THE plot could have come straight from a Hollywood movie. But it did not, and that is the problem.

When Joyce Dudley, a Santa Barbara prosecutor, published her crime novel Intoxicating Agent, it brought more than a flicker of recognition to one reader.

Massey Haraguchi was a defendant waiting to be prosecuted by Ms Dudley on charges of raping an intoxicated victim — the same crime committed by the villain of her piece.

In her novel, the defendant was described as a “vile brute”, his lawyer “disingenuous and manipulative”. The heroine, on the other hand, was a ball-breaking champion of the truth, a female prosecutor by the somewhat similar name of Jordon Danner.

Now the California Court of Appeal has ordered that Ms Dudley be removed from prosecuting the case against Mr Haraguchi, arguing that Ms Dudley was not adequately impartial to rule on a case she had fictionalised. “She has a disabling conflict of interest,” Justice Kenneth Yegan wrote on behalf of the panel who voted unanimously to remove Ms Dudley.

“Although her novel and petitioner’s case have differences in their facts, enough similarities exist to suggest Dudley is relying on petitioner’s case for plot lines,” the judge wrote.

The novel was published in January, some months after charges were brought against Mr Haraguchi. In both fact and fiction, a female prosecutor handles a case involving a suspected rapist who assaults an intoxicated victim on a beach.

Mr Haraguchi’s lawyers also argued that another character in the novel, a photographer who tries to blackmail the victim out of co-operating with the prosecution, is drawn from Mr Haraguchi’s real-life beatnik persona.

Ms Dudley may deny she lifted case details, but she has admitted being the inspiration for the heroine. Intoxicating Agent is the second of her self-published novels to feature Jordon Danner, whom she describes as “Joyce on steroids”.

Danner, Ms Dudley writes, has “the poise and sexiness of a dancer, the brains of a scholar and the protective passion of a mother. She had always been attractive, but now, having reached middle age, experience, confidence and poise further enhanced her beauty.”

Of the defendant and his lawyer, she is less flattering. In the novel, the prosecutors are the heroes, the defendants the scum and the defence lawyers scum with better qualifications.

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