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

**Megyn Kelly** (0:00)
June, 1985 On the tenth floor of the Harkness Pavilion inside Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, a woman lies in a private room. She will never leave on her own. She's not on a respirator. She breathes without help. A tube feeds her through her nose. Private nurses watch her around the clock, and twice a week someone washes and sets her hair.
There are scented flowers on the table and music playing softly in the room. Her name is Martha von Bülow. Everyone who loves her calls her Sunny, and she has not spoken a word since the winter of 1980
Ninety miles away in Providence, a jury has just told the world that the man accused of putting her in that bed is not guilty.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
The Claus von Bülow trial is finally over, and he is not guilty. Von Bülow was tried twice in a soap opera setting for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife. The first jury found him guilty, but he won a new trial, and this time he was cleared.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:02)
How do you find guilty or not guilty?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:04)
Not guilty.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:07)
So ended the second trial of Claus von Bülow accused of trying to murder his wife, longer but not as dramatic as the first trial three years ago.

**Megyn Kelly** (1:16)
Tonight Claus von Bülow can go anywhere he likes. Sunny cannot turn her head.
The murder trials are the part of this story that ends relatively quickly. Hers is the part that does not. Her two children from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala von Auerberg, turn their grief into something that will outlast the case. In 1985, they helped found a national organization for the victims of crime, and they name it for their mother, the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center. In time, it drops her name, but it grows into one of the largest victims' rights groups in America, known today as the National Center for Victims of Crime. That becomes the legacy of Sunny von Bülow. That and the belief that whatever a Rhode Island jury says, someone put her there, condemned her to unconscious bedrest for the rest of her life. But Claus does not walk away scot-free.
I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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Claus von Bülow's acquittal ends the state's case. It does not end his stepchildren's. Alexander and Ala cannot put him on trial for the crime again, so they do the one thing the law still allows. They sue him in federal court in Manhattan in a civil case. The number they seek is enormous, $56 million, and the claim behind it is the one the prosecution made twice, that he tried to kill their mother for her money.
The man who has just cleared his name in a criminal court now has to defend it again in a civil one. His appellate lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, laid out the stakes back in 1986

**Alan Dershowitz** (4:14)
Yeah, we see each other all the time. We talk about his ongoing case. He's being sued by his stepchildren for $56 million. The case is not over, and indeed the American public still remains undecided. One of the reasons I wrote this book is Claus von Bülow not only wanted to be acquitted, he wanted to be vindicated.

**Megyn Kelly** (4:32)
In time, the civil case settles, and the settlement reads like a verdict of its own.
Under its reported terms, Claus gives up every claim to Sunny's fortune, and agrees to divorce his wife, who will never know she has been divorced. In exchange, the lawsuit against him is dropped. He keeps his freedom, he gives up the money the state always said was his motive. One person is caught between the two sides of the family, Cosima, the only child of Claus and Sunny, who stood by her father through both trials, and it cost her. Sunny's mother, Cosima's grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, cuts Cosima out of her will, an estate valued between fifty and more than a hundred and ten million dollars. Cosima lost a share worth about twenty-five million. The exact figure was never the point. The rift was about a daughter's loyalty to a man the rest of the family believed had tried to kill her mother.