This whole Shawne Merriman situation continues to get stranger.
Wednesday night’s report that the woman accusing him of battery and false imprisonment became hysterical due to jealousy apparently has caused her to react in hysterical fashion.
And so Tila Tequila Nguyen has taken to Twitter, with numerous inflammatory and profane entires, with lots of venom directed at Merriman and the team for which he plays, the Chargers. (One of her goals was to push the phrase “ChargersSuck” into the “trending topics” list at Twitter, which tracks words and names appearing most frequently on the various user pages.)
She’ll probably delete many of the tweets, so it makes sense to check them out sooner rather than later.
Here’s a brief sampling.
“I mean....first he says Im drunk...now he says Im jealous cuz he was having threesomes, I mean...get it together with those stories!”
“IF he really was innocent, he wouldn’t sweat it. He would just be like...ahh f--k that bitch is lying anyway...lets focus on football..”
“Where in the law does it say ‘IF UR FRIEND IS DRUNK....MAKE SURE TO BEAT HER AND CHOKE HER'.....NO!”
“Where else in the law does it say ‘BITCH WOULDN’T SLEEP WITH ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS.....SO CHOKE HER AND BEAT HER!’ umm...NO!”
“Because my story....is the truth....and the only person I need to tell that to is the Judge. Not the media...only a guilty person does that.”
Frankly, she’s incorrect. As we’ve said many times over the past few months, high-profile cases are tried in two courtrooms -- the real one and the courtroom of public opinion. Nguyen might never get a chance to tell her story to a judge, if the San Diego County District Attorney opts not to press charges. So she needs to provide to the media something more than a statement from a lawyer that Merriman’s defense will be discredited.
Clearly, she wants to tell her story, but she is deferring to legal advice that she shouldn’t talk about the situation. The problem is that her desire to talk (which might come from a sad obsession with attention) has prompted her to launch into Twitter tirades that make her look erratic and unpredictable and not credible.
The reality is that the D.A. surely has been monitoring Nguyen’s Twitter page and making conclusions about whether she’ll be an effective witness at trial.
Based on the stream of tweets that continue to be posted even as of this posting (does she sleep?), no prosecutor in his or her right mind would rely on her testimony to satisfy the high bar of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.