Day one at the Danny Masterson retrial was wild, what’s in store for day two?

[Attorney Shawn Holley and former Sea Org official Claire Headley]

We had wondered how the Danny Masterson retrial might be different than the first trial, which ended in a hung jury on November 30. And wow, on day one of the retrial yesterday, we really got some confirmation that the differences could be pretty stark.

In our detailed reports that went out at the breaks yesterday, we told you that one big surprise was that attorney Shawn Holley actually showed up for her client, Danny Masterson. She was missing throughout the first trial, when she was busy handling former Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer’s secret arbitration proceeding in DC.

Now, apparently, she has the time to join attorney Philip Cohen at the defense table. And how will it affect the defense? Will she be sharing cross-examination duties with Cohen?

Meanwhile, the other bombshell came at the end of the day, after we spoke up and asked Judge Charlaine Olmedo if the court would make available a copy of the defense witness list. She agreed, and when we saw it, we realized that Masterson’s defense is going to call its own Scientology expert witness to counter the prosecution’s expert, former Sea Org official Claire Headley.

But then, the other shoe dropped: We realized that Hugh Martin Whitt, the defense expert, is not only a Scientology OT 8, he is Claire’s stepfather. (We initially said he was her dad, and we’re glad we got to clear that up with Claire pretty quickly after we made the error.)

Cohen, remember, had argued for excluding any mention of Scientology from the trial at all. And now, instead, he’s turning it into a spectacle about Scientology with Claire and her stepdad as dueling experts. Wild.

We are sure you have many thoughts about this, and we want to hear them. Please join us in the comments section at the dot org site and let us know how you think the retrial is going to be affected by these big differences.

This morning, we’re back at jury selection as the pool reporter, and we’ll be sending out our notes to the reporters who emailed and asked to be put on our distribution list, and then posting the notes for the rest of the world here at the Substack. Either way, we’re sharing our notes with everyone we can, and we have heard a lot of great feedback from readers about the detail we’re putting out.

We don’t expect today to be as eventful, but who knows!

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

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