The young lawyer who lost her job after she was discovered to have been smuggling drugs into prison for the son of Michael Douglas is telling her story in a new book.
Jennifer Ridha met Cameron Douglas in October 2009, just a few months after he was arrested when police found him with almost a pound of methamphetamine in a New York City hotel, enough to charge him with intent to distribute.
Ridha, serving as his legal counsel with the firm Lankler, Siffert and Wohl, soon began smuggling Xanax to Cameron in prison, and falling in love with the troubled young man.
Then, just five months after meeting Cameron, the then 35-year-old was busted by federal agents for supplying him with drugs.
Ridha says that Cameron had difficulty adjusting to life behind bars when she first met him at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan while he awaited his trial and sentence.
His personal psychiatrist told her he suffered from ‘co-morbid depression’ and ‘anxiety disorders,’ but doctors had decided he would not be able to take Xanax.
It was after she saw him drenched in sweat and covered in hives that she first brought him pills, claiming she smuggled two into the MCC in her back pocket at their next meeting.
The next time, she placed 30 of the pills, which she also had a prescription for, in a party balloon, which Cameron stored behind bars by hiding it in his rectum.
It was also around this time that their relationship became physical, with the two both telling one another they were in love.
‘He seems taller, greater, than when he is sitting across from me,’ says Ridha in the book of the first time Douglas embraced her.
‘He grabs me. And kisses me. And I kiss him back.’
Federal agents busted Ridha in February 2010 when Cameron was caught sharing the pills in prison, but the two continued to see one another, and Cameron had Ridha lie on a form so she could visit him when he was eventually moved to a facility in Pennsylvania where he was serving five years behind bars.
It was not until October 2011 however that Ridha learned she was busted because Cameron shared the pills with a government informant.
For this, Douglas was sentenced to an additional four-and-a-half years in prison.
Charges against Ridha were ultimately dropped, though she lost her job.
Ridha is currently a graduate student in legal anthropology, urban studies, and criminal justice.
As for Cameron, he will be eligible for parole in 2018.
His father Michael said of his son during his trial that though he blamed himself for his son’s problems, Cameron ‘was going to be dead or somebody was gonna kill him.
I think he has a chance to start a new life, and he knows that.’
