Winona Ryder: The accused

Starring Winona Ryder as the alleged shoplifer. Also starring: the LA DA who wants to make his mark; the disgruntled security guard who wants to 'nail a celebrity' and ex-Sony Pictures head Peter Guber, who's made three films with the defendant and is on the jury. Only in Beverly Hills...

Anyone seeking to understand the deeper meaning of Winona Ryder's shoplifting trial could have done worse than observe the proceedings on day three of the whole hoopla last Wednesday. At 9.45am, Winona entered the Beverly Hills municipal court, accompanied, as always, by her trial lawyer, Mark Geragos. To the innocent bystander it appeared that she was wearing a moderately conservative black woollen dress with pink trim – a perfectly harmless outfit in every way.

But then the press photographers lit her up with their overbearingly powerful flashlights and suddenly the shy-looking Hollywood actress took on an altogether different aspect. As the shots subsequently published on the Drudge Files (the muck-raking internet site) gleefully showed, the flashguns offered a revealing outline of her underwear.

"Panties on parade: Winona goes to court in see-through frock", the Drudge headline screamed. And the item went on: "The Hollywood star turned up for her shoplifting trial in a see-through party dress, shocking witnesses ... with one lawyer staring transfixed at Ryder's brassiere." All lies, of course. But that wasn't the point. Rather, it was all about focusing on Ms Ryder, the latest celebrity to find herself trapped in the clutches of a full-blown legal drama, then exploiting her for all she was worth. After all, nobody ever went broke following the old tabloid maxim that you should always adopt an attitude of envious resentment towards the rich and famous.

If anyone thought Winona was simply being victimised by her ordeal, though, they should have stuck around for what happened after the case resumed in Judge's Elden Fox's third-floor courtroom. For sure, the wily Mr Geragos sought to depict the somewhat bumbling security guards at the Saks Fifth Avenue department store as a bunch of liars who had concocted the case against his client for the sheer pleasure of "nailing" a celebrity. But the prosecution gave as good as it got, turning the tables on Ms Ryder and effectively accusing her of trying to wriggle out of an open-and-shut shoplifting case by hiring fancy lawyers and taking advantage of her station in life to make far more noise than the case merited.

The prosecution had one witness – security guard Colleen Rainey – recount how Ms Ryder initially dismissed the shoplifting accusation by suggesting airily that her assistant should have paid for the items. (She was unaccompanied by any assistant that day.) Ms Rainey then had Ms Ryder claiming that she was only going through the motions of shoplifting to prepare for a film role. The tenor of such testimony, and the way it was extracted, was unmistakable: this is a woman so arrogant that she thinks she can get away with anything.

So where does the truth lie? By truth, I'm not particularly referring to the increasingly irrelevant question of whether or not the 31-year-old actress, who can command £6m a film, actually stole more than $5,000 of merchandise on her shopping spree at Saks last December. Rather, I'm referring to the deeper ambiguity that the Ryder case opens up about our attitudes to the famous. Is she the celebrity-as-victim, or the celebrity-as-bitch? Is it even possible to resolve that dichotomy? She may be up on three felony charges and may face as much as three years in prison if convicted, but she could also be playing the most fascinating role we've seen her in for years.

Everything about the trial – and by extension about Ms Ryder herself – has been an intriguing dance between truth and deception. The prosecution alleges that she was seen cutting sensor tags from clothes with scissors while in the changing room. Then the defence asks: if the store really had this evidence when the alleged offence was committed, how come none of it made its way into the scanty incident reports filed at the time? The defence then digs up a former Saks security guard who says his former colleague Ken Evans bragged about "making enough evidence" to nail a celebrity. The prosecution counters by getting the former guard to admit that he had a bad falling out with Saks and that he is not even allowed back on to the premises.

This is a case in which nobody is quite what they appear to be, and everyone seems to be playing a pre-assigned role. In Ms Ryder's case, the role entails looking fragile but decent, and – uncharacteristically – saying nothing. Make no mistake, though: this is also a case in which everyone is vying to come out ahead. The Los Angeles district attorney wants to make a splash by sticking a famous person with full-blown felony charges where many reasonable-minded people might conclude that a misdemeanour and a little mandated therapy might do just as well. Lawyers for both the prosecution and the defence have names to make, and even the jury is not without its celebrity pull, thanks to the baffling presence of Peter Guber, the former head of Sony Pictures, who made three films with Ms Ryder and would love to return to the Hollywood big time after some fallow years.

Even Ms Ryder stands to gain, whether or not she is acquitted. According to her publicist, the scripts are rolling in thicker and faster than they have for some time. Clearly, as another well-worn maxim has it, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Even if her publicist is exaggerating, it is clear that what this trial has given her – arguably for the first time – is a strong public persona. Sure, she made a lot of diverse and interesting films, especially in the early part of her career (think of Heathers, or Night on Earth, or her two Oscar-nominated turns in The Age of Innocence and Little Women), but nobody quite had a grip on who she was.

Suddenly, the shoplifting escapade turns Winona Ryder into a character we can relate to: the flower-child of hippie parents who could not find herself in the free-love, drug-addled atmosphere of the northern California commune where she grew up; the precocious star who never had time to ask what all the adulation and fame was about; the overworked young adult who dropped out of one film, the third instalment of The Godfather saga, then checked herself into a psychiatric hospital because she felt she was about to crack up; and finally, the maturing woman finding herself adrift both personally and professionally.

Whether or not this emerging persona is the true Winona doesn't matter much. She has an impressive team working energetically on it all the same. In court last week were her trial lawyer, her entertainment lawyer, her publicist and an old friend of the family, the political consultant Pat Caddell, who is acting as a sort of ad hoc spin-doctor. In their view, she is a woman who may or may not have had psychological problems in the past (the word kleptomania has not passed their lips), but is now being persecuted by powerful forces – the district attorney, the tabloid media – who have no interest in her as an individual.

It's proving a persuasive argument, and may yet cause her to be acquitted when her case wraps up this week. As idle observers of celebrity trials, we can only hope the ending will prove suitably dramatic to satisfy our voyeuristic instincts. But as movie-goers, we can perhaps perceive a glimmer of a chance that this episode will push a talented actress to new and deeper challenges in the future.