I looked into this some years ago and my understanding is that it is not legal to record conversations in California without both parties’ knowledge.
Has the law changed, or are Gibson and his girlfriend somewhere else?
Because I also heard that the calls were going to be used in the custody battle.
won’t be admissible in court.
That particular code section isn’t applicable, it’s about recordings made of people who are somehow in custody.
I don’t think the recording was a phone call was it?
I thought it was legal to record a phone call if the other party were making threats of violence.
It was a phone call and the law the way I remember it was that it didn’t matter whether it was a phone call or in person.
Context please? What is a Gibson phone call? If you have a link that would be nice.
That’s what this site says.
Seems like you can record without letting the other party know just by claiming they made a serious threat at some point before you started taping. Either that or the above site fails to mention you first need permission from a government agency.
I don’t believe that Mel Gibson was married to Oksana Grigorieva, so she’s not his wife. And I believe that the rant was left on her voicemail box, so I don’t think there’s any question of legality.
If you leave a voicemail, you are de facto consenting to be recorded.
Remember, the same thing happened with Alec Baldwin.
ETA, I think there may have been more than one recording, though, because he is directly responding to her at one point (when she gets him to admit that he punched her in the face and knocked out her teeth…“You know what? You fucking deserved it.” All class, this guy).
Anyway, I thought I’d read that the cops TOLD her to record him because he’d been making threats.
No, it was a telephone conversation. There’s a link you can click on and listen to it in the link Fried Dough Ho provided.
Just because something is illegal, doesn’t mean that people don’t do it.
Read the last sentence of the OP.
From reading the Wikipedia article on Mel Gibson, I gather that there was both a telephone conversation recorded by Oksana Grigorieva as well as one or more voicemail messages.
Right, but you said you don’t think there’s any question of legality because the rant was left on her voicemail box. It’s most likely that Stoid wasn’t confusing the voicemail with a phone conversation but was referencing the conversation in his OP.
Stoid is a she, but I think you answered her question definitively in post #8. It was legal to tape the call because he’d made threats.
Thanks.
Don’t feel bad. It threw me, too, and I was aware of the tape. I don’t think of him as Gibson–he’s either Mel Gibson or Crazy Mel.