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.

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‘It didn’t bother me as much on a personal level as it did professionally,’ Clark recently told People about the publication of the photos.

‘How the media was treating me was of much less concern than how [Judge Lane Ito] was treating me in the courtroom.

‘Everyone forgot about [murder victims Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson], and it became this enormous circus.’

She also added that she was grateful her two sons with her second husband Gordon, Kyle and Travis, ‘were too young to remember any of the trial’.

Kyle was five and Travis was just two in February 1995 when the photos ran in the tabloid.

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.

The Washington Post reported soon after that her former mother-in-law had no issue with selling the photos to the Enquirer and did not think it was a big deal because Clark was on a European beach and with her husband.

Clark and Horowitz met when they were both 18 while attending UCLA, where Clark was studying political science.

She wrote about her relationship with Horowitz in her bestselling account of the Simpson trial, Without A Doubt.

The two were both Israeli and met while she was having dinner with her girlfriends one night. She moved in with him just one month later.

Horowitz was a professional backgammon player with a number of celebrity students, most notably Lucille Ball, and Clark said the two would spend their nights going to clubs in Los Angeles where Horowitz would try to find games to play to pick up money.

‘Gaby was flashy, always dressed to the nines in body-hugging suits. He seemed to have plenty of money,’ Clark wrote in her book.

‘He slept all day and went nightclubbing all night. I found his lifestyle very glamorous, and allowed myself to be swept along by it.’

She eventually grew tired of this lifestyle however, and said she stopped going with Horowitz to the clubs after a year and later devoted her focus to law school.

‘I grabbed onto law school like a drowning woman clings to flotsam. It was to become my salvation. Law school took more effort than undergraduate work. I had to study. I had to memorize. I actually had to attend classes,’ wrote Clark.

‘Studying law served as an absorbing and invigorating counterpoint to my life with Gaby. The deeper I got into law, the more I withdrew from him.’

She first married Horowitz when she was still in college so he could obtain his green card to stay in the country and did not tell any of her friends, but the two eventually had a formal ceremony and made it public.

‘A year or so passed and Gaby started to talk about doing it properly. The idea of a wedding seemed to make him happy, so I gave in,’ wrote Clark.

‘On November 6, 1976, we were married again.’

They began to drift apart however after Clark graduated from Southwestern law school and began to work, around the same time the backgammon craze started to die down and Horowitz’s livelihood took a hit.

That is when Clark said one of Horowitz’s students, Bruce Roman, introduced him to Scientology.

She split with Horowitz soon after and the two were granted a quick Tijuana divorce in 1981, with Clark marrying her second husband that same year.

Clark met her second husband Gordon when he was working at the Scientology administrative office, she writes in her book.

Horowitz’s life meanwhile took a terrible turn in 1989 when he was shot in the head by his good friend Roman while looking at his gun collection.

He was left paralyzed by the accident.

‘Gaby’d been visiting Bruce Roman and the two of them were looking at guns – they were both collectors – when the gun Bruce was holding went off and the wild shot found its way into Gaby’s head, ‘wrote Clark.

‘It had been a freak accident. The shot had ricocheted off the ceiling and hit Gaby on the rebound. It left him paralyzed.

‘Such a bizarre twist of fate.’