Nude photos of Marcia Clark OJ Simpson trial sold by her first husband's mother

Marcia Clark suffered much public humiliation over the course of the OJ Simpson trial - but no incident was more difficult for the prosecutor than when nude photos of her taken years earlier were sold to a tabloid.

It was five months into the Simpson trial when The National Enquirer published photos of Clark taken in September 1979 topless on a beach in St. Tropez with her first husband Gaby Horowitz.

The photos had been sold to the tabloid by Horowitz's mother Clara, more than a decade after her son's divorce from Clark.

Almost immediately after the then-Los Angeles assistant district attorney was tasked with heading the prosecution of former NFL standout O.J. Simpson for the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, she was bathed in an intense, white-hot spotlight of media attention and public scrutiny of a sort that no criminal litigator had ever experienced in the history of the justice system.

American Crime Story: The People V. OJ Simpson depicted the moment Clark learned about the nude photos on Tuesday's episode.

Clark (played by Sarah Paulson) is called into the office of her boss, Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti (played by Bruce Campbell), who produces a copy of the tabloid.

Clark is standing naked on the beach in just her bikini bottom in one photo with her arm around Horowitz. The Enquirer placed a black bar over her breasts. Garcetti assumes the photos are fake and promises Clark they will sue the tabloid, but she quickly informs him that they are in fact real and the man is her first husband also prompting her to disclose that she had been married before.

After this Clark is forced to return to the trial, and is shown being met with intense stares as she enters the courtroom. Judge Lance Ito (played by Kenneth Choi) announces as soon as she sits at the table, trying to hold back her tears, that he is recessing court until the next morning. In real life, this is almost exactly how things played out for Clark

Tell me a little bit more about the ... I guess I would say corrosive effect of celebrity, as you mentioned, in the middle of all of this. It felt like at the time of this trial, that sort of phenomenon had been building with the Menendez brothers and Heidi Fleiss and Tonya Harding and those kinds of things. And yet it was also the big kickoff for this world that we live in now, where high profile crime is a cottage industry. So tell me about that effect on what you were doing then, and your thoughts on where it’s gone since.

MARCIA CLARK: Then, I was very torn about it. Very torn, because I did not want to revisit it. I really didn’t want to have to relive the nightmare. And of course I needed the money, but I [had] very mixed feelings. I wanted the press to go away, and you put out the book and that’s not going to happen. But my agent at the time said, "It’s not going to happen anyway for a few years, so give it up. Not writing the book is not going to make your life any better in the short term."

And then, what was most compelling to me on the other side of things was "I’m going to forget. I’m going to forget the details, I’m going to forget all this happened. At some point, people are going to care what the truth is, what really happened, from the prosecution standpoint. And if I don’t write this book, it’ll be gone forever." So I thought, "I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to do it, because I want people to know the truth. I want them to know what really happened with us, with the prosecution team and what we saw."