Retired NYPD officer testifies at Spector retrial

But she said he began drinking, then disappeared for a time and she fell asleep. When she awoke, she said, he was outside pointing a gun at her car and when she protested he smacked her in the face with the gun, refused to return her purse and she fled in her car with him chasing her down the driveway with a shotgun.

Melvin said she called police for help getting her purse back because "I had my passport, Joan Rivers' passport and a couple of thousand dollars in cash."

She said Spector charmed the policemen with "rock and roll stories" and insisted he didn't have the purse. After a sergeant arrived, she said, Spector was briefly handcuffed and police found her purse in the house. But she never pressed charges.

"He's Phil Spector, music legend, and I'm Joan Rivers' manager. I really don't like publicity and there would have been publicity because of Joan Rivers' name," she said.

Looming over the courtroom was an enlarged photo of a young Melvin and Spector smiling together at a party.

Later, she said she ran into Spector at Elaine's restaurant, a New York hangout for the rich and famous, and she accepted his invitations to some events but was never alone with him again.

Do tried to get her to corroborate Tannazzo's testimony about the Christmas parties but was stopped by defense objections of unfair surprise because Melvin had not testified about that in the first trial. The judge ordered a hearing on the issue for Tuesday morning.

For the second time during the retrial, Weinberg called for a mistrial, saying that the prosecution's focus on incidents in Spector's past had turned the trial into a character assassination rather than an examination of the facts.

He said Spector should not be judged on five incidents occurring over more than 30 years.

But Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler said he was allowing the women's testimony "for a very limited purpose," which he would explain to jurors later.


