Rose Lenore Blake says she has been forced into silence by threats from her half-brother over his murder-mystery play staged at the same restaurant where her mother was killed.
The 23-year-old daughter of “In Cold Blood” actor Robert Blake, 91, and his slain wife Bonny Lee Bakley said that Noah Blake, 61, warned he would expose her “past life struggles” to the press if she kept speaking out against “A Killer Night in Studio City.” The production opened Sept. 15 at Vitello’s Italian restaurant in Studio City, where Bakley was fatally shot in the couple’s parked car after dinner in 2001.
Rose first went public with her objections Monday, posting on social media to plead with followers: “Please help me shut down this show.” By Thursday night, she had reversed course, saying that Noah had reached out with menacing messages she read aloud in a TikTok.
“Noah has reached out to me and threatened to expose me (past life struggles) to the press,” Lenore said. “I am worried for what’s to come.”
One alleged text from Noah read: “Don’t start talking about me, and don’t play a pity card about it. If you want to and try to make me look like a bad guy, I will have to go and defend myself, and I will use whatever I need to.”
Noah directs and stars in the fictional 1958-set production, which carries a $145 ticket price. While the play itself makes no direct reference to the Blake family tragedy, its venue choice is deeply personal and deliberately provocative.
“Doing the show at Vitello’s, however, is absolutely intentional,” Noah said in a statement. “It was a very special part of my life for decades, but after everything that happened, the venue became a physical symbol for me of something much larger and much more painful that I’ve spent years processing.”
He described returning to the restaurant to create something joyful as part of his healing, transforming a place tied to painful memories into something positive. He also acknowledged that others might view his decision differently.
Rose, in her own statement to the outlet, called the project “distasteful” and maintained that she stood by her opinion, adding that she wished her brother “no harm.” She did not specify what past struggles Noah had threatened to reveal.
Noah’s representative said that the production “has absolutely nothing to do with Rose’s mother” and noted that she had never seen the play. “The play itself has absolutely no connection to the events of the past,” Blake said. “It’s an entirely fictional story, and none of its characters or storylines are connected to real people or events.”
The sibling rupture comes more than two decades after the killing that defined both their lives. Robert Blake, the Emmy-winning star of the 1970s detective series “Baretta,” took Bakley to dinner at Vitello’s on May 4, 2001. After the meal, she was shot twice in the head while sitting in their Dodge Stealth in the restaurant parking lot. Robert claimed he had returned to the restaurant to retrieve a handgun he left behind and found his wife dying when he got back to the car. A jury acquitted him of murder in 2005, but he was later found liable for Bakley’s death in a civil suit and ordered to pay $30 million in damages, a figure later reduced on appeal.
Noah said he had tried to handle the dispute privately before Rose took it public. “When Rose first raised her concerns with me, I asked that we discuss them directly,” he continued in his statement. “I’ve made multiple attempts to have that conversation, and that door remains open. She obviously chose to handle this publicly, which certainly wouldn’t have been my choice, and still isn’t.”
“A Killer Night in Studio City” continues its run at Vitello’s with performances scheduled through October.