Guilty (24 page)

There were strong suggestions that the Obama campaign had tipped off the
Chicago Tribune
to his opponents' divorce files, especially because Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod, had worked at the
Tribune
for five years, including as its lead political reporter. The
New York Times
reported that “the Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story.” Some had suggested, the
Times
intriguingly wrote, that Axelrod had “an even more significant role—that he leaked the initial story.”
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It's an interesting philosophical question, but the problem is, it's virtually impossible to distinguish between the media and the Obama campaign—or the campaign of any liberal Democrat.

The media hubbub about Hull's sealed divorce records was so great that Hull and his ex-wife Sexton eventually relented and allowed their sealed divorce records to be unsealed—eighteen days before the primary. By then, both Hull and Sexton had admitted to every embarrassing detail in the divorce records, including a physical altercation during their divorce. Sexton had declined to press charges and the police dropped the matter, having determined that it was a matter of “mutual combat.” Both parties said it was a private matter and had nothing to do with Hull's campaign, which Sexton supported.

But the press coverage was relentless. The Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women denounced Hull. His first ex-wife, his daughters, and Sexton's nanny held a press conference to say Hull had never been violent. Less than two weeks before the primary, Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate again detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce files, explaining that Sexton “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”
¹⁰

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull's campaign collapsed with the nonstop chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

Luckily for Obama, his opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan, Obama's Republican challenger for the Senate, was a dazzling candidate. In addition to actually having the stunning good looks that the media unaccountably ascribe to Obama, Ryan had a résumé that was so impressive it was almost comical. He grew up in a large Catholic family, went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of
dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early forties, left investment banking to teach at an inner-city Catholic school on the South Side of Chicago. Many thought he was a shoo-in even in liberal Illinois: Recall that Ryan and Obama were running for a seat that was being vacated by a Republican, Peter Fitzgerald.

Obviously, Ryan would be a tough nut to crack, but do not underestimate the Liberal Attack Machine! Five years earlier, Ryan had been divorced from a Hollywood starlet, Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell borg on
Star Trek: Voyager.
The divorce and custody filings were sealed by a California court in accordance with the wishes of both of the divorcing parties. Originally, Jeri Ryan had opposed sealing the records, stating that the only reason her ex-husband wanted them sealed was to protect his political career. But she later changed her mind when she acquired a stalker. Only then did Superior Court judge Robert Schnider place the records under seal.

Jack Ryan wanted the records sealed not for his prospective political career, but to protect the privacy of his son, who is autistic. By the time Ryan faced Obama, he had already released years of tax returns to the media. He even released his sealed divorce papers. Just not the custody records pertaining to his son. That wasn't enough for liberals. As one charmingly argued on the Democratic Underground blog, “The son is reported as autistic and would not even be exposed to the scandal unless he were suddenly cured.”
¹¹

In what would become a familiar pattern, Obama announced, “It's going to be up to other people to determine what's appropriate and what's not.” Meanwhile, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) was ferociously e-mailing reporters articles about the controversial divorce. A DSCC official unsubtly told the
Chicago Sun-Times,
“I don't believe we've engaged in any
on-the-record
commentary about his divorce files” (emphasis added).
¹²
Obama later piously declared, “I can say unequivocally that this is not something that we are going to be focused on in our campaign.” But it's an odd coincidence that both of Obama's Senate opponents were knocked out by the unsealing of sealed divorce records, rather as if all his political opponents' cars had blown up.

The Democrats didn't need to push hard on the Ryan divorce issue, since a pack of media wolves had soon taken up the chase and were demanding that all of Ryan's divorce records be released. Lawyers for the
Chicago Tribune
and WLS–Channel 7 flew to Los Angeles to request that the custody papers in the Ryan divorce be unsealed. The
Tribune
admitted it had no idea what was in the custody records; it sought to unseal them precisely “because it didn't know what was in them.”
¹³
This is rather like entering a home without a warrant and tossing the place because you never know what you might find.

They didn't have to ask Judge Schnider twice. So with the acquiescence of an unscrupulous judge, the media won the right to peruse the Ryans' sealed child custody records.

If any news organization can open sealed court records by asserting the novel legal argument “it might be interesting,” what is the point of sealing the records in the first place? I think it would be interesting to know the names of women who falsely accuse men of rape. It would be interesting to know the race of rape suspects—especially if there has been a string of rapes in my neighborhood and I want to be on the lookout. The gay community might find it interesting to know the names of HIV-positive men in their communities. Most of all, I think it would be interesting to know the occupant, rent, and number of bedrooms in every rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. In fact, I would
be fascinated.
But in all these cases, the media engage in ferocious self-censorship in the service of some idiotic liberal cause.

Protecting the privacy of a Republican for the sake of his child did not fall into that category. Even Judge Schnider, in ordering the records unsealed, admitted that “the nature of publicity generated will become known to the child and have a deleterious effect on the child.”
¹⁴
But this was no time to worry about a child—there was an attractive Republican Senate candidate to be stopped!

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the Ryans' divorce case released by Judge Schnider was a claim by Jeri Ryan, in response to Jack Ryan's claim that she had had an affair, that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris and New York and proposed that they have sex in front of other people. It was the sex clubs, she said, that drove her to
fall in love with another man. In a Clintonesque I-didn't-inhale-and-I-didn't-like-it claim, Jeri Ryan described the interior of a “sex club” that she said she didn't enter: “One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in the cubicles.”
¹⁵

Jack Ryan forcefully denied the allegations in his response at the time of the divorce, saying, “I should not have to respond to the ridiculous allegations Jeri Lynn makes in these two paragraphs.” He unequivocally denied that their romantic getaway weekends included “the type of activities she describes.” Rather, he said, “We did go to one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return.” Ryan warned that the filings would become public and complained that his wife apparently “did not consider how [their son] Alex will feel about his parents or himself when he learns of this type of smut”—which is exactly what happened years later when the media unsealed the custody records and broadcast them to the world.

Manifestly, Ryan had accurately described the effect those allegations would have on a nine-year-old child. There were also plenty of reasons to believe he had accurately described the veracity of his ex-wife's allegations. For starters, a case could be made that it is implausible on its face that Jeri Ryan could have had sex in public in the spring of 1998 without setting the gossip pages on fire. As busy as Jack Ryan must have been with investment banking and raising their son in Chicago while his wife was shooting
Star Trek Voyager
in Hollywood,
¹⁶
he had to know that she had attained the level of celebrity that does not allow one to have sex in public.

In addition to earlier smaller roles in shows like
Who's the Boss?, Melrose Place, Matlock, The Sentinel,
and
Co-Ed Call Girl
(she was the head call girl), Jeri Ryan had become a well-recognized sexpot since joining
Star Trek: Voyager
in 1997. By the spring of 1998, she had been in hundreds of newspapers, dozens of photos, nine issues of
Entertainment Weekly
(which described her as “a bracing mix of steely sexuality and undiluted aggression wrapped in spandex so tight it'D make ol' Jim Kirk blush”), two issues of
People
magazine, and one issue of
Newsweek,
which purports to be a newsmagazine but also publishes
Jonathan Alter. The previous December, TV Guide Entertainment Network had chosen her as TV's “sexiest star.”
¹⁷
In her spare time, she attended Star Trek conventions around the country.

Moreover, by her own winsome account, Jeri Ryan seems less offended by the public leering of her coworkers than the public leering of her own husband. In a 2006 interview with
FHM
magazine, accompanying a photo spread of her posed in underwear, Ryan said:

Even the laddie magazine interviewer moved on from Ryan's fascination with her own breasts, asking her if she ever talked to fellow
Boston Public
actor William Shatner about
Star Trek.
Ryan replied, “Not really. He mainly talked about The Girls.”
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So Jeri Ryan wasn't exactly Princess Grace of Monaco. She posed for men's magazines in her underwear and bored an interviewer with endless prattle about her “boobs,” but her husband takes her to a New York club “with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling” and she needed smelling salts?

In addition, there's a reason you never hear the expression “As true as claims made by an ex-spouse in divorce papers.” Despite the plot-line of every movie on Lifetime Television, false allegations of domestic abuse in divorce cases are, to put it mildly, not uncommon—especially in two kinds of cases: child-custody disputes and cases involving a lot of money. Indeed, legislatures around the country are constantly trying to find ways to reduce the incidence of false allegations, from punishing the guilty to inducing the parties to settle out of court.
¹⁹

But punishing false allegations is not the function of divorce court. Long before Obama needed an opponent destroyed in the 2004 Senate
race, California's family court—which was responsible for the Ryans' divorce case—was described in a California newspaper as “a place where discovering the truth and punishing the guilty are not the highest priorities.” One superior court judge said although judges are well aware that people in divorce proceedings “exaggerate or embellish stories,” the family courts simply have no capacity to determine who is telling the truth or to punish liars.
²⁰

Even the
Chicago Tribune
eventually reported on the unreliability of divorce filings—but only after Jack Ryan had safely been driven out of the race. Legal experts told the
Tribune
that the worst cases were custody battles like the Ryans', where “passions run highest.” Divorce attorney James Feldman said, “People are desperate to prevail and are often willing to say almost anything.” Another divorce attorney, Lee Howard, said, “People become so hateful, they lose sight of morality, they lose sight of ethics, they even lose sight of protecting the children they love.” He estimated that there were false allegations in about 80 percent of custody disputes.
²¹

Even assuming for the sake of argument that the questionable allegations against Jack Ryan in a bitter custody battle involving a lot of money were true, it is the least scandalous scandal I've ever heard of. His alleged ignominious act was wanting to have sex with his wife, albeit under somewhat tawdry circumstances. Ryan wasn't accused of having sex with an intern or a male congressional page—indeed, he wasn't accused of having sex at all. This may be the first sex scandal in history in which there was no sex. Jack Ryan was accused of asking his wife to have sex with him and taking “no” for an answer. If being turned down for sex is a disqualification for public office, how did Henry Waxman get elected?

Still, the media were aflame with indignation about Ryan. The scandal was covered on
Entertainment Tonight
—because if there's one thing Hollywood can't tolerate, it's a sex scandal! Although Jeri Ryan had opposed releasing the records to the
Chicago Tribune,
once they were unsealed, she immediately had her publicist shoot out a press release saying she stood by her racy allegations.