Update: Favourite Letterman-blackmail quote so far is by Stephanie Gutman, at The Telegraph, UK:
“But this follows on the heels of the Travolta family extortion affair, so it points out one of the pitfalls of fame and wealth, that one is continually surrounded with a mosquito cloud of predators trying to draw blood. And even the creepiest, snarkiest, fake-sincere liberal talk show host gets my sympathy for having to live with that.”
“Three weeks ago, Letterman said, he got in his car early in the morning and found a package with a letter saying, “I know that you do some terrible, terrible things and that I can prove that you do some terrible things.” He acknowledged the letter contained proof.
He said it was terrifying “because there’s something insidious about (it). Is he standing down there? Is he hiding under the car? Am I going to get a tap on the shoulder?”
Letterman said he called his lawyer to set up a meeting with the man, who threatened to write a screenplay and a book about Letterman unless he was given money. There were two subsequent meetings, with the man given a phony $2 million check at the last one. Letterman joked it was like the giant ceremonial check given to winners of golf tournaments.”
He told the audience that he had to testify before a grand jury on Thursday.
“I was worried for myself, I was worried for my family,” he said. “I felt menaced by this, and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I had done.”
He said “the creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show. My response to that is yes, I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Yes, it would, especially for the women.”
My Comment:
What an irony (but not an oddity) that the comedian who was making vulgar jokes about Sarah Palin’s minor daughter – presumably, to prove how trashy the Palins are – has a history himself.
Letterman admitted to numbers of affairs with co-workers, while revealing a black-mail plot from another CBS news employee, whose name hasn’t been confirmed yet. It’s interesting that this critic of the Palins* – who’ve been married for years and who had children within their marriage – married his long-term girlfriend only in March this year, though he had a child with her in 2003.
This is not a judgment about Letterman’s lifestyle. That’s his business. It’s a judgment about his good sense and his psychological motivations. You’d think the man would zip up about anyone else’s family or sexual history.
File this away as another instance of the corruption of the media. In recent posts, I’ve talked about sexual blackmail as one way in which public figures are ruined or hounded out of office. We’ve had the example of Eliot Spitzer, most famously.
The other point to note is that the perpetrator is a newsman (and not just any newsman – an Emmy award winning CBS producer and crime reporter for “48 hours.” Although this has nothing to do with the “deep capture” of the media in the financial story, it does add to the evidence that the media really is the problem, at every level. When reporters are so intent on making their names that they’re prepared to “out” public (or even less than public) figures over personal matters that are irrelevant to any public interest, why should we be surprised that one of them takes a more direct route and uses the information to make money from his target directly?
*Note: As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin’s but dislike the way she was treated.
I think it’s Walter Block who makes a distinciton between extortion and blackmail. Extortion is the thread of force, like when an organized crime boss says pay him “protection” money or your business might happen to burn down. But if someone has information, legitimately obtained, then blackmail should be legal, because the blackmailer is just giving the “victim” a choice, an alternative to having the information released to the public, which the person with the information could legally do anyway without offering the choice.
Well – yes, there’s sound economic logic to it too.
But it’s morally objectionable.
And releasing it into the public realm is also morally objectionable unless there’s a public interest involved or some kind of ongoing fraud/crime.
I fail to see why we should know about David Letterman’s affairs. He’s an entertainment figure. There’s a commercial value for it in the tabloid media. I guess you could say, the blackmailer gave the victim the choice to pay the money he might have made from releasing the information publicly…but is it clear that he’d make that kind of money releasing it?
I don’t know.
Taking Block’s argument to the absurd end of logic, I could come into possession of sex tapes of my next door neighbor, and since there’s a healthy market on the porn market for that sort of thing, I could blackmail her for money.
Should that be legal too?
Where would it end?
Information might be true. But the use of that information must also be legitimate.
Isn’t it coercive?
I really fail to understand how he defends it..
For what it’s worth, I believe ANY attempt to (violently) control information whatsoever (copyright, patent, profanity-censorship, obscenity-censorship, privacy) is infinitely more coercive than any damage the information could possibly do. So that’s how I would defend it.
[/me ducks.]