Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust (26 page)

The
Washington Post
’s Ombudsman memorably wrote that he was surprised at the number of their readers that “despised” the Salahis. But once the critical thinker bore down on that statement it became clear the public “despised” the couple, in large part, for what the
Washington Post
had written about them. By the paper’s own admission, they had assigned thirty reporters and written enough about the Salahis between late November and the first of July to equal enough words to “fill a novel.”

How could anyone’s reputation stand up to seven solid months of constant, relentless and nationwide dissection of their personal life?

Multiply what the
Washington Post
wrote about the Salahis by all the countless other newspapers, internet sites, television and radio stations which picked up the
Post
reports or created their own original (and negative) items about the Salahis and ask yourself an honest question—“Did they ever have a chance?”

How could anyone possibly and adequately respond to an avalanche of sensationalistic reportage as it flows out nearly every single day, for months on end?

So then, were the Salahis squeaky clean in all their business dealings? No. By some accounts I discovered they may have been downright duplicitous. Did they like to make the social scene and were they anxious to attend a function at the White House? Yes—just like so many other Washington-area residents. Did they seem a bit odd agreeing to be featured on a Reality TV show? Yes. But being odd is not a crime in the United States of America.

By taking the advice of their various attorneys and advisors, the Salahis remained mostly silent after the state dinner because they were warned that they faced the possibility of being indicted by a federal grand jury. They even stayed clammed up when summoned to appear before a committee of the United States Congress. Your attorney would give you the same advice: Keep quiet and it will all play out in court—
except the Salahis never got to have
their day in court.
It was the court of public opinion that passed judgment upon them—and branded them for the rest of their lives.

I was reminded while still researching the extent of the media coverage of this couple and the nature of its tone how eerily similar it was to other contemporary stories in which biased over coverage resulted in unfair public opinion and scorn.

In Atlanta, Georgia in July 1996, after the Olympic Park bombing the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
newspaper reported that the FBI suspected the guilty party was security guard Richard Jewell, the man who first reported finding a suspicious back-pack with its deadly munitions that night. Jewell’s timely reporting of the disguised bomb and his assistance in clearing the park was originally credited with saving countless lives. However, other media began to pick up and pass along the
Journal-Constitution
story saying Jewell fit the FBI profile of a “lone bomber.” It turned out the bomber was actually Eric Robert Rudolph, who eventually pleaded guilty to a total of four deadly blasts. Rudolph is currently serving four life sentences without the possibility of parole at the Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado. Attorney General Janet Reno publically apologized to Richard Jewell for the “unconscionable leak” from the FBI. Jewell sued and won large six-figure settlements from NBC News
, the New York Post and
CNN. When he died in 2007, at the age of 44, his lawsuit against the
Journal-Constitution
was still in progress.

Later that same year, after the Christmastime murder of young Jon Benet Ramsey, there were so many column inches and airtime minutes filled with suspicions about John and Patsy Ramsey that as a result, many people were suddenly pounding their fists and decrying the grieving parents. A popular opinion was that one of the Ramsey’s killed their daughter and the other was helping to cover it up. In the end, of course, the District Attorney’s office in Boulder, Colorado employed cutting-edge new DNA technology and was able to completely exonerate that persecuted couple. Their vindication in 2008 came too late for Patsy Ramsey, who died of cancer in June, 2006. She passed away still under that horrible cloud of suspicion. We are left to imagine how that burden felt to her in the immediate aftermath of the murder, added as it was to the wrenching loss of her beautiful child.

Then there was the story that played out in 2001, in the anxious atmosphere following the September 11
^th
terrorist attacks. There were a series of mailings that contained weapons grade powdered anthrax. It was in that frenetic atmosphere that the FBI launched a major bioterrorism investigation, and once again the media locked-and-loaded on a favorite suspect: Dr. Steven Hatfill.

Hatfill was a former U.S. Army scientist who also worked in Rhodesia back in the 1970s during… (wait for it….) an anthrax outbreak! Reportage commenced in earnest and lasted for months. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft added to the frenzy when he labeled Hatfill a “person of interest.” Trouble was; Hatfill was an innocent man. With his reputation in tatters, he filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government. In 2008, the federal judge presiding over the case declared, “There is not a scintilla of evidence,” linking Hatfill to the crimes. Hatfill ultimately accepted a 5.82 million dollar settlement from the federal government.

Too bad about these media mistakes, news executives would say, perhaps while sadly shaking their heads. In the meantime, realize that the media makes buckets of money from this sort of over-coverage. It will happen again. Maybe you or someone you know will be a future target.

Why are we so quick to hate the Ramseys, the Jewells, the Hatfills, and now the Salahis? The simple answer is that it’s easy to hate them because we don’t know them. The media mostly makes no effort to delve into a target’s true personality or background. Many reporters simply mimic what they’ve read, some embellish, and nearly all are lacking the time to dig any deeper than to get a few surface facts before they must file their stories, feeding the beast. Many are sanctimonious in their motivations for pursuing those not yet charged with a crime. Sometimes it’s justified, most of the time it’s not.

In the Salahis’ case, the constant drumbeat of negativity spawned thousands of hateful reader comments in both the traditional media and the internet blogosphere. Michaele was even accused of being a transvestite born with the named “Michael,” and the poster unveiling this “revelation” swore it was true. Tareq was branded as a domestic abuser who manhandled his wife. The couple was blasted for a series of unproven and unfounded transgressions, such as stealing money from a charity for sick children and taking home $50,000 per episode on
Housewives.
Anti-Salahi pages cropped up on Facebook. One was titled, “Tell the White House Pary (sic) Crashers to Go Away,” and included a picture of the Salahis with Osama Bin Laden photoshopped between them. New “friends” to the site were greeted with, “Welcome and feel free to add any Crasher Bashing you wish.” In response to this invitation to dive off the cliffs of insanity just because the other lemmings were doing it, one reader wrote in like a good girl: “I’m looking forward to a murder-suicide with these two.”

An electronic perpetual motion machine geared up, fueled by equal parts technology and the age-old petty evil of the human tendency to gossip. A cyclical nightmare ensnared the Salahis while the negative news stories gave rise to more negative reader comments. The Salahis suspected that the flood of reader comments were used as an artificial ratings system, and gave reporters more ammunition to go after even more anti-Salahi stories.

In my research for this book, I did not find one positive article written about the Salahis. This is a couple who had participated in many charity events over the years for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation, for the MS Society, Aids groups, and others. They donated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wines to a range of humanitarian and political events. The public never heard any of the positive aspects of the Salahis’ lives. I talked with several people who believe the Salahis are among the kindest and most generous they’ve ever met, and still they feared having their names made public speaking about them. It’s hard to blame them, given what the whole world has already seen in the way this story has been handled.

However, there was a man named Al Vega who was eager to tell a wonderful story—on the record—about how Michaele helped him prepare to propose marriage to his girlfriend. Michaele arranged for a limousine and stocked it with wine, roses, and chocolates, then made a weekend reservation for the couple at a romantic Virginia bed-and-breakfast. “She made me look so good,” Vega gushed when I spoke to him. “I had just called Michaele for some advice about what would impress my girlfriend, and she took off! It was the sweetest thing. My wife is still talking about it.”

For reporters with a deadline, it’s all about the nitty-gritty of a story and the constant feeding of the beast. The story elements include the “who-what-when-where-why,” of course, but the juiciest stories have conflict, something sinister. This plays into a strange quirk in human beings, in that we seem to automatically think the worst about people in the public eye. We may secretly wish to be like them—but know that we are not—and so the underlying admiration turns sour and mean. Envy, the evil twin of admiration, shows up looking like a broke relative carrying a big suitcase.

Forensic Psychologist and lawyer Dr. Brian Russell thinks its Schadenfreude at play. “It’s that little bit of guilty pleasure we get from watching someone who’s gotten something we wished we had, get their comeuppance. Getting into the White House, for example, is something that a lot of people would think is really neat. And so they hear this story about the Salahis and they automatically think, ‘These people tried to weasel their way into something that I won’t ever get to do, so good! They got caught!’ It’s classic Schadenfreude.”

Faced with an ever-present digital beast that never shuts up and forever seeks “content,” we live amid a cacophony of information streams constantly flying at us. It can be as abrasive as facing into a desert sandstorm. Under constant sensory bombardment, it can become easier to get through the day by passively adopting the opinions of others. Critical thinking, after all, takes up valuable time and requires sustained concentration. The mental skills necessary to enable us to focus on a line of thought and sustain that focus over a protracted period of time comprise a valuable skill. It is a skill a healthy society must sustain and nurture. My mother would have called it, “using your good old common sense.”

For example, if you read a screaming headline such as, “Couple Gate Crashes Fort Knox!” take a moment to stop and apply common sense. It sounds catchy, but in reality of course, nobody “crashes” the gate at Ft. Knox. Anybody who dares to swim against the information stream and instead employ their own common sense in reading something like that will realize that the more likely scenario is that somebody opened the gate and let them in.