For the first time last week, Nima Momeni, the man charged with stabbing tech executive Bob Lee, spoke after a year and a half of silence. His soft, almost nasal voice with a light Iranian accent at first sounded so terse and clipped that it was nearly drowned out by the clacking of a dozen reporters typing into their computers. But as his testimony wore on over two days, he became defiant, combative and accusatory.
While Momeni’s account of what happened the night the Cash App founder ended up with a knife through his heart was clearly the main event of the ongoing murder trial, the month-long affair unfolding at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice has not lacked friction, flair or even fashion.
The day begins with San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon greeting the courtroom with a bright “Good morning, everyone!” If the courtroom attendees fail to echo the greeting to her liking, she has everyone do another take, like a choir director listening for the perfect harmony.
Despite its soap-opera-like allure to spectators, what happens in Department 28 is highly consequential for the two families who sit up front on opposite sides of the aisle.
Bob Lee’s family — typically his brother, father, ex-wife and any friends — gather daily at one end of the hall, accompanied by a victim advocate who, like a caretaker, leads them to and from the courtroom.
Lee’s father, Rick, sits stoically listening to descriptions of his son being stabbed to death. The two were close enough that, before his demise, Lee moved his newly widowed father to the Bay Area in 2019 and, a few months before the 2023 stabbing, the father and son moved together to Miami, Florida.
Lee’s brother, Oliver, and Lee’s ex-wife, Krista, have a harder time keeping their emotions in check. Krista gasped at the screen as the jury was shown surveillance-camera footage of Lee collapsing in the street. After hearing Momeni’s sister, Khazar Momeni, testify, Krista stepped out of the courtroom and blasted her in front of the press for playing the victim.
“She can go fuck herself,” Krista said loudly, eliciting a loud laugh from her former father-in-law.
That comment got her kicked out of the courtroom until the next witness took the stand, and Krista has since kept quiet. “I shouldn’t,” she now says demurely when asked for her opinions on recent testimony. (Upon hearing a former police officer on Monday suggest that Lee may have attacked Momeni, however, Krista snapped again: “You’d have to be higher than Khazar Momeni to believe any of that!”)
Bob Lee’s brother, Oliver, similarly, doesn’t disguise disgust or anguish. Hearing about how blood might have dripped off his brother’s clothes, he hung his head. When Khazar Momeni testified that Lee was “very erratic, he would get in your face,” and said her earlier complimentary texts were her way of encouraging Lee to be the “better version of himself,” Oliver stormed out of the courtroom.
Oliver often speaks to the press as the family spokesperson and, last week, standing in the hallway, he called the Momeni family “depraved.”
For their part, the Momeni family has been more subdued on the stand and in the audience. Khazar Momeni, breezing into the courtroom in flowy Valentino and oversized sunglasses as if she was at the Cannes Film Festival, testified for four days. Her mother, Mahnaz — watchful and somber — was always at her side, and a trail of paparazzi-like cameramen followed her every move.
Although dressed to the nines and admitting on the witness stand that she can “get dramatic,” Khazar remained silent outside of her testimony; she only testified because she had been subpoenaed by the prosecution.
Mahnaz, as if projecting innocence on behalf of her son, appears mostly in white. The dental hygienist, who fled Iran from an allegedly abusive husband to move to the United States when her son and daughter were teenagers, listens intently from the same seat each day. Occasionally, the press corps and others hear her muttering “objection” under her breath.
In the hallway, Mahnaz is polite, cooing at photos of reporters’ young children, or amiably rolling her eyes at a kooky attendee who asks odd questions. When Momeni’s 40th birthday fell on the same date as a pre-trial hearing, Mahnaz arrived with a cake. The judge nixed her idea to pass it to her son, so instead she offered it to the journalists.
But mostly, Mahnaz stares ahead and plays the maternal role for her adult children. She passes clothes through the bailiff to her son. When Khazar, after testifying, lingered in the vestibule between the inner and outer doors of the courtroom, Mahnaz murmured some words into the gap between the doors and coaxed her out.
Nima’s five defense attorneys are reliably boisterous and friendly, joking with reporters. They draw a sharp contrast to the three-man prosecution team, which stalks out each day carrying boxes of documents and wearing near-identical suits in shades of blue or black.
And after they leave, reporters gather round for a quick debrief before hunching over their computers to write up the day’s events.
Thanks for covering this so closely. I really enjoy Eleni’s writeups and observations.
I agree. Eleni’s reporting is by far a blow by blow accounting of this trial. I now don’t have to attend the trial in person. Thank you Eleni, best wishes