Quick: What's your mental picture right now?

If the answer is anything like "grifter," "nude pictures," "star stalker" or "used promises of sex to swindle men through lonely-hearts ads in newspapers," then Harland Braun can congratulate himself on a job well done so far.

Braun is the attorney representing Blake, the former movie and TV star who Los Angeles police say is not a suspect in the May 4 killing of his wife, but who also has not been ruled out. He is flamboyant and, in legal circles, famous, having risen to prominence in the '70s by successfully defending Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in a perjury case. In the '80s he defended movie director John Landis in the "Twilight Zone" manslaughter trial. In the '90s he represented Los Angeles police officer Theodore Briseno in the Rodney King beating, at one point memorably comparing his client's boots to ballet slippers.

Blake hired Braun immediately after Bakley was killed, and within hours Braun embarked on a strategy known in the legal racket as "dirtying the victim."

"She's been involved in these kind of con schemes where you bilk lonely men out of money with ads across the country," Braun was quoted as saying in the initial news reports. "So there could be any number of people that would have had it in for her." In the weeks since, there has been a constant stream of information and evidence from the Blake defense team, and just about all of it has been damaging to Bakley's reputation.

It seems that you cannot talk to a Los Angeles attorney about Braun without hearing the words "excellent lawyer" and "brilliant" and "very, very bright." But if you want to get a handle on just how aggressive Braun's smear campaign on Bakley has been, understand that Johnnie Cochran thinks he has gone too far.

"Braun's an excellent lawyer," Cochran told Greta Van Susteren on CNN May 15. "I'm a little bit amazed, though, even for Harland, the way he's attacked the victim, who's not even buried. I mean, he's attacking her, releasing stuff about her. It's almost like, 'Thou protest too much.' And it's a very strange case. Only in Hollywood that happened. You know, but I -- he's an excellent lawyer."

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Bakley, as you must know, was shot in the head as she sat in Blake's car a block from a Studio City, Calif., Italian restaurant where they'd just eaten dinner. (Studio City is, in fact, just over the hill from Hollywood.) Blake says he'd left Bakley in the car and returned to the restaurant to retrieve a legally registered gun he'd left in a booth, and on his return found her slumped over and bleeding. He'd been carrying a gun, he said, because Bakley feared that someone might be stalking her, presumably because of her less-than-savory moneymaking activities.

Here's some of what Braun has said about the 44-year-old Bakley: that the New Jersey native had just completed probation in Arkansas on a conviction for carrying false identification; that she used lonely-hearts ads to get men to send her money in the belief that they would get to meet her; that as part of these scams she sold pornographic pictures of herself and told the men who wrote her that she would have sex with them; that she was obsessed with celebrities and their world, and made it her goal to marry one; that she got pregnant with a child she thought was fathered by Christian Brando -- son of Marlon and a veteran of a previous decade's tawdry Hollywood-fringe scandal -- before DNA tests showed Blake was the father; that audiotapes recovered in her bungalow after her death and turned over to police and the media revealed her talking on the phone with a friend and trying to decide whether she should "go with" Brando or Blake; and that she continued operating her scams after marrying Blake and moving onto his property despite a prenuptial agreement in which she'd agreed not to.

Braun, who didn't return a phone call requesting an interview, has insisted that he's merely trying to get the facts out, trying to force the LAPD to do a thorough investigation. He says the police are focusing solely on Blake and ignoring the fact that "there could be any number of people out there who would have a motive to kill" Bakley.

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