Still beat your wife?

How Matt Drudge's lawyer, with the help of the media, revived an ugly -- and untrue -- rumor. Plus, Salon and the Wall Street Journal square off.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

It was a throwaway line in a column by politico-turned-pundit Susan Estrich -- so disposable, in fact, that it never even appeared in print. But it was enough to warm, however slightly, the stone-cold rumor promoted by cybergossip Matt Drudge that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal has a history of spousal abuse. Never mind that there's not a whit of evidence to support this ugly bit of trash.

Here are Estrich's unpublished words: "In Sid Blumenthal's case, longtime friends of his wife actually approached her offering shelter." Drudge lawyer Manny Klausner, defending his client against a libel suit brought by Blumenthal, argues the Estrich line is proof that Blumenthal's rumored wife-beating had been gossiped about long before his client glommed onto it. Yet Estrich herself, in an interview with the Phoenix conducted by e-mail, says she was actually reporting what happened to the Blumenthals after Drudge's column appeared.

Apparently, you just can't keep a bad rumor down.

The story begins last August, when Drudge reported, if the term may be used so loosely, that Republican activists were getting ready to take down Blumenthal, a Boston Phoenix alumnus who had just begun working for the White House. Blumenthal's previous posting was at the New Yorker, where his relentless pro-Clinton activism raised questions among his fellow journalists. Drudge quoted an anonymous "influential Republican" as saying that "there are court records of Blumenthal's violence against his wife." Drudge was wrong, and though he quickly retracted the item and apologized, Blumenthal hit him and America Online, which carries his column, with a $30 million libel suit ("Don't Quote Me," News, August 15, 1997). (The judge dropped AOL from the suit last week. Blumenthal has vowed to appeal.)

Enter Susan Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988 and is now a law professor at the University of Southern California. Last fall Estrich -- a liberal, pro-Clinton Democrat and no enemy of Blumenthal's -- wrote a column for USA Today in defense of Drudge, arguing, among other things, that he was performing a public service by "democratizing" the inside-the-Beltway buzz.

There things stood until March 11, when Klausner appeared in a federal courtroom in Washington to contend that Blumenthal's suit should be thrown out because Drudge had produced "an accurate report of an inaccurate rumor."

As evidence, Klausner introduced the aforementioned Estrich column, including the line about Jacqueline Blumenthal's friends having offered her shelter. Trouble is, Klausner had a computer printout of a copy that Estrich had e-mailed to Drudge; it turned out that the explosive line had never appeared in USA Today or, apparently, anywhere else. James Ledbetter, the media critic for the Village Voice, had a field day with Klausner's screw-up, but he did not take issue with Klausner's characterization of Estrich's words.

Estrich, though, told the Phoenix she used the anecdote to illustrate how the Blumenthals had been affected by the Drudge column, which is precisely the opposite of what Klausner claimed in court. "I think Matt maintains that there were rumors beforehand, but I know nothing of that," Estrich says. (Neither Blumenthal nor his lawyer, William McDaniel, could be reached for comment, but McDaniel told the Voice that the story about Jacqueline Blumenthal's being offered shelter is untrue.)

Klausner, reached at his Los Angeles law office, was flummoxed when told of Estrich's remarks. "If that's the case, that's certainly not what I've understood. In fact, I've asked for her source, and I was under the opposite impression," Klausner says.

Ledbetter says his intent, in his Voice piece, was not to parse Estrich's words but rather to illustrate that Klausner hadn't even realized he had introduced an unpublished column into evidence. "She should have been clearer in her draft that she was referring to the post-Drudge environment," Ledbetter says. True, but that's what editors are for -- and her editors at USA Today did the right thing.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Shnayerson, who profiled Blumenthal in the May issue and who also reported the Klausner maneuver, raises a more important issue when he takes on the notion that Drudge should be exonerated because he was simply passing along the Washington buzz. In fact, the Blumenthal-beats-his-wife gossip has been whispered about in political circles for years -- as the White House itself acknowledged last summer. But since there is zero evidence to support the rumor, that hardly makes it legitimate media fodder. "We seem to live in a society of rumors that at some point become legitimate to publish," says Shnayerson. "And it's kind of interesting in the abstract to ask, at what point does a rumor become publishable? If you hear 10 people talk about it, is it news?" In a word, no.

Drudge has already smeared Blumenthal once. Now his lawyer, Klausner, with the help of the media, is smearing him again. That Klausner is using a sentence he didn't realize hadn't been published, and is twisting its meaning into the opposite of what its author says she intended, is fully in keeping with the way this miserable affair is playing out.

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For several years now, the ultraconservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and liberal contributors to the Web magazine Salon have defined the extremes of Clinton-scandal coverage.

The Journal still thinks there's some funny business to be explored concerning the death of Vincent Foster, although, it must be said, the editors don't actually believe Hillary had him killed. In Salon, Clinton defenders such as political consultant James Carville and Arkansas pundit Gene Lyons, the author of Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), have argued that Bill Clinton has given us -- just as he promised -- the most ethical administration in history. (To be fair, Salon has also run critical pieces by Camille Paglia, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Horowitz, and others.)

Now they're going after each other. The Journal, incensed by a Salon investigative piece by Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas revealing that Whitewater witness David Hale may have received payoffs from conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife funneled through the American Spectator, weighed in with an editorial on April 17 that derided Salon ("paid circulation zip") for relying on "quotes from somebody's former girlfriend."

Salon editor David Talbot swung back later that day with an editorial blasting the Journal for publishing "some of the most noxious sludge that has ever been dredged up in American politics." (Disclosure: I've written for Salon, though not lately.)

The journalistic cliché that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle is almost always wrong, but in this case it may be right. Hale payoffs or not, there is ample circumstantial evidence that former Clinton associates from Webster Hubbell to Monica Lewinsky have received unusual financial and employment assistance that reasonable people could assume was aimed at keeping their mouths shut. And independent counsel Kenneth Starr has revealed himself to be an ideologically motivated zealot who regularly crosses ethical lines in his get-Clinton crusade.

The persistence of true believers in such a contaminated environment is of course astounding, but their naïveté is also just a little bit touching.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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