Platt objected, and after another hour of desultory testimony, Judge Garvey ruled that “Clearly there is no evidence . . . that Stella is in additional danger by being with Mr. Olmos.”

She looked at Keitel quizzically. Then she threw out the motion.

Judge Garvey had read the history of Keitel’s legal battles over the past five years and was, apparently, considering what drove him. After a rough period in the eighties involving pickup jobs on Italian TV and an intoxication with cocaine, he’d begun to behave like the obsessive characters in his movies; by the early nineties, however, he’d solved most of his troubles, but like Charlie, the doomed young mafioso he’d played in Mean Streets, he’d somehow brought his troubles with him, fixating on the alleged Olmos molestation and Bracco’s “betrayal.” “It was the saddest day of my life when she hooked up with him,” Keitel told me.

His anger might have gradually abated, had it not been for what allegedly occurred in Florida in July 1992. Lorraine; her two daughters, Stella and Margaux Guerard (the latter from an earlier marriage to a French hairdresser); her nanny, Ruth Bergman; and two friends of the family, 14- and 13-year-old girls whom the court has identified as “R.G.” and “V.G.,” were living in a rented house on Golden Beach, in Dade County, Florida, near Miami. Also present for part of the month were Eddie Olmos, then 45, and his sons Bodie, then 16, Brandon, 19, Mico, 19, and Michael, 20. Bracco was making a TV film, Scam, for the Showtime cable network and frequently had to shoot at night; so on those occasions, Olmos would take Bergman and the two sisters to visit Bracco on the set, eat dinner, then return to the house.

During the second week of July, according to R.G., she had driven back from visiting Bracco with Olmos, Bergman, and Stella, then 6 (who’d fallen asleep, it being after midnight). When Bergman and Stella went to bed, only R.G. and Olmos were awake in the house. R.G. had rented a Bogart-Bacall movie and went to watch it in Olmos and Bracco’s master bedroom on the first floor. She later told Linda Fairstein, head of the Manhattan D.A.’s Sex Crimes Unit, and testified in court that she’d fallen asleep on her stomach, head at the foot of the bed, watching the movie, while Olmos reclined with his back to the headboard, in a sitting position.

Sometime after 1 a.m., R.G. alleges, she woke up on her back, her top and bra pushed up around her neck, her shorts and panties pulled slightly down, and with Olmos “peering” at her: “His hand was in my underwear and one hand was under my shirt,” R.G. testified.

Dan Kornstein (counsel for Keitel): “And was he doing anything with his hands?”

R.G.: “Yeah . . . he was touching me.”

Kornstein: “Did you say anything to Mr. Olmos?”

R.G.: “Well . . . I had woken up and he stopped. . . . I left the room.”

Two days later, according to the girl, the scene was repeated, in exactly the same way, under exactly the same circumstances, except that this time, she’d gone into the bedroom reluctantly, after being coaxed by Olmos. When lawyers asked her why she’d told no one about the first incident, and why she’d put herself in danger again, she said she was “shocked” and “confused,” and “didn’t want to tell Lorraine . . . because I knew how much she liked Mr. Olmos.” She also explained: “I didn’t know how to avoid it.” (Linda Fairstein testified that one reason she found R.G.’s story credible was that she hadn’t tried to embellish her account, “harden the case against Mr. Olmos and make him more evil in other ways. . . .”)

Olmos, on his side, admitted watching movies with R.G. alone in his bedroom but placed the times as much earlier, between 8 and 10 p.m., and he denied having ever touched her, except on daytime occasions when he said he might have put “suntan lotion” on her “back.” He also testified that all the kids in the house had gotten into the habit of watching movies on his bed, and that there was nothing unusual about the practice.

On July 17, R.G. flew to Jamaica with Bracco and Olmos, turning down an offer to go back to New York with Stella and Keitel; there she worked as a production assistant on Scam, hung out, and had what she later described as “the best summer of my life.” In late August, she flew to Los Angeles and stayed at Olmos’s home with Bracco and the Olmos boys, one of whom, Bodie, later claimed to have engaged in some sexual “fondling” with her while they were in Florida. (R.G. denies it.)

By October, however, she was feeling traumatized and guilty, and she finally wrote her mother a letter, which she posted on an armoire mirror before leaving for the weekend. (Abuse experts testified that it was “not unusual” for child sex victims to wait a long time before reacting, and to exhibit “avoidance” symptoms when they did.) The letter read, in part:

“I was and am so angry at him and myself for not doing anything for being so scared. It’s just that I felt so betrayed. I trusted him to be my friend and he really wasn’t. I didn’t even know if I really was molested, but I guess I was. . . . I can’t get it out of my head. . . . I feel like I betrayed you. . . . Please don’t tell anyone. I love you.”