — Ep. 5 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

154.01

Word count

3,423

Sentence count

238

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:25.860 June 1985 on the 10th floor of the Harkness Pavilion inside Columbia Presbyterian Medical
00:00:33.140 Center in New York a woman lies in a private room she will never leave on her own she's not
00:00:39.560 on a respirator she breathes without help a tube feeds her through her nose private nurses watch
00:00:46.600 her around the clock and twice a week someone washes and sets her hair there are scented flowers
00:00:52.300 on the table and music playing softly in the room. Her name is Martha Von Bulow. Everyone who loves
00:00:59.660 her calls her Sonny, and she has not spoken a word since the winter of 1980. 90 miles away in
00:01:07.820 Providence, a jury has just told the world that the man accused of putting her in that bed
00:01:12.860 is not guilty. The Kloss Von Bulow trial is finally over, and he is not guilty. Von Bulow
00:01:19.620 was tried twice in a soap opera setting
00:01:21.500 for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife.
00:01:23.960 The first jury found him guilty,
00:01:25.660 but he won a new trial, and this time
00:01:27.620 he was cleared. How do you find guilty
00:01:29.780 or not guilty? Not guilty.
00:01:33.240 So ended the second trial of Klaus von
00:01:35.760 Bülow accused of trying to murder his wife
00:01:37.720 longer but not as dramatic as the
00:01:39.600 first trial three years ago.
00:01:41.960 Tonight, Klaus von Bülow can
00:01:43.560 go anywhere he likes.
00:01:45.820 Sunny cannot turn her head.
00:01:48.140 The murder trials are the
00:01:49.480 part of this story that ends relatively quickly. Hers is the part that does not. Her two children
00:01:56.320 from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala von Oersberg, turn their grief into something that
00:02:02.580 will outlast the case. In 1985, they helped found a national organization for the victims of crime,
00:02:09.140 and they name it for their mother, the Sonny von Bulow National Victim Advocacy Center.
00:02:13.760 In time, it drops her name, but it grows into one of the largest victims' rights groups in America,
00:02:20.700 known today as the National Center for Victims of Crime.
00:02:23.680 That becomes the legacy of Sonny von Bulow.
00:02:26.960 That and the belief that whatever a Rhode Island jury says, someone put her there,
00:02:33.020 condemned her to unconscious bed rest for the rest of her life.
00:02:37.720 But Klaus does not walk away scot-free.
00:02:41.600 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:03:59.980 Klaus von Bülow's acquittal ends the state's case.
00:04:03.740 It does not end his stepchildren's. 0.73
00:04:06.500 Alexander and Allah cannot put him on trial for the crime again, so they do the one thing 0.97
00:04:11.320 the law still allows. 0.68
00:04:13.060 They sue him in federal court in Manhattan in a civil case.
00:04:17.660 The number they seek is enormous, $56 million, and the claim behind it is the one the prosecution
00:04:23.840 made twice, that he tried to kill their mother for her money. The man who has just cleared his
00:04:29.860 name in a criminal court now has to defend it again in a civil one. His appellate lawyer,
00:04:36.220 Alan Dershowitz, laid out the stakes back in 1986. Yeah, we see each other all the time. We
00:04:41.780 talk about his ongoing case. He's being sued by his stepchildren for $56 million. The case is
00:04:48.140 not over. And indeed, the American public still remains undecided. One of the reasons I wrote
00:04:53.080 this book is, Klaus von Bülow not only wanted to be acquitted, he wanted to be vindicated.
00:04:57.700 In time, the civil case settles, and the settlement reads like a verdict of its own.
00:05:04.660 Under its reported terms, Klaus gives up every claim to Sonny's fortune and agrees to divorce
00:05:11.160 his wife, who will never know she has been divorced. In exchange, the lawsuit against
00:05:16.840 him is dropped. He keeps his freedom. He gives up the money the state always said was his
00:05:22.820 motive. One person is caught between the two sides of the family, Cosima, the only child of Klaus and
00:05:30.040 Sonny, who stood by her father through both trials, and it cost her. Sonny's mother, Cosima's
00:05:37.480 grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, cuts Cosima out of her will, an estate valued between 50 and more
00:05:45.060 than 110 million dollars. Cosima lost a share worth about 25 million. The exact figure was
00:05:52.760 never the point. The rift was about a daughter's loyalty to a man the rest of the family believed
00:05:59.280 had tried to kill her mother. The estrangement is real and for years it holds. Through both trials
00:06:06.680 Cosima and her half-sister Allah are not on speaking terms. On the last day of the second 0.98
00:06:12.320 trial, Dominic Dunn watches the two of them pass in a courthouse corridor, the first time the two
00:06:19.000 women have laid eyes on each other in three years, and neither one says a word. Later, Allah tells
00:06:25.880 him, she's gotten so beautiful, my mother would be very proud of her. The affection is still there.
00:06:33.040 The rupture is over money and loyalty, and a father the rest of the family cannot forgive.
00:06:39.920 What finally closes the rift is not a scene of forgiveness. It's a legal document. In December
00:06:46.940 1987, the same settlement that ends the $56 million lawsuit against Klaus reinstates Cosima's
00:06:54.420 inheritance. The grandmother who had cut Cosima out was dead and her will stood.
00:07:01.500 Allah and Alexander say they have no quarrel with Cosima at this point, and they agreed to restore
00:07:07.240 her to the one-third share their grandmother had first intended all three of them to have.
00:07:13.420 The thing that had split the three of them, Klaus's treatment of Sonny and her money,
00:07:18.280 is no longer a concern. The deeper reconciliation comes the way everything in this family finally
00:07:25.000 does, through Sonny. Whatever the three of them feel about Klaus, they are bound to the silent
00:07:31.260 woman in the hospital bed. And over the years, all three keep coming back to her room,
00:07:37.240 When she dies in 2008, after 28 years in that bed, her children come together to bury her.
00:07:45.840 Cosima would also spend years caring for her own father, financing and following him when
00:07:51.580 he moves out of the country.
00:07:53.240 She stays close to Klaus for the rest of his life.
00:07:56.980 So what becomes of Klaus von Bülow?
00:07:59.780 Free and stripped of the fortune that made him who he wanted to be, he does not retreat.
00:08:06.260 He gives interviews. He goes to parties. He lets the notoriety settle over him and carries it
00:08:13.580 almost with relish. The image that fixes him in the public mind comes from the trial itself.
00:08:21.420 All through the second trial, while a jury is weighing whether or not he tried to murder his
00:08:25.800 wife, Klaus spends his weekends back in New York. There, his lover and public relations strategist,
00:08:32.580 Andrea Reynolds, has moved into Sonny's own 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue.
00:08:38.800 There, in rooms still full of Sonny's things, the couple entertains. Dominic Dunn, who travels in
00:08:45.620 the same circles, sees what goes on inside. He described it in an interview with the Television
00:08:51.400 Academy Foundation. She had moved into Sonny Vambula's apartment on Fifth Avenue, one of the
00:08:58.120 most beautiful apartments and they gave a lunch party this is during a murder trial
00:09:05.240 with butlers with white gloves and and all this kind of stuff well i mean that's right up my alley
00:09:11.720 i have to tell you i mean and they and helmet newton the great photographer a wonderful man
00:09:20.440 genius i think and a great friend of mine he photographed klaus and andrea in black leather
00:09:28.040 I don't know if you remember those famous photographs during the trial.
00:09:34.440 The audacity is the point.
00:09:37.100 While on trial for trying to murder his wife, Klaus hosts a lunch party in her apartment
00:09:42.060 with white-gloved butlers serving the guests,
00:09:45.640 then poses in black leather for one of the world's most famous photographers.
00:09:51.500 And when the acquittal comes, society does not shut its doors to him.
00:09:56.780 In fact, it opens them.
00:09:58.860 Klaus and Andrea make one of their first appearances at a party given by Lady Jean Campbell,
00:10:04.720 a Duke's daughter and a former wife of Norman Mailer.
00:10:08.440 They take a box at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday nights,
00:10:12.000 the house's old society night, where white tie is still the custom
00:10:16.440 and the same families fill the same boxes they always have.
00:10:21.300 Klaus and Andrea turn up at Mortimer's,
00:10:23.320 The restaurant where Manhattan goes to be seen.
00:10:26.940 Not everyone will have him.
00:10:29.140 At one dinner, a magazine editor says she will walk out if she is seated at his table.
00:10:34.160 But most of the charm circle takes him back.
00:10:38.000 Dominic Dunn would write that Vambulo's dark and spacious place in social history has been assured.
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00:11:12.460 It is Reynolds who has stage managed this whole comeback.
00:11:17.080 She's the one who decided that the cold aristocratic figure the first jury saw needed
00:11:21.560 softening, and she remade his public image for the retrial. She calls their courtship a ballet
00:11:28.000 of seduction and says he needs a witness to account for his every move. But the romance
00:11:34.040 does not last. Within a few years of the verdict, Reynolds and Klaus quietly part ways. She goes on
00:11:41.240 to marry an English aristocrat, the Honorable Sean Plunkett. Klaus does not stay in New York
00:11:47.640 to be talked about. Dominic Dunn watches Klaus return to society and remains convinced the jury
00:11:53.560 got it wrong. Here he is again with the Television Academy Foundation. In your opinion, guilty? Oh,
00:12:00.520 yes. I felt so. And he hates me a lot, the way I wrote about him. So Klaus moves to London,
00:12:08.320 the city where he first made his name, and settles back into its dinner parties and its
00:12:13.740 opera boxes, as though the last five years had been a long, unpleasant weekend. He takes a job
00:12:19.980 reviewing plays for a Catholic newspaper. He never again mounts a public campaign to prove his
00:12:25.760 innocence, and by all appearances, he never needs to. He has his verdict, and he is received in the
00:12:32.700 drawing rooms of London again, if not on the scale Sonny's money once paid for. He lives out
00:12:38.260 his years quietly and comfortably on Cosima's support. He follows the advice of his lawyer,
00:12:44.280 Alan Dershowitz, the same advice Alan's given every client who wins a case the public
00:12:49.460 desperately wants them to lose. Alan told me this when we spoke.
00:12:54.320 I gave him advice, the same advice I gave O.J. Simpson when we won both cases. I said,
00:12:59.920 disappear. Nobody wants to see your face. They hate your guts. Go away. And Klaus took my advice,
00:13:08.600 went to England, stayed out of the public light. Through it all, Klaus's reinvention and interviews
00:13:14.820 and parties, Sonny von Bulow does not change at all other than to age. While Klaus dines out first
00:13:22.960 in New York and then in London, his wife lies in the same hospital bed. And the argument over what
00:13:29.160 she was and what was done to her carries on above her head, and she cannot say a word. Her care costs
00:13:37.120 a fortune, more than half a million dollars a year. Dr. Richard Stock, who has been her physician
00:13:43.900 for nearly 30 years, comes to see her several times a week. Her room is kept as for a wife
00:13:50.640 being welcomed home. Her own nightgowns, her own skin creams, music in the air, and her children
00:13:57.460 keep watch. Alexander and Allah visit their mother often. When Allah's own daughter is small,
00:14:04.140 she brings the little girl named Sunny for her grandmother into the room so that Sunny might 0.55
00:14:10.020 somehow know she has a granddaughter. They talk to her. They touch her. They tell her about their
00:14:16.580 lives. The years pass, far more of them than anyone imagined. In 1998, at age 67, Sunny is
00:14:26.300 moved to a Manhattan nursing home, her hair still set, her nightgowns still her own, fresh flowers
00:14:33.120 still by the bed. And on December 6, 2008, Sunny dies there without ever having woken up. She is
00:14:41.440 76. Her children release a short statement calling her a woman of grace and dignity and the most
00:14:48.060 loving mother imaginable. A woman lost 28 years of her life. Whoever decided to hurt Sunny Von
00:14:56.000 Bulo that day in 1980, this can't possibly have been the desired outcome. As for the public
00:15:03.080 relations around her case, long before Sonny died, the case had already split into competing stories.
00:15:10.420 Alan Dershowitz wrote the defense account in a book called Reversal of Fortune. Reporters like
00:15:16.660 Dominic Dunn wrote the skeptical ones, among them Dunn's own fatal charm. And then came the version
00:15:23.960 most people would remember. A Hollywood movie. The film, also called Reversal of Fortune,
00:15:30.340 arrives in 1990. It does the one thing neither trial could. It gives Sonny a voice. The filmmakers
00:15:38.140 let her narrate the story from inside the coma that silenced her. This was my body.
00:15:45.660 On December 27th, 1979, I lay in bed all day.
00:15:53.420 Whether I was asleep or in a coma, later became a subject of dispute.
00:16:00.960 Jeremy Irons plays Klaus and wins the Academy Award for it.
00:16:05.920 He almost turned down the part.
00:16:08.480 He explained why to the Hudson Union Society in 2009.
00:16:12.220 when the movie reversal of fortune was offered to me i thought it was very tasteless idea
00:16:17.820 because most of the family was still alive and had been through a very difficult awful time
00:16:25.580 and i thought to have a film made about that is a nightmare so i passed on it a few times and then
00:16:33.340 my friend glenn close persuaded me she said quite rightly if i didn't do it someone else would
00:16:37.260 irons would go on to win the oscar for best actor in a leading role in 1991 this is great
00:16:47.500 thank you my co-stars ron silver and glenn for finally persuading me to do it and lastly if i
00:16:58.300 may cut the call of a telephone to london where my wife is trying to keep awake awake in a hotel
00:17:06.860 bedroom i wish you were here to help me carry this because you helped me win it thank you all
00:17:13.340 the movie becomes the definitive version of the von bulow case it makes sunny famous all over again
00:17:20.140 and dramatizes the doubt at the heart of everything conveniently avoiding some of the
00:17:25.580 more troubling facts for klaus like his quick return to the newport home three days after
00:17:31.480 Detective Reese asks him about insulin. What the movie fails to do is settle the doubt.
00:17:38.780 No film could possibly answer what two juries could not. Those two juries did not judge the
00:17:45.000 same case. The first heard the state's motive, the mistress, and the 14 million Klaus stood to
00:17:51.080 inherit. The second jury heard none of that. The judge in the second trial barred testimony from
00:17:58.020 the family banker about the will, citing a lack of foundation. She said there was insufficient
00:18:03.640 evidence that Klaus's potential financial gain, quote, impelled him to allegedly harm Sonny.
00:18:09.700 The move was widely criticized at the time. The second jury did hear a medical defense.
00:18:15.780 The first jury never did. That the science behind the insulin reading was not reliable. That one of
00:18:22.860 Sonny's comas may not have involved insulin at all, and that the needle with insulin found in
00:18:28.860 the infamous black bag looked like it had been dipped in insulin, not used to inject an actual
00:18:35.760 person. One jury convicted Klaus von Bülow. A higher court threw out that conviction. A second
00:18:43.280 jury acquitted him, and that verdict was final. Two juries, two opposite conclusions, and in the
00:18:51.440 And only the acquittal stood.
00:18:54.240 Both were asked the same question.
00:18:56.460 Did Klaus von Bülow try to kill his wife?
00:18:59.280 Beneath that question, a harder one.
00:19:01.900 Was either coma caused intentionally at all?
00:19:06.240 Alan Dershowitz has never claimed to know the answer.
00:19:08.740 The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted coma.
00:19:14.800 That's the balance of evidence.
00:19:16.520 Even if this were a civil case, not a criminal case,
00:19:18.680 I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence.
00:19:24.980 The preponderance favors innocence.
00:19:27.840 That doesn't mean he's innocent.
00:19:29.440 That means the evidence isn't there to convict.
00:19:32.540 I don't know whether he's guilty.
00:19:35.440 Sunny von Bulow knew.
00:19:37.280 She was in the room both times.
00:19:39.640 The one witness who knew everything was unable to tell any of it, frozen instead in an unreachable state.
00:19:48.680 This is all you can know, all you can be told.
00:19:54.500 When you get where I am, you will know the rest.
00:19:59.680 More than a century ago, an American writer published a story called The Lady or the Tiger.
00:20:06.880 In the tale, a barbaric king decides guilt or innocence through a public spectacle.
00:20:13.060 An accused person must choose between two identical doors.
00:20:17.360 Behind one wastes a tiger that would kill him.
00:20:20.160 Behind the other, a woman he must immediately marry.
00:20:23.940 When the king discovers that his daughter is secretly in love with a young man on the royal court,
00:20:28.840 he sends the man into the arena to choose between a tiger and a beautiful woman his daughter deeply resents.
00:20:36.580 The princess learns which door is which.
00:20:40.340 From inside the arena, her lover looks to her for guidance.
00:20:43.740 She signals toward the door on the right, and he opens it without hesitation.
00:20:49.720 The story ends without showing what lies beyond that open door.
00:20:55.060 Did the princess save the man she loved, knowing he would marry another woman,
00:20:59.900 or did jealousy cause her to send him to the tiger?
00:21:03.720 The writer never tells us.
00:21:05.820 Was it the lady or the tiger?
00:21:08.180 The reader is left to decide.
00:21:11.140 The Von Bulow case has its own two doors.
00:21:15.020 Behind one is the defense's version, an unhappy, self-destructive woman whose medical crises became a murder case through fear, unreliable memory, and flawed science.
00:21:27.240 Behind the prosecution's door, a husband who twice tried to kill his wife and whose money built a defense powerful enough to escape a second conviction.
00:21:36.860 The two juries in this case opened two different doors, but neither could say what actually
00:21:43.700 happened inside Clarendon Court. The answer stayed forever with Sonny and Klaus, who died in London
00:21:50.740 in 2019. Of course, we all have our opinions. I have mine. What do you think happened to Sonny
00:21:59.980 Von Bulow. Send me an email at megan at megankelly.com. We'll be back Monday evening
00:22:06.920 with another case, this one out of the nation's capital. For MK Confidential, I'm Megan Kelly.