Prosecutors again attempted Wednesday to portray Khazar Momeni, the sister of accused killer Nima Momeni, as an unreliable witness today, in an attempt to have her testimony excluded from the ongoing murder trial.
But it was Cash App founder Bob Lee’s ex-wife, Krista Lee, who ended up barred from the courtroom. In the hallway during a break from testimony, she accused Khazar Momeni of unfairly playing the victim on the witness stand.
“Our family is the one that got murdered,” Lee said outside the courtroom. “She can go fuck herself.”
Nima Momeni is accused of stabbing Lee to death on April 4, 2023. Krista Lee’s statement was in response to accusations made today and yesterday that Lee’s family had “intimidated” Khazar Momeni.
Bob Lee’s brother confirmed that Krista Lee had been barred from the courtroom for the remainder of Khazar Momeni’s testimony, which concluded this afternoon. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon called each juror into the courtroom to speak with them individually, possibly to verify that the exchange had not been overheard.
Inside the courtroom, too, tensions rose. Khazar Momeni, who has been timid and soft-spoken over the past few days of testimony, began pushing back on questions from prosecutor Dane Reinstedt. The prosecutor questioned her memory of the events of April 3 and April 4, 2023, when Bob Lee was stabbed to death after leaving her Millennium Tower home with Nima Momeni.
The duration of Khazar Momeni’s testimony can be attributed to the fact that she has been placed at the center of the case, with prosecutors claiming her brother killed Lee over some perceived indiscretion between Lee and Khazar, while defense attorneys have tried to show that Nima Momeni had no issue with Lee and that Khazar Momeni was, in fact, sexually assaulted by Lee’s friend and purported drug dealer, Jeremy Boivin.
New witnesses also testified that Momeni and her mother attempted to sell off Nima Momeni’s BMW, which he drove Bob Lee in minutes before the stabbing — but that the car only received “typical maintenance” and its computer was not wiped or modified. The police sergeant who confiscated the vehicle from the BMW dealership in May 2023 testified that he did so without a warrant.
Krista and Khazar
The apparent animus between Krista Lee and Khazar Momeni was demonstrated in a text message exchange last month between Krista Lee and a friend: Krista asks her friend, Anthony, to “play detective” to help police track Khazar down, apparently referring to her as “the whore of high tower.”
That exchange was forwarded to a friend of Khazar’s, and was used by Momeni’s defense attorneys to argue before the trial started that Krista Lee should be barred from attending courtroom proceedings. The judge rejected that request at the time, but apparently changed her mind after this morning.
Khazar: When I saw the threatening messages, I was very scared … I told my lawyer, ‘can you contact the police and tell them that I’m here? I’m not going anywhere. If they need anything from me, I’m available.’
Reinstedt: I want to be very clear on this. You just described threatening messages. There was no message directed to you. Was there?
Khazar: They were trying to reach out to me and speak to me …
Reinstedt: Did anyone say that they were going to harm you?
Khazar: They were speaking ill about me and intimidating me and threatening me, basically.
After seeing the text messages in question, Khazar Momeni said she changed her phone number.
Bob Lee’s brother, Timothy Oliver Lee, called today “a really emotional day,” and said Khazar took “every opportunity to assassinate [Bob Lee’s] character.” Krista, his sister-in-law, had a visceral reaction to Khazar’s testimony, he said, and he was glad for her mental health that she was not in the courtroom for the afternoon.
Khazar Momeni’s reliability
Though prosecutors attempted to discredit Khazar Momeni as a witness, it is unclear how effective that effort was on jurors, who today completed the seventh day of the trial, which is expected to go into December.
Prosecutors asked how Khazar Momeni remembered certain events and not others, and suggested she was cooperating with defense attorneys to testify only about events that helped their case.
Reinstedt: The combination of all of these things put you in the state that Mr. Zangeneh asked you about, and that I just described, right?
Khazar: No, the three shots of GHB did. Because it takes one shot to get you high, two, you’re out, and three, you’re completely gone.
Reinstedt: And you’re telling us right now that you can distinguish between the LSD, the cocaine and all the other drugs?
Khazar: Yes. Because as soon as I started taking more shots of that, I started becoming more and more unaware and unconscious.
Reinstedt: You were ‘on another planet.’ You ‘didn’t know what country you were in’ you were 10 out of 10 intoxicated, couldn’t move your body. You were coming in and out of consciousness. You couldn’t stand on your own? All of those things.
Khazar: Correct.
Reinstedt: … We got to a correct answer — it’s very different than when Mr. Zangeneh was asking you the same questions, you kept saying ‘yes’ to everything he’s asked … It took me five minutes.
[Defense attorney Saam Zangeneh, objects that the question is argumentative]
Khazar: I have nothing against you, and I want to answer all your questions.
Reinstedt: Those things were at the height of their effect on you at the time that you reached out to your brother [to pick you up]?
Khazar: The height of the impact must have been when I was passed out. … I had just gained some consciousness, enough to know what’s happening around me … Imagine the things that I don’t remember.
Reinstedt: I’m sure there’s a lot you don’t remember.
[Defense attorneys object again]
Khazar: That’s okay, go ahead.
Khazar Momeni insisted that, despite her inebriation, she did remember certain events from the afternoon and evening with Lee, her brother, and Boivin, who she said continues to “harass” her by reaching out to her from different phone numbers.
“I’m sorry, I feel I’m being intimidated into thinking that I’m lying to you,” Khazar said, “but I’m not lying to you. The more I remember — ”
Judge Gordon asked Khazar to stop speaking as she ruled on yet another objection.
“Sorry, heat of the moment,” Khazar said.
For a while i thought i was in LA, the clothing, the sunglasses, the designer handbag, etc but you do not want to make a movie out of this; Dateline will deal with it later on. I am glad i am not on the jury because ee are witnessing lying on a grand scale.
That’s a great shot of the ex-wife. You can tell she’s pissed.
Love y’all, and kudos to your early breaking of news on this case, but at this point:
– your editor has complained that everyone thinks crime is up when it is, in fact, down. I’d love to know how many articles you’ve written about *just this one murder* relative to how many articles about the decrease in crime. Is your continued reporting on this domestic dispute part of the problem?
– there have been more killings by car than any other weapon in the city this year, including one just yesterday, which you have not yet reported on. (And if you count killings *of strangers*, the ratio of car:other weapons is probably what… 4:1? 5:1?) Again, how many articles have you devoted to those trials (or the lack of trials in those cases) v. how many you’ve dedicated to this case?
I complained about over attention to this salacious murder non-mystery myself, but now I pop a bag of popcorn and settle in. I recommend it.