Kobe Bryant Preliminary Hearing, Part Two
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Let's move on now to the Kobe Bryant story. He's back in Eagle, Colorado for day two of his preliminary hearing. Still unknown is whether today's proceedings will be open to the public. Reporter Heidi Hemmat of CNN affiliate KDVR is standing by in Eagle. She's got the latest for us. They opened supposedly about an hour or so ago. Heidi -- what's happening now?</s>HEIDI HEMMAT, CNN AFFILIATE KDVR REPORTER: Just moments ago, Wolf, we understand that Kobe Bryant and his attorneys entered courtroom one, Eagle County courtroom one, to start what should be the second day of his preliminary hearing. So, he is now in place and ready to go. Up until now, for the past two hours, Kobe Bryant and his attorneys and the prosecution in this case have been meeting with the judge. Apparently, they have requested that part or all of the remainder of this preliminary hearing be closed to the public. This comes after last week's complete bombshell that was dropped in court by Pamela Mackey, Kobe Bryant's attorney, of course, her suggestion that the victim in this case may have or could have had sex with three different people in three days. So, today both the defense and the prosecution had an interest in having part of this hearing, at least part of this hearing, closed to the public. And for right now, we do not know what part of the hearing will be closed. We only know that this meeting took a pretty good long time, about two hours.</s>BLITZER: Heidi, the whole arrangement now for this hearing, I take it some reporters, assuming the judge lets them in, will be allowed inside. Others will be in a hearing room, if you will, in a room where they can listen to what's going on. Do they also get to see it on closed-circuit TV, or is just audio pumped into there?</s>HEMMAT: Well, there are two courtrooms. There is courtroom one that seats about 50 people. And those seats have been taken for months now. There was a lotto system a few months ago, where all of the local stations got in and said, hey, we want to be in there. So, those tickets are hard to come by and have already been reserved. That is where the actual hearing is going on. And then, there is an auxiliary courtroom, where they are getting audio, but they aren't getting a whole lot of video. I mean, they do get video, but it's not in real-time. It's a little bit different situation over there. And those seats are all taken as well by all of the national, international media that is now here. And, again, it's just another courtroom with about 50 seats or so. And if they decide to close parts of this hearing, what happens is the judge basically asks all of the reporters and all of the people, just members of the public who are watching this hearing and observing this hearing, they have to leave the room and go out into the hallway. And the last time when I was the courtroom, some of those periods where we were asked to leave the courtroom were up to two hours long. So, nobody knows what is discussed. At one point, we thought that Kobe Bryant's statements to police that he made after finding out he was accused of sexual assault, we do know that was discussed at one of those breaks. So, we expect this could go very much the same way today.</s>BLITZER: All right, Heidi Hemmat from our affiliate KDVR joining us from Eagle, Colorado. Heidi, thanks for that report. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com.