From the Strange Bedfellows File comes word that Rodney King–yes, that Rodney King–has found love with a juror who awarded him a multi-million dollar settlement in wake of the infamous 1991 beat down he took from LAPD officers.
In fact, the love birds are getting married.
But here's the even weirder part: they had their first rendezvous in Newport Beach.
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RadarOnline.com has the exclusive scoop.
For you young 'uns from public school districts run by Christians who have changed your history textbooks to state Jesus rode dinosaurs: 19 years ago, Sir King was beaten savagely by a gang of LA cops who'd just chased his car through the San Fernando
Valley.
Being a black man, there was nothing so unusual about that. What was so unusual was, this time, the brutality was captured on videotape.
When the officers–including one who was represented by John Barnett, one of the Haidl 3 gang rape defense attorneys–were acquitted in their 1992 criminal trial, Los Angeles exploded with a four-day race riot that left 55 dead
and more than 2,000 injured. The civil unrest also produced the quote of the decade, from King himself: “Can't we all just get along?”
He went on to win a $3.8 million payout in a civil case against the city of Los Angeles. That must be where juror No. 5 Cynthia Kelley first caught his eye (and she his). However, both were married . . . to other people . . . during the trial. Each later divorced.
“Our first date was the next day after the trial when Rodney's lawyer
and Rodney met me in a local pizzeria in Newport Beach,” Kelley reportedly reveals in the Radar post.
They got together after that, separated for awhile and then got back together for good. Now, they are headed down the aisle, although the date has yet to be set. “She is a godsend, a blessing in my life,” says King in the post. “I don't know what I would have done without her in my life. . . . I can't wait to make her my wife!”
He apparently would have been poorer without her in his life. Kelley claims in the item that other jurors wanted to award King $100,000, which they figured he would have blown anyway. Kelley says she, the lone black juror, pushed for the $3.8 million pay day. “It was a blessing that I was even there,” she tells Radar, “the other jurors didn't want to give him anything.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.