EDITOR’S NOTE: Diane Dimond is an investigative reporter, author and columnist based now in Rockland County, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I love crime. I love to read about it and write about it. What I don’t like is to live through it.

There’s a trial going on out in Los Angeles right now that brings back a flood of disturbing memories.

On trial is a guy who calls himself the “Sin Eater” — former private detective to the stars, Anthony Pellicano. He’s on trial for, among other things, illegally threatening and wiretapping the phones of his client’s foes, including reporters who were investigating Hollywood bigwigs.

Pellicano’s co-defendants include a former cop, a telephone company worker and a lawyer. The prosecution says Pellicano had a web of cohorts that he relied on whenever he wanted to go after someone, including ex-cons when he needed muscle.

In my opinion, Pellicano is guilty as charged. I know Anita Busch, the freelance reporter he’s currently charged with threatening. She was investigating information about either actor Steven Seagal or Hollywood powerhouse Michael Ovitz. It’s unclear who her target was but both Seagal and Ovitz have hired Pellicano in the past. Busch is still scared to death and was literally driven out of journalism by her fear.

In my constitutionally protected opinion, Pellicano is guilty now just as he was when he started hounding me back in the mid-90s.

I was working for the TV show Hard Copy, just breaking news that Michael Jackson was under investigation for possibly molesting young boys. Pellicano was practically on retainer for one of Jackson’s lawyers and he zeroed in on me.

Suddenly, growing mobs of Jackson fans would surround me as I left work, taunting, threatening and following me to my car. My office phone on the Paramount Pictures lot began to pop and crackle. Things I said only over that phone began to come back to me in strange ways. Funny things started to happen at my house. My mailbox was mowed down, the fountain near my front door was tampered with. Hard Copy arranged for a security sweep at my house. Ultimately they provided me with bodyguards to follow me to and from work.

My journalist husband, Michael, and I devised a red-herring scheme to see if my work phone really was tapped.

At an arranged time Michael called me and said, “So how’s that half hour special about Pellicano coming?”

“Oh, terrific,” I said. “Pellicano is gonna have a conniption when he sees it!”

“OK, honey,” my husband said. “See you at home tonight.”

I sat down and watched the clock on my desk. Twenty-two minutes later my phone rang. It was the Paramount legal department.

“Hey, Diane,” a lawyer named Cindy said to me, “I really need to see that script on the Pellicano special before you start editing.”

Cindy, I knew, had come to Paramount via the law offices of uber-entertainment lawyer Howard Weitzman. Weitzman and Michael Jackson’s lead attorney, Bert Fields, were best buddies. I imagined in my mind how the phone tree had worked right after my husband and I hung up.

It had taken only 22 minutes for the planted information to come back to me. There was no Pellicano special in the works – there never had been - and I told that to a confused Lawyer Cindy.

I had my proof that someone was listening in on that phone line. I never used it again.

A decade later a very high ranking source within the FBI told me they’d confiscated about a billion computer pages of wiretap transcripts from Pellicano’s office. Among them were mine.