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San Francisco – from www.latimes.com – The former mistress of slugger Barry Bonds testified tearfully at his federal trial Monday that Bonds had threatened to cut off her head, cut out her breast implants and burn her house after he began using steroids about 2000, seven years before he broke the record for career home runs.

Kimberly Bell, 41, a star witness for the prosecution, told the court she became Bonds’ girlfriend when she was 24, and he was in the process of divorcing his first wife. She said the relationship continued after he married his second wife in 1998 and ended in May 2003, when she said Bonds told her “to disappear.”

Bell testified that the former San Francisco Giant told her in 1999 or 2000 that he was using steroids and blamed the drug for an elbow injury. She said she frequently saw Bonds’ former trainer, Greg Anderson, go into a bedroom with Bonds and lock the door after breakfast when they were in Arizona for spring training. She said Anderson had a black satchel with him during those times.

Prosecutors have said that Anderson administered steroids to Bonds. Anderson, a childhood friend of Bonds, was taken into custody last week for refusing to testify in the trial.

After Bonds began taking steroids, he became aggressive and impatient, Bell testified. She wept and said she was often afraid of him. He would blow up if he could not reach her on the telephone, she said.

“He was just very controlling,” said Bell, her voice breaking with emotion. She said Bonds was physically abusive, although she did not elaborate. The prosecution had been barred from allowing Bell to testify that Bonds once choked her.

Bell said she had been in love with Bonds and was upset when he decided to marry during their relationship.

She testified that Bonds’ testicles shrank and he became impotent at times after starting steroids. But she also admitted under cross-examination that she had been wrong when she told a grand jury in 2005 that his testicles shrank by half.

Defense lawyer Cristina Arguedas, who grilled Bell for much of the day, tried through her questions to suggest Bell was a gold digger who was infuriated when Bonds broke up their relationship and tried to profit from it.

Arguedas accused Bell of lying and committing mortgage fraud, a federal crime, by making misstatements on loan papers for a house Bonds bought her in Arizona. Bonds is being tried on charges he lied to a federal grand jury in 2003 when he testified he did not knowingly use steroids.

The defense lawyer asked Bell if she had a “tremendous amount of practice” for her testimony, noting Bell had given at least 20 media interviews about Bonds, and suggested that Bell’s tears had been disingenuous.

“On how many of those radio shows did you cry when describing this information?” Arguedas asked. “None, right?”

Bell repeatedly testified that she was “hurt” when Bonds abruptly ended their relationship. When Arguedas tried to get her to admit that she was angry with Bonds, Bell refused.

Arguedas then read an email Bell had sent to Bonds’ website after the break-up.

In the email to Bonds, Bell said she understood why she was never allowed to travel with him to New York — he had another girlfriend there — and mentioned “the ugly whore in Vegas” and “the stripper in Phoenix,” apparent references to other women Bonds dated at the time.

“You testified he had penile dysfunction,” Arguedas said.

“He had some trouble,” Bell responded.

“This is a lot of action, isn’t it?” Arguedas asked.

“I don’t know what he was doing with them,” Bell said. “I can only imagine.”

Arguedas questioned Bell so aggressively that U.S. District Judge Susan Illston admonished her at one point to “ratchet it down,” prompting Arguedas to apologize to Bell. Bell answered some questions through clenched teeth and glared at the lawyer.

Bell admitted that she hired an attorney after Bonds broke up with her in an attempt to get Bonds to pay off her Arizona home. She said he had given her money for the down payment and had promised to buy it for her. She testified that she had quit a well-paying graphic design job and moved to Arizona for the ballplayer.

Bonds agreed to a settlement of only $20,000 and a confidentiality pledge, which Bell rejected and described as “peanuts” during a television interview. Bell testified she made $113,000 from the sale of the Scottsdale home.

Bell’s presence in court Monday attracted the biggest crowd yet to Bonds’ trial. The courtroom was filled at least 20 minutes before the proceedings started, and several dozen spectators showed up in an overflow room to watch the testimony on a live video and audio feed.

Bonds has not played baseball since 2007, when the federal government indicted him for lying during a probe of steroid distribution.

from www.sfgate.com – Cast as a gold-digging, scorned mistress desperate to promote a tell-all book and humiliate former lover Barry Bonds, Kimberly Bell pulled a shrewd maneuver on his defense team Monday.

Asked whether she had tried to “disparage Mr. Bonds in the most vulgar ways possible” on Howard Stern’s radio show, Bell parried with lawyer Cristina Arguedas about what constituted vulgarity and then asked to have her memory of the show refreshed.

In other words, she wanted a transcript from the interview with Stern read to her and, by extension, into the record of Bonds’ perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial. Arguedas went to the defense table and then returned to withdraw her question, saying: “We’re going to decline that opportunity to go into the gutter.”

Too late. Way too late.

The entire courtroom had passed the gutter hours earlier and spent most of the day in the sewer.

Bell’s testimony was expected to be tawdry. The prosecution touted her as the witness who would validate that Bonds’ testicles shrank and that he had experienced sexual dysfunction – both regarded as side effects of steroid use, about which Bonds is accused of lying in grand-jury testimony.

Both Bell and prosecutor Jeff Nedrow approached the sexual topics delicately, almost squeamishly. Arguedas cross-examined Bell so aggressively that the judge felt compelled to ask her to “ratchet down” her tone.

Reading from an e-mail that Bell sent to Bonds’ website after their nine-year relationship ended in 2003, Arguedas rattled off Bell’s descriptions of other women she believed were Bonds’ lovers, including “the ugly whore in Vegas” and “the stripper in Arizona.”

After that, Arguedas noted: “That’s a lot of action” and “this is the man you described as having penile dysfunction.” At the defense table, Bonds was spotted trying to hide a grin.

Some of the most unflattering testimony about Bonds at this trial has been elicited by his attorneys. Apparently, Arguedas earned her fee by defending Bonds’ manhood and making Bell seem livid and bent on vengeance. The depiction of rampant womanizing was a necessary evil.

The strangest and most intriguing testimony of the day came when Bell explained how she thought of writing a book, which was not published but yielded title ideas of “In the Shadow of a Giant,” “Giant Mistake” and “Bonds Girl.”

“Liz told me I should write a book,” Bell said, and she repeated it later.

By that, she meant Liz Watson Bonds, the second wife of the former left fielder. They married in 1998, 3 1/2 years into Bell’s relationship with Bonds, and divorced last year. The book, however, was in the works as early as 2004, a year after Bell and Bonds broke up. (Or, as Bell described it, he “told me to disappear.”)

So the wife and ex-mistress were somehow in cahoots? Later, Arguedas asked Bell how she felt about being demoted to road-trip girlfriend, because she once had been important enough to meet his parents. The attorney kept trying to draw Bell into acknowledging anger and resentment.

Instead, she and the jury got this from Bell: “I knew his wife, Liz, was getting it worse than I was.”

For some reason, Arguedas did not ask her to elaborate.

Arguedas did ask Bell what Bonds had told her about “wife cities” and “girlfriend cities” for traveling ballplayers. She acknowledged that Bonds said a city like Miami is where players take their girlfriends. His colleagues in baseball should be really happy to hear that his trial dragged this into the light.

Asked about the fun of her road trips, Bell pointed out that Houston in 2001 did not end well. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 happened that week, and she said Bonds “abandoned” her as he took the team plane back to the Bay Area. Arguedas asked if it was true that no one but Giants personnel was ever allowed on the plane, and Bell curtly said there had been exceptions.

Arguedas repeatedly asked whether Bell started peddling information about steroid use to increase her visibility and push forward a book proposal. The defense attorney referred to the doping accusations as the book’s “money shot,” originally a term for a movie’s big scene, now slang for a porn-flick climax.
Gwen Knapp

* SF Giants’ Mike Murphy testifies in Bonds trial 03.28.11
* Tawdry talk turns trial into cringefest 03.28.11
* Bonds trial to shift focus to baseball 03.27.11
* Steroids expert testifies in Barry Bonds trial 03.24.11

More Gwen Knapp »

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The cringe factor wouldn’t disappear. The leading candidate for lowest moment of the day might have been when Bell said that Bonds had threatened her in several ways, including vowing to “cut out my breast implants because he paid for them.”

No one can say for sure how all of this went over with the jurors. But if they come into court today wearing HazMat suits, no one should be surprised.
Giants’ Murphy on hat size

Mike Murphy, one of the original Giants employees when the team moved to San Francisco 53 years ago, testified briefly at Barry Bonds’ perjury trial Monday.

Now the equipment manager for the team, Murphy was asked whether Bonds’ hat size had changed after 1999, when he is alleged to have started using performance-enhancing drugs. Murphy said that he had to order a cap an eighth of an inch larger sometime between 2000 and 2002. The size, he said, went from 7 1/4 inches to 7 3/8 , even as Bonds began shaving his head.

Skull growth is believed to be a side effect of abusing human growth hormone.

On cross-examination, Murphy said both Willie Mays and Willie McCovey had required larger caps over time, but only after they retired and put on weight.

Asked whether he was nervous, Murphy drew laughter when he replied: “Oh, definitely.”

Murphy is expected to be the only current team employee called to the stand.

Former team trainer Stan Conte, now with the Dodgers, is expected to appear today, possibly followed by former A’s first baseman Jason Giambi.