I broke the Anthony Pellicano story in 2003, not Anita Busch. Shortly thereafter, two men posing as LA County District Attorney investigators knocked on my door when they knew I was gone in Las Vegas and spoke to my landlord. When I called the number on the card they left, I never got a call back. And that was that.
Anita Busch is an interesting story on her own.
Anita Busch, the hard-charging former journalist whose discovery of a dead fish on her car led to the downfall of infamous Hollywood “fixer” Anthony Pellicano, disclosed for the first time to The Hollywood Reporter Wednesday that she was viciously raped in 2003, just as the intimidation and terror tactics she describes had reached a harrowing crescendo.
Busch, who has long since dedicated her life to aiding victims of mass shootings, said she was assaulted in February of 2003 by two men in a parking garage on a dark evening in Los Angeles, where she had returned from New York in a failed bid to escape her tormentors’ reach. She said the attack was so brutal, it left her bedridden for more than a year and using a wheelchair for the next five.
“I was given a strong message by them, which was: ‘If you report this, if you don’t stop helping law enforcement, we are going to come back and kill you or harm your family.’ And I believed it 100 percent,” she told THR.
Busch said she was too “petrified” to contact police, but reported the attack to family and friends, including a former colleague and a former assistant, both of whom independently corroborated her story to THR. She did not directly blame Pellicano, but said “there’s no doubt in my mind that it had to do with the whole Pellicano case. … It could have been dirty LAPD cops. It could have been anyone. I don’t know who it was.”
Pellicano, who was released from prison in 2019 and is now 79, told THR: “I had nothing to do with that, nor would ever have anything to do with something so despicable.”
Busch said the rape caused a concussion and back injuries that left her bedridden for 14 months, but only her closest friends knew the reason for her widely known struggles with health and mobility. “I had to literally learn how to walk again,” she said.
