Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (38 page)

Perhaps trying to sound like a reasonable person, Jodi took some responsibility, albeit in a rather backhanded way. She didn’t mind at all that he liked her sexually, and the way she described it, it would have been way more awkward to get out of it after a certain point of no return rather than just go with the moment, so to speak. They were two consenting adults, and even though it moved faster than she would have liked, she didn’t have the will or inclination to hold back. Even assuming it happened the way she said it did, questions still remained about what aspect of Jodi’s behavior had made Travis correctly conclude that she was the kind of girl who wouldn’t slap him.

And so the testimony went, Jodi recalling incident after incident of sex between the two with a straight face, while the audience blushed and the jurors squirmed. The explicit nature of the sexual discourse went far beyond what even the most seasoned court veterans had expected. Jodi was very comfortable with Nurmi, so Jodi actually seemed more like an intern on a clinical assignment or an observer of sexual behavior rather than someone who had done the things she was talking about. Sometimes, she’d laugh, sometimes, she’d act more coyly, but she seemed to be dead serious. Her ability to recall detail was astonishing, unless, of course, she was making it up. After all, these episodes had happened years earlier, and she could even remember the kind of drink each of them ordered at a Starbucks on their second date, which, coincidentally, also ended in a one-way oral sex act on Travis. Jodi again said the feeling of attraction was mutual, but she was beginning to feel degraded.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez sat stewing on the side, but without any seriously dramatic outbursts. He knew he would get his chance. He would occasionally feverishly write down a note on his legal pad or lean over to exchange a whisper with Detective Flores, who was sitting beside him at the prosecution table.

Meanwhile, Jodi continued to follow Nurmi’s prompts, discussing the spiritual toll the sex was having on Travis and her. She talked about Travis giving her
The Book of Mormon
and her baptism into the faith a month later. She explained to the jurors what her interpretation of chastity was, especially when she relied on Travis to be her guide. Her recollection of a night of sex right after the baptism, including the first anal sex of the relationship, outraged the audiences in and out of the courtroom. Based on frequent media surveys done throughout the trial, the majority of people following the case considered this story and many of Jodi’s other sexual anecdotes to be a lie. Their opinion was that there was no way in hell Travis would do that on the very night he baptized her into his religion, no way in hell.

J
odi had spent a week on the stand when, on Monday, February 11, the attack on Travis’s character was ratcheted up. If trial watchers thought the details of their sex life to date had been uncomfortable pornographic fabrications, the story she was about to relate was despicable. More awkward, Jodi’s father Bill Arias was in the gallery with her mother Sandy. He looked tired and beaten down and always had on his now-oversized outdoor jacket, appearing as though he was just arriving or just about to leave. He tended to lean away from Sandy, rather than lean close in, more of a posture of solidarity. Jodi’s younger brother Joseph was also present. The two were expected to be at the trial for the remainder of the week.

The testimony began with Travis’s supposed Valentine’s Day gifts to Jodi soon after they became a couple in February 2007. One of the gifts, according to Jodi, was a package of boys’ Spiderman underwear, which were ill-fitting and tight. She said Travis told her she was “hot” in them and wanted her to wear them in the future for “sexual interaction,” the term Nurmi used. Next, Nurmi directed Jodi to a May 2007 between-the-sheets incident that Jodi claimed was their first vaginal intercourse.

Jodi explained, “I wanted to stay with the Law of Chastity, felt our relationship would be blessed if we followed that.” Nurmi, followed up with a question, “When you went to sleep, were you dressed?”

“Wore cotton shorts, pretty high,” Jodi answered.

Nurmi had another follow up. “When you woke up, what was happening?”

“He was in the act,” Jodi replied. “My first thought was uh-oh. Worried about spiritual consequences.”

While there’s no doubt they ultimately did have sexual intercourse repeatedly, a lot of people suspected this particular incident never took place, at least not the way she described. Not only was Jodi slathering it on thick when it came to her own spirituality, but many questioned how Jodi could remain asleep during the process of having Travis remove her shorts and penetrating her vaginally. According to her testimony, when she became aware of what was happening, she got out from under him and performed oral sex on him. “He began to quicken his pace. I don’t know if I scooted out . . . He pushed my head under the covers.” And why did she go along with something that she was now painting as degrading? “I just wanted to follow through,” was her nonanswer answer. She said no words were ever spoken about it, as she lacked the “moral courage” to bring it up, adding that they still spent the rest of the weekend together.

Jodi moved through their timeline together, their trips to Disneyland, Huntington Beach, the Sacred Grove, and Niagara Falls. The problem with Jodi was no one really knew where any of her lies began and where they ended. She added more sexual details than travelogue tidbits but, of course, that was the purpose of the testimony, to show Travis’s insatiable sexual appetite. She talked about them breaking up over the phone, because she had discovered that he was cheating on her, but they were still going on trips together.

“Why, after you get back to California, are you still willing to put up with this?” Nurmi asked his client. Jodi said she was in denial, and that the sexual interactions made her feel loved. Nonetheless, according to Jodi, they broke up on June 29, 2007.After the breakup, Jodi moved to Mesa. She said Travis encouraged the move and had listed the positive attributes of living there. That, of course, was contrary to what Travis’s friends said outside court—that he “freaked out” when he learned she was moving to Mesa—but, for now, jurors were left with the impression that Travis actually wanted her to be nearby. Jodi explained that they continued a sexual relationship, but that it was essentially a secret life, with no signs of affection for each other in public. She needed money, and he hired her to clean his house. An indignant Nurmi displayed a drawing of a woman in a French maid’s outfit that Travis purportedly suggested via an email that Jodi wear while cleaning. Though she never wore such clothes, the defense strategy was to pile on as much questionable conduct by Travis as they could to prove that Jodi was his dirty little secret, and that he emotionally abused her.

“When you were cleaning the house, working as his maid if you will, did he ever express desire to have sex with you while you were working for him?” Nurmi asked.

“Occasionally.”

“How did you feel about that? You’re at his house, and he wants to have sex with you.”

“It wasn’t unpleasant . . . it made me feel good.”

With Nurmi’s prompting, Jodi began a lengthy list of “wheres,” now that the two were finally able to have access to each other regularly, something that had not happened during the preofficial and official portions of the relationship. In addition to Travis’s house, the clandestine trysts took place in Jodi’s car or behind the bushes on the front porch of her house. Jodi testified that the porch scenario occurred more than once and was a sexual fantasy of Travis’s.

“He wanted to drive up to the house,” she began, “it was a more private porch, stucco column, a big bush that created a shadow—it would occur at night—drive up to the home, have me come out of the house, me give him oral, he ejaculate on my face, and he would drive away.” She said they did this three times, and once, he dropped Toblerone candy on the grass beside her for a reward.

No wonder her father never took off his coat, in case there was a chance to escape and avoid hearing more of his daughter’s kinky sexual history. Jodi even said on the stand how embarrassing these stories were to relate with her parents sitting in the front row. Nonetheless, that purported self-consciousness didn’t stop the sex narrative from continuing—sex on the freeway in Texas, sex here, sex there, anal sex, oral sex, vaginal sex, and finally, after a day with so much sex that even the most prudish were desensitized, Nurmi brought it all back home to the boys’ Spidey underwear and sex. This was where the story sank to a new low.

On January 21, 2008, Jodi said, she’d gone into Travis’s room to retrieve a porcelain angel he had given her, and she’d caught him masturbating.

“I got kind of embarrassed. Kind of awkward. I was headed toward the dresser. Trying to think of something funny or witty. He started grabbing at something, papers. One of them went sailing off his bed and landed faceup near my feet. A photograph.”

“What was in the photograph?”

“A picture of a little boy.”

“How old?”

“Five-ish, six.”

“Was the boy dressed?”

“In underwear, like briefs.”

Jodi described being horrified, of running from the room feeling nauseous. Travis was calling her name, but she ran for her car. She got home and threw up in the bathroom. She discovered that Travis had left her three voice mails but she was so repulsed, she drove right to the temple center to try to collect her thoughts. Finally, she thought maybe she was actually saving little boys from Travis’s advances because of her willingness to wear boys’ underwear, that she was mitigating his sick obsession. Also, she thought Travis himself had been violated as a child, and this was his acting out. She might be the vessel that would swing his obsession away from children. With her as a pliant, flexible sex partner, he would be the normal, heterosexual man he wanted to be. When she was done with her story, much of it through weak attempts at tears, she admitted that she still didn’t want to end it with Travis because of the idea that she was saving him.

With this testimony, Jodi certainly wasn’t saving herself. The backlash was immediate and ferocious from the public watching the trial on television. Jodi’s accusation that Travis had the tendencies of a pedophile made people furious with her, and they vented their rage by calling television and radio shows, and writing scathing posts online. It appeared that Jodi Arias had just surpassed Casey Anthony as America’s most hated female.

What had begun as a critique of Travis’s character and proof of his involvement in their sexual relationship had metastasized into something far more grotesque. Like the suggestion that she had suffered abuse at the hands of her parents, this accusation had come out of nowhere. Never had she spoken about it in any of her previous interviews, and no evidence of child pornography had ever been found on any searches of Travis’s property, physical or digital. One news producer noted the theatricality of her story, how a photo flew through the air and just happened to land faceup at her feet—just one of many convenient occurrences in Jodi’s lies. There was little believable about her tale; yet the fact that she had the audacity to tell it spoke volumes. To hear such an extreme story from a source with so little credibility displayed an arrogance and a boldness that was disturbing. This was a woman who would apparently say anything about Travis, go to any lengths, in her quest for freedom. It was hard not to hear these extreme allegations about Travis without replaying Jodi’s famous words to the media: “No jury will convict me.” The same brand of assuredness that had led her to proclaim her future freedom meant she would stop at nothing in her search for vindication.

The courtroom gallery was aghast and incredulous, although the jurors, true to their oath, showed no particular reaction. Nobody but Jodi was crying. Travis’s sisters, in their front row seats, shook their heads in disbelief, their expressions revealing their disgust over what the defense was doing to their dead brother’s reputation. By the time the day ended, with Jodi testifying that Travis physically abused her by kicking her in the ribs and breaking her left ring finger, the sentiment against Jodi had coalesced. From that moment forward she would be universally despised.

CHAPTER 19

THE SEX TAPE

I
n the aftermath of Jodi’s outrageous allegations of pedophilia, few thought that the defense would be able to top itself. As it turned out, Nurmi and Willmott were just getting warmed up.

The following day included a highly anticipated piece of evidence, salacious fodder for the trial junkies. There had been a lot of buzz about the recording that Jodi had made of Travis and her engaging in phone sex, and this was the day that the tape was finally going to be played. Judge Stephens spent quite a bit of time telling the gallery audience that the testimony they were going to hear was going to be more sensitive and sexually explicit than usual, and that any spectator in the gallery could raise his hand and excuse himself now, before proceedings got under way, if he thought this was something he would not be able to handle. Not a single hand went up.