A Horse-Whisperer's Tale Trails Dominick Dunne nytimes.com
[ This is sort of an odd story. It refers to an Atlantic story in the Jan/Feb issue, by RFK Jr. no less, but that's not available on line yet. clips: ]
Reached at his country home in Connecticut for comment on the lawsuit and on a recent Atlantic Monthly attack on him for his role in pushing for the prosecution of Michael Skakel, convicted last year of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, Mr. Dunne said, "How did you get my number?" He added: "I just am not going to talk. This is a very bad time in my life." Ms. Ingraham did not return repeated calls to her radio show's office.
Understanding the fuss requires knowing the horse-whisperer story in all its rococo glory, as told by Mr. Dunne to the radio audience. The story begins in the fall of 2001, when Mr. Dunne received a call from someone claiming to have information about Ms. Levy's disappearance. At the time the body of Ms. Levy, the former Federal Bureau of Prisons intern, had not yet been found; it was discovered last May in Rock Creek Park in Washington. The case remains unsolved.
The caller, Mr. Dunne said, identified himself as the animal behavior expert whose professional story had been recreated in the Nicholas Evans novel "The Horse Whisperer." The man, never named by Mr. Dunne, said that he worked in Dubai, where he met a man who procures call girls for wealthy Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern embassies in Washington.
A recording of the radio show reveals that Mr. Dunne then said: "Now some of this I can't explain, and I don't want to get into any trouble saying. But according to what the procurer told the horse whisperer who told me, is that Gary Condit was often a guest at some of the Middle Eastern embassies in Washington — where all these ladies were.
"And that he had let it be known that he was in a relationship with a woman that was over. But she was a clinger. He couldn't get rid of her. And he had made promises to her that he couldn't keep. And apparently she knew things about him and had threatened to go public. And at one point he said, `This woman is driving me crazy,' or words to that effect.
"And I wrote all this down at the time, and what the horse whisperer said that the procurer said is, by saying that, he created the environment that led to her disappearance. And she shortly thereafter vanished." Reminding his audience that "I can't vouch for any of this," Mr. Dunne added that he was told that a semi-conscious Ms. Levy had been hustled aboard a private plane. The procurer, Mr. Dunne said, speculated that "she was dropped at sea."
In February 2002 Mr. Dunne repeated an abbreviated version, without the remarks attributed to Mr. Condit, on "Larry King Live." These remarks are also cited in the lawsuit, in which Mr. Dunne is the sole defendant.
[ e.g. Dunne went on TV and spewed a lot of BS. Which, in the genre of talk television seems only slightly less rare than on talk radio, where it in turn seems pretty obligatory. ]
Chris Matthews, the host of a show on MSNBC, said of the horse-whisperer tale, "That's a hell of a lot of assumption piled on assumption." A host, he said, must show skepticism of thinly sourced information. But considering Mr. Dunne's overall work, "I would still have Nick on," he said. "I just like Dunne."
Michael Kinsley, the former editor of Slate and a former panelist on CNN's "Crossfire," also said he believed that "talk radio and talk television are media where everything is a first draft." Without defending Mr. Dunne, he said, "It would be too stuffy to say that they have to have the same standards of evidence and accuracy as a newspaper."
Which is not the same as having no standards. He said that there was a line, and Mr. Dunne's remarks "were on the wrong side of the line."
[Blurb for the Atlantic story: ]
In Defense of Michael Skakel
A little over a year ago Michael Skakel, whose cousins include the children of Ethel and Robert Kennedy, was convicted of the 1975 murder of his neighbor Martha Moxley. The trial generated lurid headlines and occurred in a climate of misinformation and innuendo. Now his cousin steps forward to mount a defense
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. |
