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The longtime boyfriend and two doctors of Anna Nicole Smith plied the late Playboy model with a steady stream of drugs acquired through fake prescriptions, a court heard Wednesday.
Howard Stern, along with physicians Sandeep Kapoor and Khristine Eroshevich, funneled powerful medications to the reality star for years before her death from a drug overdose in February 2007, prosecutor Renee Rose said.
All three defendants deny felony charges of conspiring to prescribe, administer and dispense controlled substances to Smith from June 2004 up until the 39-year-old's death in a Florida hotel room three years ago.
In an opening statement on the first full day of their trial at Los Angeles Superior Court, Rose said the doctors would use multiple fake patient names to obtain drugs for Smith.
Eroshevich was Smith's next-door neighbor and would "prescribe medication without a legitimate purpose," Rose told jurors.
Rose alleged that Stern often kept Smith over-medicated, ringing around various doctors in an effort to obtain prescription medications for the former Playboy Playmate.
However Stern's attorney Steven Sadow said in an opening rebuttal that his client had been an unwitting victim, believing that the use of aliases to acquire prescriptions was necessary to keep Smith's name out of the spotlight.
"Howard K. Stern, the non-doctor, the layperson, watched it and had no reason to think there was anything wrong," Sadow said of the use of aliases for Smith.
He said the defense would argue Smith was "not an addict" and took the medication to deal with her pain, then to deal with severe depression after the death of her son, Daniel, in September 2006.
"He cared for her, he cherished her, he loved her," Sadow said of his client, noting that Stern had no medical training. "He relied in good faith on the medical judgment of doctors.
"The larger than life platinum blonde Smith was once regarded as one of the world's most desirable women during the 1990s when she replaced supermodel Claudia Schiffer as Guess Jeans model.
However Smith -- who married aging oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, a man 63 years her senior, in 1994 -- fell out of the spotlight over the next decade, often appearing to be under the influence of drugs or drink in public.
