HOUSTON -- Prosecutors played the first of more than a dozen secretly recorded phone conversations Monday illustrating the tempestuous relationship between two MD Anderson Cancer doctors in a trial accusing one spurned lover of trying to poison the other.
In the nearly one-hour phone conversation Dr. George Blumenschein seems to be fishing for information from his colleague and some-time lover Dr. Ana Maria Gonzalez-Angulo.
"I didn't have you followed. I had you watched," Gonzalez-Angulo said when Blumenschein asks her about her activities before and during the time he was poisoned.
"Why in Christ would I ever hurt you," she says. "I know that I have no reason to hurt you. The only thing that I have done here is I have lost. I have lost one of my best friends. And I lost my career. I lost a lot. The only person who loves you is me. It's sad. The only person who is going to pay for all of this is me."
Gonzalez-Angulo was arrested two days after that phone conversation, accused of being a jilted lover who laced her man's coffee with antifreeze. Dr. Blumenschein spent weeks in the hospital. And said today he's left with kidney function of just 40 percent.
But the defense continues to impugn any integrity they believe Dr. Blumenschein has left: a man carrying on a sexual relationship with one colleague while he had another live in girlfriend with whom he is trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. He admitted lying to that girlfriend and multiple other people. And agreed that the only one who knew he was cheating from the very beginning was Dr. Gonzalez.
"My life is pretty f....d up. And yeah, you almost died. And I was assaulted. But now the rest of my life is pretty f....d up. As I said, I may not have a career in the next two or three months. It's that simple George," Gonzalez-Angulo says in the phone conversation.
"It's just not worth it anymore. It's too late. As I said, go have a kid have a good life I'll leave. We'll be fine."
And in another development late Monday afternoon, an investigator for the drug company GlaxoSmithKline said he received email from, and had two phone conversations with, a woman who wanted to report that Dr. Blumenschein and his live-in girlfriend should be investigated for a potential conflict of interest with the company.
Blumenschein's girlfriend, Dr. Evette Toney, was an employee of GlaxoSmithKline and Blumenschein was a principal investigator in a research project that included GSK.
The GSK investigator said in court that the woman who made the anonymous allegations sounded on the phone very much like Dr. Ana Maria Gonzalez-Angulo.
The "other woman" in this lover's triangle is expected to take the stand as a prosecution witness late Monday afternoon or early Tuesday.
