Linda Deutsch, who covered high-profile trials in nearly 50 years as a reporter with The Associated Press, starting with the one surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and including the defendants O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 80.

Her death followed a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2022, which was successfully treated but returned this summer, The A.P. reported.

Ms. Deutsch’s decades of clips offer a counternarrative of celebrity in America, a view of its underbelly told through many of the country’s most notorious trials.

Based in Los Angeles, she was also a front-row witness to societal breakdown. Besides the 1969 cult murders ordered by Mr. Manson, she covered the 1976 trial of the kidnapped-heiress-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst, the 1996 conviction of the parricidal brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of the Black motorist Rodney King, which set off deadly riots in 1992.

“That almost destroyed my belief in the justice system,” Ms. Deutsch said of the King case in 2014, the year she retired. “I feel a jury usually gets it right, but in that case, no. It was the wrong conclusion. It was the wrong verdict, and it nearly destroyed my city.”