The Confession (36 page)

Facing the prospect of that long weekend separated from my family, I was profoundly lonely. That Saturday, as a distraction, I made a five-hour trip to help a friend move down to the shore. After dropping him off, I had the state troopers take me past Congress Hall, a beautifully renovated 200-year-old hotel on the Atlantic Ocean owned by Curtis Bashaw, whom I'd asked to serve as executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the state agency that had used casino revenues to restore Atlantic City's grandeur and turn it into a modern family entertainment center. Curtis was charming, exceptionally bright, profoundly knowledgeable about state politics, and an important player in the ongoing effort to redevelop South Jersey.

He was also a Republican, as he quickly admitted when we'd first met a
year before. But he happened to come from a profoundly spiritual and religious background—his grandfather was Rev. Carl McIntire, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher whose sermons were broadcast on more than six hundred stations at the height of his fame in the 1960s. Communism was his main foe, but McIntire also battled some Protestant churches (those he considered too liberal), the Roman Catholic Church (which he considered “fascist”) and, later, homosexuality.

Yet somehow Curtis had grown up as a well-integrated, balanced, religious, gay man, who lived openly with his partner, Will, in the same town where he grew up—and attended the evangelical church that had nourished him as a youth. “I don't buy the baby-and-bathwater stuff,” he once explained, with typical good humor. “You can't accept the religion of your parents without questioning it, not if it doesn't accept you. But don't abandon it, either.” Curtis told me that he'd found a way to make his faith his own. “The Bible says, ‘Let the words in your mouth and the meditations of your heart be acceptable to God.' That's the bottom line. Forget about living up to some standard set down by preachers. If your words, your actions, and your feelings all align, then you've pleased God. My grandfather said it all the time.”

Talking to him made me realize how far away from my faith I'd drifted. I longed for the emotional alignment I felt when I was right with my Church. Without it I felt as though I were navigating in a storm, letting each challenge determine my course. My goal was no longer to do what was right, but to do what got me to my next plateau.

I don't know why it was so important for me to see Curtis that night, but I asked the Congress Hall staff where to find him, and they pointed me toward a birthday party he was hosting nearby. I decided to crash the affair. When I arrived, the scene was something out of a dream of mine: Curtis and his partner surrounded by their extended families and friends, along with dozens of members of the local establishment; couples and singles, gay and straight alike. There were no barriers here, certainly none based on sexual orientation. Curtis welcomed me to the party, and I enjoyed the evening immensely, but by the end of the evening I had just plunged further into loneliness.

As he walked me out to the car, I squeezed his arm.

“I really admire how integrated your life is,” I told him.

“You know, the root of the word
integration
is the same as the word
integrity.
When the words in your mouth and the actions of your hands and the feelings of your heart are one and the same, you're a whole person, you're integrated, and there's integrity in your life.”

I don't suppose he knew then about my secret. I was suddenly overcome with a need to confess it to him. I knew he would understand better than anyone. But I didn't dare. Instead I talked about my issues indirectly, confessing that I was unhappy in my marriage and suggesting that I might want to rekindle a romance with Kari; I suppose she was a metaphor in my mind for total authenticity. “It is a rare man who can not only live a decent life, but also find love and purpose,” I said. “You have that in your life.”

I remember adding, “You're so lucky.” Of course luck had nothing to do with it, but saying what I meant—“You're so brave”—would have revealed too much about myself.

“I'm lucky?” he said. “Look at you. You're the governor of New Jersey!”

“I climbed the ladder,” I said, “but it led to the wrong world.”

 

I DON'T REMEMBER HOW I SPENT THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF
Friday, July 23, 2004—whether I went to the Princeton University gym, or down to the crew house on Carnegie Lake, where there is a glassed-in room on the second floor with a comfortable chair for reading. I'd developed a habit of spending my waking hours away from the mansion whenever possible, and filling my time there with meetings, sometimes late into the night. Afterward I must have attended an event of some kind; a gathering with a crowd always puts me in a good mood, and I remember being pumped up when I got to the office around noon.

What I do remember is the expression of my chief of staff, Jamie Fox, when I arrived. He looked like he'd just gotten news of a nuclear accident. He pressed the fingers of one hand to his upper lip, as I'd often seen him do when anxious or angry.

“We have a bit of a problem,” Jamie said. “Michael DeCotiis is on his way over.” Michael was our general counsel. “We'll talk about it when he gets here.”

“What is it, Jamie? Just tell me.”

I didn't expect him to answer. But he looked at me brokenheartedly, lowering his hand from his face. His voice fell to a whisper. “Michael got a call from a lawyer representing Golan. He's suing for sexual assault and harassment, unless you pay fifty million dollars.”

It was the other shoe I'd been waiting for. Golan would go public, on fantastically trumped-up charges, or try to extort a fortune from me to keep him quiet. Either way, since he could no longer be a part of my administration, apparently he'd decided to burn it to the ground.

The weariness I'd been feeling for a year became almost too much to stand. I rolled my head on my shoulders. Jamie looked concerned.

“We'll get over it,” he said. “Michael will make this go away.”

I knew he was wrong. “It's all over,” I said.

 

THAT SUNDAY, WE WERE ALL PLANNING TO GO TO BOSTON FOR
the Democratic National Convention, where John Kerry would sweep the party's nomination to oppose George W. Bush. It was to be a big moment for us. I hadn't been asked to speak from the main stage, but I was scheduled to give a talk about my stem-cell research initiative before a meeting organized by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. I'd spent all week preparing for the proceedings. I'd asked my old friends Jimmy and Lori Kennedy to come along; I hadn't seen much of my old friend lately, so I was looking forward to a week in their company.

Now I sat alone in my office dreading the outcome of Golan's gambit.

Michael DeCotiis arrived early that afternoon, joining me and Jamie in my office. That morning, Michael began, he'd received a call from a New York lawyer named Allen Lowy, alleging not only that I'd fired Golan for spurning my advances, but that our sexual encounters were never consensual. Both of these were preposterous charges. From a legal perspective, Michael was surprised that Golan's lawyer hadn't laid out the specific elements of his allegation, giving dates or any corroborating evidence.

“He wants money,” Michael said. “Lots of it. And he gave a very strict deadline. If we don't meet his demands by Tuesday, they're going public.”

“That's blackmail, Michael. I never harassed or assaulted Golan,” I said flatly. “It was consensual from start to finish.” Those were the first words I ever said out loud about my homosexuality. In retrospect, the confession was probably unnecessary, at least from Jamie's perspective; I could see in his eyes that he had surmised my truth, one gay man to another.

A silence fell over the room. Finally Jamie spoke. “I always said Golan was a gold digger,” he said. “I wonder if he's been fired from another job recently. If he's without income, that would explain a few things. And if he's on somebody's payroll, I wonder if his boss knows he's blackmailing the governor.”

A few phone calls later, Jamie knew a bit more. Golan had recently sold his Princeton townhouse and moved to Manhattan, where he was living in an expensive rental on Columbus Circle. He was working for Dan Tishman, the fourth-generation chief of the Tishman Construction Corporation, the massive development firm that had built the World Trade Center towers in the 1970s. “Tishman must be paying him a lot of money to afford that address,” Jamie said.

“The first thing you're going to need is a lawyer,” Michael told me. Jamie called Bill Lawler of Vinson & Elkins, who had helped resolve the Machiavelli case and had since become a good friend.

“I'll call Lowy back and stall him,” Michael said. “I'll set up some sort of meeting with him, Bill Lawler, and me early next week.”

Jamie asked what we knew about Lowy. Very little, it turned out. Michael had looked up his credentials in a legal directory and discovered Lowy was an entertainment lawyer, which struck Jamie as odd. But all we could do was play the cards we were dealt.

 

THE FOLLOWING DAY, BILL LAWLER AGREED TO FLY IN TO MEET ME
at Newark Liberty Airport to discuss the case. My old friend Nene Foxhall of Continental arranged for us to meet in a room at the Continental Admiral's Club. He asked me a million questions about my relationship, intimate questions that were embarrassing to admit. I could see he was disappointed in me.

But I was pretty sure of one thing: the fact that I was gay did nothing to
diminish Bill's affection for me. I can't express exactly how much this surprised me. It was the first test of my own self-hatred, in what would become an endless series of tests, and the first time I recognized how much I'd misjudged my friends.

 

ON SUNDAY, AS PREVIOUSLY ARRANGED, WE WENT TO BOSTON.
Dina, Jacqueline, and I shared a suite. Dina could tell I was distracted, I'm sure, but by then our relationship was so distant that the new tension in the air went entirely unmentioned. On Monday, I delivered my stem-cell address.

On the way back, Jamie and I released the state troopers and sat on a bench in Boston Common, watching a beautiful afternoon unfold. Children played, and pairs of swans circled in the lake. I realized for the first time that I was filled with fear about the future, what it would mean to my family and my parents, to all that I'd known. I was overwhelmed with the sense that I had jeopardized everything I held dear.

But Jamie was a tremendous comfort. Without his constant friendship and love, I could never have survived what was to come.

“You're strong enough to handle this,” he told me. “People are either victims or survivors, and it may be painful, but you're going to be a survivor. You'll get through this.”

All of a sudden, I looked at my friend Jamie differently—not just as my chief of staff, but as a gay man. I imagined the life he lived when he wasn't in the office, the adolescence he must have endured—one that was probably much like my own. The thought that Jamie had survived his own journey gave me strength.

In the afternoon, we returned to wage the war in a small catering room on the mezzanine level at the convention center reserved for the New Jersey delegation. Huddled around the telephone, Jamie and I strategized with Bill Lawler and Michael DeCotiis, who had met Lowy at the Manhattan offices of Vinson & Elkins. Bill said that Lowy wasn't a litigator. Based on his business card, which read “Classical Alliance,” he appeared to be an agent or manager for classical musicians. He arrived at the meeting without a
briefcase or notepad, Bill reported, carrying nothing but a book,
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling.

“Lowy started out saying, ‘If the case were to go to trial, I have no doubt we'd be able to collect damages in excess of fifty million dollars,'” Bill said. “So I said, ‘Well, what did the governor do? I understand they had a consensual relationship for a period of time while Golan was a state employee, that he left state employment for reasons having nothing to do with the governor, that Golan resigned and moved on, and really hasn't had a significant amount of contact with the governor up until recently.'”

Lowy interrupted, Bill recalled, saying, “My client has been damaged, and he needs to be compensated.”

“So I said to him, ‘What are your claims?' I'd already researched a number of claims he theoretically might have made, but he didn't make any. He actually said he wouldn't tell me. He said, ‘Your client knows what he did.' It was the strangest meeting I ever attended. I think their entire plan from start to finish is: call up governor, demand money, get money. Eventually he said, ‘Write up the papers however you want, I don't care. I'll release you from anything. In exchange for fifty million.'”

That wasn't happening—if for no other reason than that I had only a few thousand dollars in the bank, and no assets to speak of.

Monday ended on a faint note of hope; Lowy had agreed to a follow-up meeting on Thursday. The more we could engage him, the better our chances of disarming him would be.

Before dawn the next morning, I walked around the convention grounds with Jim Kennedy. We circled the same fountain a number of times before I found the courage to tell him what Golan was threatening to do. “I had a consensual sexual relationship with him,” I said. “Now he's suing.”

God bless Jim. My oldest friend jumped right past all the difficult questions and found just the right thing to say. “What do you need from me?”

“Your prayers and support,” I said.

 

ON THURSDAY, BILL LAWLER AND MICHAEL DECOTIIS MET AGAIN
with Lowy. As before, he carried no notepad or briefcase, only his subway
reading—this time,
Madame Bovary
. He seemed to play his part with a steely determination, never raising his voice or appearing unsteady or anxious, despite his apparent lack of experience.