For more than 13 years, Jody "Babydol" Gibson owned and operated one of the most exclusive escort services in the world and, frankly, she still looks every inch the Hollywood super-madam. She shimmies out of her bedroom - where the four-poster bed is festooned with cerise lace trimmings - wearing thigh-high pink boots, a purple satin micro-mini and a shocking-pink fake-fur bolero.

Sitting down on the open red lips of her Salvador Dali-style sofa in her Beverly Hills living room, Gibson stabs one spiked heel into a heart-shaped cushion on the floor. Above the sofa hangs a huge framed photograph of "Babydol", Gibson's nom de guerre. Her petite figure in the image is offset by what she calls "a bodacious set of natural 38Cs" and is decorated with a baby-pink peekaboo bra and barely there underwear.

Carelessly thrown on the floor is a subpoena, which, as Gibson excitedly explains, requires her to appear as a witness in legendary music producer Phil Spector's murder trial. The case opened on April 25 this year to massive media attention, the most given to any trial since O.J. Simpson's in 1995.

As producer for stars like The Beatles, Tina Turner and the Ramones, and co-writer of The Righteous Brothers's huge hit "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", Spector, now 67, was hugely famous and influential in the '60s and '70s music scene, but has been a recluse for much of the past 20 years.

On the night of February 3, 2003, police were called to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where they found the body of Lana Clarkson, 40, sprawled on a chair, a single gunshot wound to her head, and a .38-calibre revolver lying nearby. Until the trial began, the public had seen it as a black and white case - that of the man known for his fondness for guns and for threatening women with violent behaviour, and the innocent actress caught up in his world to disastrous effect. But Gibson's admission that Lana "was one of my girls - she used to work for me as an escort, using the name Alana" could blow the case open and force Gibson into the media glare.

This is something that understandably makes Gibson nervous - because she's been under that sort of scrutiny before, during her own trial, for pimping, in 2000.

"I'm dreading entering that courtroom," she explains. "Last time I was in there, I was shackled and led to the cells, and didn't see the light of day again for three years."

Read more about Jody Gibson and why her evidence could shake Hollywood in the October issue of marie claire.