A defense lawyer promised a legal battle royale Thursday over the bar brawl that left Grace Kelly’s princely grandson with a broken jaw.
Defendant Adam Hock forcefully rejected a plea deal in the Feb. 12 fight at the Double Seven nightclub, with attorney Joseph Tacopina insisting his client was the real victim in the fisticuffs.
“There will be no plea in this case, so they can save their offer,” Tacopina declared. “He was struck by one of the alleged victims.”
Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Clerkin had just proposed an agreement where Hock, 45, would receive probation and a 12-week anger management course for a guilty plea to assault.
But Tacopina charged that Monaco’s Prince Pierre Casiraghi and his three pals were “habitual bar brawlers” with a history of fights in Paris and Belize.
Hock, the only one arrested after the punches flew in the Meatpacking District, claimed the fight started when he stepped up to protect a bevy of fashion models from the prince’s unwanted attentions.
The brawl escalated when Hock was smashed in the shoulder with a $500 bottle of vodka — an injury that Tacopina claims will require surgery.
“It’s really a ridiculous case,” said Tacopina, whose client is due back in court on May 27.
Casiraghi and his pals are “very well-known individuals who seems to be in bars and bar fights all the time,” Tacopina said derisively. “One of them claims to be half-a-prince.”
Tacopina insisted three witnesses would back up Hock’s version of the brawl. Hock is the former owner of the now-defunct Hawaiian Tropic Zone.
Oh cry me a river Hocky puck! There's a fight in a bar, one guy leaves in an ambulance with his face smashed in, the other leaves in a police car and you want us to believe that the one in the ambulance was the real villain? Give me a break! I would have advised you to take the plea deal and consider yourself lucky. Each side will have witnesses, probably each saying something different, each saying the other started it so that probably won't amount to much. What will be crucial is that one guy walked away with a slight injury that may require attention at some point and the other guy was carried away by paramedics with a broken jaw. Doesn't look good for you Hocky puck! I'm also not impressed by this effort to sway public opinion by slandering Pierre in the press. Pierre, you will not, hasn't said a word about what happened but Hocky puck and his legal lizards are putting it out that Pierre is part of some sort of jet-set, barroom version of fight club. Give me a break! Pierre Casiraghi is under almost constant scrutiny and the paparazi, certainly in France and Italy, are not known for ignoring celebrities getting into fights. If Pierre were getting into bar fights constantly, all over the world, I'm pretty darn sure we would have heard about it before now. At least one of them. Sometime. Somewhere. Have you? I havn't, and I keep pretty close tabs on our Monegasque friends. Besides which, when it comes time to go to court, anything that happened in Paris or Milan or British Honduras is not going to matter. All that is going to matter is who did what to whom and the evidence is pretty clear that Pierre got the worst of it. It hardly seems that ol' Hocky puck was the injured party.
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