The “D.C. Madam” scandal isn’t going away. Reporters, bloggers and investigators for Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt are all scrambling to match recently released phone records from Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service to Beltway pols who might have been clients. “It’s going to be one revelation after the other for the next 20 weeks or so,” says Palfrey, who is fighting federal prostitution charges and who hopes “outed” clients will testify that her employees weren’t prostitutes. She says anywhere between a few dozen to a hundred high-level officials will be discovered on her list.
The latest catch: Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, Rudy Giuliani’s top Southern conservative ally. Vitter quickly confessed to a “very serious sin” and went into hiding. The Vitter revelation is just the latest scandal to touch Giuliani, whose former police commissioner has pleaded guilty to corruption charges and whose South Carolina campaign chairman was forced to step down last month after he was indicted on federal cocaine charges. A Giuliani aide called the scandals “a string of bad luck.” Palfrey says if Vitter did have sex with one of her escorts he should be indicted as she has been—but she’s still not sure he did. “All those right-wing politicians do just that—they fall on their swords. Isn’t there some script out there for this very event?”
The question is who will be next, now that the numbers are so accessible. Vitter’s number was unearthed by Dan Moldea, a D.C. reporter who is helping Palfrey write her memoirs and who also moonlights for Flynt. Palfrey’s list of almost 200,000 numbers is a gold mine for Flynt, who already has a team of investigators trying to dig up dirt on the sexual indiscretions of lawmakers and has placed ads in The Washington Post offering rewards for info. “But the bloggers and the techies are really doing the greatest job,” says Moldea. “And they are all obsessed with numbers starting with 202-224 … numbers coming from the Hill.” A new Web site, dcphonelist.com, allows anyone to punch in a number and it will cross-reference it to “madam’s” list. The site urges users to “be responsible”—but any pols who made use of Palfrey’s services probably shouldn’t count on that.
The ultimate measure of just how dangerous the reign of George Bush has been to our basic freedoms was documented in January at a packed hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Provoking the shock and anger of the committee’s deputy chair, Republican Senator Arlen Specter, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had the temerity to insist that the right of habeas corpus—that basic principle of English common law enshrined in the Magna Carta guaranteeing prisoners the right to appear in a court of law to have their case reviewed—is NOT one of the rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, which Gonzalez took an oath to enforce. “There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution,” Gonzalez insisted, while lamely conceding that, in that sacred document, “There’s a prohibition against taking it away….” To which a flabbergasted Spector responded, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in cases of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there is an invasion or rebellion?”
Gonzales did not appear any more perturbed at being caught in an egregious violation of America’s tradition of liberty than he had been at previous Congressional hearings during which he defended torture and illegal wiretapping. This time, however, his rationale was more sweeping and therefore more ominous in its implication. What our nation’s top law enforcement officer argued—and bear with me because his logic is quite bizarre—is that because the Constitution refers to habeas corpus as a right that can be suspended in the midst of a rebellion or invasion, that it is not a basic right at all.
“I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas,” said Gonzalez. “Doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except—” At which point he was cut off by an exasperated Spector, who accused him of “violating common sense.”
Worse, Gonzales espoused a philosophy that would strip away most of the guarantees of our Bill of Rights, for they too are affirmed only by the negative prohibition restricting Congress from interfering with what was assumed by the Founders to be obvious basic human rights established by the Enlightenment.
As Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee, put it pointedly to Gonzales: “Many of our most cherished rights are guaranteed by the Constitution in much the same way. For example, the First Amendment is also a negative construction. It prohibits Congress from making laws infringing on religious freedom and our freedom of speech, but you wouldn’t say that it doesn’t guarantee free speech and religion.”
In fact, the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution clearly establishes that rights are assumed unless clearly taken away: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
But why is Gonzalez not only confused but indeed desperate in asserting an obviously invalid legal doctrine? How could someone presumably well-versed in the country’s legal traditions—and officially pledged to uphold them—be so oblivious as to their essence? Commenting on this mystery, John Dean, former White House counsel in the Nixon Administration, wrote on FindLaw.com of Gonzalez’s sorry performance: “I must confess that watching his testimony makes me deeply uncomfortable. Gonzalez does not seem to know when he is making a fool of himself, and I can’t tell if he is suffering from empty-suit syndrome or an unhealthy case of hubris.”
Unfortunately, there is a lot more at stake here than one man’s reputation for intelligence. Not content to just obnoxiously insult the basis of our civil democracy, the Bush Administration has acted as if there are no restraints on its behavior, as when it decided to illegally wiretap Americans even when a secret judicial review process was already in place, hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as “an enemy combatant,” and give no due process to hundreds held in Guantanamo Bay without charge or prisoner of war status.
As with torture, the denial of habeas corpus—basically, the threat that you will never have your day in court and be imprisoned for the rest of your life—is clearly counterproductive to getting at the truth concerning the dangers we face as a nation. It is a proven axiom of law enforcement that witnesses who testify under terrible duress tell their inquisitors what they want to hear rather than the truth. But if the purpose of the interrogation is to exploit the crime—in this case, the tragedy of 9/11—for political advantage, then the truth is not what the prosecutor is after.
We know from even the limited information made available through the 9/11 Commission that none of the key prisoners interrogated have confirmed the Administration’s portrayal of the roots of the attack. Most importantly, they deny any connection between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and therefore their testimony in an open court in accordance with habeas corpus requirements would embarrass the administration and possibly our allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
In other words, these witnesses have been kept out of sight precisely because their day in court, while not in any way exonerating any crimes they may have committed, would nonetheless expose the lies of the administration as well.
Here is the LA Times article written by Larry Flynt on Jerry Falwell. Below the LA Times article are Part 1 & Part 2 clips from Larry Flynt on Larry King Live.
How the pornographer found himself in the embrace of the reverend who sued him. By Larry Flynt, LARRY FLYNT is the publisher of Hustler magazine and the author of “Sex, Lies and Politics.”
THE FIRST TIME the Rev. Jerry Falwell put his hands on me, I was stunned. Not only had we been archenemies for 15 years, his beliefs and mine traveling in different solar systems, and not only had he sued me for $50 million (a case I lost repeatedly yet eventually won in the Supreme Court), but now he was hugging me in front of millions on the Larry King show.
It was 1997. My autobiography, “An Unseemly Man,” had just been published, describing my life as a publisher of pornography. The film “The People vs. Larry Flynt” had recently come out, and the country was well aware of the battle that Falwell and I had fought: a battle that had changed the laws governing what the American public can see and hear in the media and that had dramatically strengthened our right to free speech.
King was conducting the interview. It was the first time since the infamous 1988 trial that the reverend and I had been in the same room together, and the thought of even breathing the same air with him made me sick. I disagreed with Falwell (who died last week) on absolutely everything he preached, and he looked at me as symbolic of all the social ills that a society can possibly have. But I’d do anything to sell the book and the film, and Falwell would do anything to preach, so King’s audience of 8 million viewers was all the incentive either of us needed to bring us together.
But let’s start at the beginning and flash back to the late 1970s, when the battle between Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, and I first began. I was publishing Hustler magazine, which most people know has been pushing the envelope of taste from the very beginning, and Falwell was blasting me every chance he had. He would talk about how I was a slime dealer responsible for the decay of all morals. He called me every terrible name he could think of — names as bad, in my opinion, as any language used in my magazine.
After several years of listening to him bash me and reading his insults, I decided it was time to start poking some fun at him. So we ran a parody ad in Hustler — a takeoff on the then-current Campari ads in which people were interviewed describing “their first time.” In the ads, it ultimately became clear that the interviewees were describing their first time sipping Campari. But not in our parody. We had Falwell describing his “first time” as having been with his mother, “drunk off our God-fearing asses,” in an outhouse.
Apparently, the reverend didn’t find the joke funny. He sued us for libel in federal court in Virginia, claiming that the magazine had inflicted emotional stress on him. It was a long and tedious fight, beginning in 1983 and ending in 1988, but Hustler Magazine Inc. vs. Jerry Falwell was without question my most important battle.
We lost in our initial jury trial, and we lost again in federal appeals court. After spending a fortune, everyone’s advice to me was to just settle the case and be done, but I wasn’t listening; I wasn’t about to pay Falwell $200,000 for hurting his feelings or, as his lawyers called it, “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” We appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and I lost for a third time.
Everyone was certain this was the end. We never thought the U.S. Supreme Court would agree to hear the case. But it did, and though I felt doomed throughout the trial and was convinced that I was going to lose, we never gave up. As we had moved up the judicial ladder, this case had become much more than just a personal battle between a pornographer and a preacher, because the 1st Amendment was so much at the heart of the case.
To my amazement, we won. It wasn’t until after I won the case and read the justices’ unanimous decision in my favor that I realized fully the significance of what had happened. The justices held that a parody of a public figure was protected under the 1st Amendment even if it was outrageous, even if it was “doubtless gross and repugnant,” as they put it, and even if it was designed to inflict emotional distress. In a unanimous decision — written by, of all people, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — the court reasoned that if it supported Falwell’s lower-court victory, no one would ever have to prove something was false and libelous to win a judgment. All anyone would have to prove is that “he upset me” or “she made me feel bad.” The lawsuits would be endless, and that would be the end of free speech.
Everyone was shocked at our victory — and no one more so than Falwell, who on the day of the decision called me a “sleaze merchant” hiding behind the 1st Amendment. Still, over time, Falwell was forced to publicly come to grips with the reality that this is America, where you can make fun of anyone you want. That hadn’t been absolutely clear before our case, but now it’s being taught in law schools all over the country, and our case is being hailed as one of the most important free-speech cases of the 20th century.
No wonder that when he started hugging me and smooching me on television 10 years later, I was a bit confused. I hadn’t seen him since we’d been in court together, and that night I didn’t see him until I came out on the stage. I was expecting (and looking for) a fight, but instead he was putting his hands all over me. I remember thinking, “I spent $3 million taking that case to the Supreme Court, and now this guy wants to put his hand on my leg?”
Soon after that episode, I was in my office in Beverly Hills, and out of nowhere my secretary buzzes me, saying, “Jerry Falwell is here to see you.” I was shocked, but I said, “Send him in.” We talked for two hours, with the latest issues of Hustler neatly stacked on my desk in front of him. He suggested that we go around the country debating, and I agreed. We went to colleges, debating moral issues and 1st Amendment issues — what’s “proper,” what’s not and why.
In the years that followed and up until his death, he’d come to see me every time he was in California. We’d have interesting philosophical conversations. We’d exchange personal Christmas cards. He’d show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with him in Florida once when he complained about his health and his weight, so I suggested that he go on a diet that had worked for me. I faxed a copy to his wife when I got back home.
The truth is, the reverend and I had a lot in common. He was from Virginia, and I was from Kentucky. His father had been a bootlegger, and I had been one too in my 20s before I went into the Navy. We steered our conversations away from politics, but religion was within bounds. He wanted to save me and was determined to get me out of “the business.”
My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.
He was definitely selling brimstone religion and would do anything to add another member to his mailing list. But in the end, I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.
I always kicked his ass about his crazy ideas and the things he said. Every time I’d call him, I’d get put right through, and he’d let me berate him about his views. When he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after he wrote his “Tinky Winky” article cautioning parents that the purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him in Florida and yelled at him to “leave the Tinky Winkies alone.”
When he referred to Ellen Degeneres in print as Ellen “Degenerate,” I called him and said, “What are you doing? You don’t need to poison the whole lake with your venom.” I could hear him mumbling out of the side of his mouth, “These lesbians just drive me crazy.” I’m sure I never changed his mind about anything, just as he never changed mine.
I’ll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I’m not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends.
