Robert Durst returns to witness stand, denies yanking 1st wife from party by her hair or kicking man’s face with cowboy boot
Robert Durst returned to the witness stand Wednesday and denied violently yanking his first wife Kathie Durst out of a party by her hair in 1981 or kicking a man in the eye with a cowboy boot earlier that same year.
The socially awkward scion of a Manhattan skyscraper fortune said he regretted the rude way he acted around Kathie’s family before she disappeared in 1982 but couldn’t help it.
“It just sort of drove me bananas,” he said of visiting Kathie’s mom’s house for family functions.
“I was not polite. The way I acted was just absolutely wrong,” he testified inside an Inglewood, Calif., courtroom during his trial for the December 2000 murder of close friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles.
Durst, 78, said the hair-pulling story — which jurors previously heard from Kathie’s brother Jim McCormack and saw acted out in “All Good Things,” the fictionalized movie about his life starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst — never happened.
“I did grab Kathie’s hat, put it on Kathie’s head, grab Kathie’s coat and push her towards the door,” he testified from his wheelchair.
“I certainly could have acted better than I acted. But I don’t think anything I could do would have made me comfortable with being in that house with all those people and all those kids and the television and a couple of radios on loudly at the same time,” he said.
“Did you intend to hurt Kathie?” his lawyer Dick DeGuerin asked.
“No,” he replied.
Durst’s testimony that he didn’t act “live a cave man” that night contradicted McCormack’s account given in the first few days of the trial back in March 2020, before the pandemic caused a 14-month hiatus.
McCormack told jurors he personally witnessed Durst forcibly pull Kathie out of the family gathering after grabbing a handful of her hair.
“Bob insisted she get up. Kathie wanted to continue the conversation. He got impatient. He went out and then he came back very quickly (and) he grabbed Kathie by the top of her head,” McCormack said. “She went with the yank.”
Durst is testifying in his own defense to counter prosecution claims he killed Berman inside her Benedict Canyon bungalow in December 2000 to stop her from telling authorities what she knew about Kathie’s disappearance.
Prosecutors claim Durst killed Kathie amid a bitter breakup, tapped Berman to help with alibi and then shot her in the back of her head nearly two decades later to guarantee her silence.
During 11 weeks of prosecution witnesses, jurors heard testimony that Durst was an abusive husband to Kathie and once kicked a man in his face during a fit of rage inside their Upper East Side apartment in 1981.
The man, Peter Schwartz, previously testified Durst kicked him “hard” in the eye with a cowboy boot at a party — and that Kathie called him a year later, on the night she was last seen alive, and urged him to sue.
“He was enraged,” Schwartz said in the videotaped testimony played for jurors in May. “It was hard enough to fracture the bone under my eye.”
Schwartz claimed the kick, which led to a criminal prosecution and private civil settlement, was unprovoked.
Durst testified Wednesday that it was Schwartz who turned physically aggressive after Durst asked him to leave and “upended” a dinner plate allegedly covered in cocaine.
“Peter Schwartz grabbed me by my shoulders and the two of us fell down,” Durst testified.
“When we fell down, I think he hit his face on the coffee table. He might have hit his face on my foot, but I did not do anything that anybody would considered a kick,” he said.
In his first words to the jury on Monday, Durst denied killing Berman and made it clear he had no trouble recalling dates, names and addresses while fielding questions.
“Bob, did you kill Susan Berman?” DeGuerin asked as his opening question Monday.
“No,” Durst replied in a hoarse voice.
Durst claims he did not kill either Kathie or Berman and has no idea how each woman met her demise.
Kathie’s body has never been found. Durst has not been charged with her murder.
During his testimony Wednesday, Durst recalled the early years of his relationship with Kathie after they first met at a dinner when she was only a year out of high school, working as an assistant at a dentist’s office.
He said she was only 19 years old when he made her agree as a condition of their courtship that they would never have children.
“I was very, very much against having children,” he said. “I did not want to be a daddy. My childhood had been a disaster. I did not want the same thing to happen to my child.”
Looking back, Durst said it was “totally unrealistic” for him to believe Kathie “giving up everything she always planned for” was an option.
“Clearly Kathie was not going to just accept not having children,” he testified. “Was I making mistake by ruling children out or making a mistake thinking Kathie would be able to live her life and not have children and be happy?” he asked rhetorically.
Kathie’s friends have said Durst’s demand that she have an abortion after becoming pregnant in 1974, a year after their wedding, was a turning point for the couple, fueling the fighting and alleged domestic violence that marked the end stages of their marriage.
Before jurors were brought in Wednesday, Judge Mark Windham reminded Durst he was prohibited from mentioning inadmissible topics such as polygraph testing and his mental health during his sometimes long-winded answers.
“I want to make it clear...I’m instructing you, Mr. Durst, not to mention these subjects,” Judge Windham said.
“I understand,” Durst replied, giving a thumbs up.
