Former Girlfriend Details Changes in Bonds

SAN FRANCISCO — Kimberly Bell — who was Barry Bonds’s girlfriend for nine years, spanning his two marriages — walked into the courtroom on Monday to testify at his perjury trial, and nearly everyone there turned to gawk at her.

Everyone except Bonds. As Bell took the witness stand, Bonds’s eyes were fixed on the defense table in Courtroom 10 of the Phillip Burton Federal Building. He knew what was coming.

For more than a decade, baseball and its fans have had to confront certain aspects of the sport’s steroid scandal: the unfair advantage gained by players who were using the drugs; the skepticism that baseball’s drug-testing policy was meaningfully set up to catch anyone; the tainted careers that have left likely Hall of Famers consigned to ignominy instead.

But on Monday, the public was introduced to what prosecutors insist is another side of the scandal: the physical toll of taking steroids, in effect what the athletes who used them were willing to do to their own bodies in pursuit of an advantage, real or imagined.

It was not pretty.

“He developed acne on his upper shoulders and back; his hair was falling out quickly and he ended shaving it all off,” Bell testified of Bonds as the jury sat to her left, rapt. Then her voice grew so faint it was barely audible. “He changed sexually, in his testicles and performance and that.”

Between deep breaths and under unsparing questioning, Bell further testified: “The shape, size of his testicles were smaller, unusual, differently shaped.” Of Bonds, baseball’s official home run king, she testified that he had to resort to using “something” to resolve his trouble maintaining an erection.

For nearly six hours, Bell gave graphic and sometimes tearful testimony in United States District Court about the changes she noticed in Bonds, including a bloated face and belly. Prosecutors said all of it — the changed appearance and behavioral qualities — were documented symptoms of steroid use and thus evidence that Bonds had used them during his career, then lied about that fact under oath when questioned before a grand jury in 2003.

Bonds’s lawyers, in their cross-examination, tried to paint Bell as a vindictive, attention-craving gold-digger who was upset about their breakup. She posed in Playboy for money, was writing a book about her relationship with Bonds and gave at least 20 radio interviews about the subject, the defense pointed out.

Those attempts, to be sure, were aimed at blunting the power of her often explicit firsthand testimony.

Bell said she spoke to Bonds once about his possible steroid use, in 1999, but never pressed him about it because he told her it was common in baseball. Besides, she said he told her, he did not inject himself every day, as some bodybuilders do.

“He mentioned that other players do it and that’s how they got ahead,” Bell, who dated Bonds from 1994 to 2003, said. “That’s how they achieved.”

Bell testified that she had a good reason for never bringing up the subject of steroids with him again: She was afraid of him.

During their later years together, she said Bonds grew irritable and verbally abusive — “almost violent.” The government insists that change in his demeanor was triggered by steroid use.

Bell testified that Bonds threatened “to cut my head off and leave me in a ditch” and said that “he would cut out my breast implants because he paid for them.” He also said he was going to burn her house down, she said.

“I didn’t want to make him angry,” Bell said, growing teary. “I didn’t want him to yell at me.”

Their relationship started differently, she said. Bell first met Bonds in the parking lot of the San Francisco Giants’ stadium in the summer of 1994, then chatted with him the next day at a friend’s barbecue. She took a long drive with him in his new Porsche and spent the night with him that night, beginning their long relationship.

Bell said the first she heard of Bonds using steroids was in 1999, when he talked about an elbow injury he had.

“He said it was because of steroids,” she said, adding that he explained that the muscle and tendons grew faster than the joint, so his elbow simply “blew out.”

Bell said she soon discovered that those achievements came at a cost.