Linda Deutsch, who covered high-profile trials in nearly 50 years as a reporter with The Associated Press, starting with the one surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and including the defendants O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 80.
Her death followed a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2022, which was successfully treated but returned this summer, The A.P. reported.
Ms. Deutsch’s decades of clips offers a counternarrative of celebrity in America, a view of its underbelly told through many of the country’s most notorious trials.
Based in Los Angeles, she was also a front-row witness to societal breakdown. Besides the 1969 cult murders ordered by Mr. Manson, she covered the 1976 trial of the kidnapped-heiress-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst, the 1996 conviction of the parricidal brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of the Black motorist Rodney King, which set off deadly riots in 1992.
“That almost destroyed my belief in the justice system,” Ms. Deutsch said of the King case in 2014, the year she retired. “I feel a jury usually gets it right, but in that case, no. It was the wrong conclusion. It was the wrong verdict, and it nearly destroyed my city.”
She was more circumspect about Mr. Simpson’s acquittal on charges that he fatally stabbed his former wife and a friend of hers in 1994, declining to say if she thought he was guilty of murder. “I never made a decision,” she told the women’s lifestyle publication Refinery 29 in 2015. “It’s not my job.”
The judge in the trial chose Ms. Deutsch to be the lone “pool” reporter covering jury selection. She became nationally known through daily television appearances as the country was transfixed by the trial’s mix of celebrity, murder and race.
When Mr. Simpson was freed, he called Ms. Deutsch to thank her “because I just reported the facts,” she told Refinery 29. They continued to speak for years, and she wrote often about those conversations.
Mr. Jackson, whose 2005 trial on child molestation charges was also covered by Ms. Deutsch, called her, too, after his acquittal, to give her an exclusive interview.
“She’s just extremely ethical, extremely professional and very, very honest,” Mr. Jackson’s lawyer, Thomas Mesereau, who also successfully defended the actor Robert Blake on a murder charge (Ms. Deutsch covered that trial, too), told The A.P. in 2014. “If she tells you something is off the record, you can bet your life that it is.”
Ms. Deutsch, who had set out to be an entertainment reporter, was in the courtroom from Day 1 of the eight-month trial of Mr. Manson and three female followers in the 1969 murders of the actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles.
When Mr. Manson died in 2017 while serving multiple life sentences, Ms. Deutsch wrote a reminiscence of the trial in tight, precise prose evoking the best of wire-service reporting. The trial, she wrote, “was “a surreal spectacle punctuated with grotesque images of death, bloody scrawlings and tales of a ‘family’ of disaffected youths living in a backwater commune.”
Linda Deutsch was born on Sept. 24, 1943, in Perth Amboy, N.J., and raised in the shore town of Bradley Beach. She was the only child of Sandor and Sylvia (Sosna) Deutch, who owned a haberdashery in Asbury Park, N.J.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1965 from Monmouth College (now Monmouth University) in New Jersey. As an undergraduate, she worked for a summer on The Perth Amboy Evening News, where she persuaded editors to let her cover the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington.
After graduation, she was a reporter and columnist for The Asbury Park Press before moving west. The A.P.’s Los Angeles bureau chief took one look at her clips and hired her in 1967. She was the sole woman reporter in the office.
Ms. Deutsch was on duty on the night in June 1968 that Senator Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles, and she went on to cover the trial of his assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan.
In the early 1970s, she and other female journalists sued The A.P. for discrimination. They won a cash settlement to cover unequal back pay and the right to be called “newswomen” rather than “newsmen.” The A.P. later gave her its most prestigious title for a reporter, “special correspondent.”
Covering courtroom dramas is “as old as Shakespeare and as old as Socrates,” Ms. Deutsch said in 2007. “It’s an extremely powerful theater that tells us about ourselves and about the people on trial.”
In 2019, Ms. Deutsch endowed a $1 million scholarship for journalism students at Monmouth.
She left no immediate survivors.
“I have a very full life, but it never included marriage,” she told Refinery29. “I think my relationships mostly broke up because of my work. Men were not interested in women who had to be away for five months at a time on a trial.”
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