Linda Tripp's Privacy
By Nat Hentoff
Saturday, March 28, 1998; Page A15
Becoming a public figure involves the risk that all sorts of people --
including journalists and the American Civil Liberties Union -- may try to
diminish you. An instructive case in point was Jane Mayer's "Portrait of a
Whistleblower" in the March 23 New Yorker magazine -- a dissection of
Linda Tripp.
Mayer reports that in 1969, when Tripp was 19, she was arrested on a
charge of grand larceny. Two men had accused her of "stealing $263 in
cash and a watch valued at $600 from their rooms at the Long Pond Inn"
in New York.
The stolen goods were found in Tripp's possession, and she was arrested.
Tripp, Mayer wrote, "posted bond and entered a plea of not guilty."
Mayer added, "As of March 13, the outcome of the case could not be
determined."
On March 17, Jeff Leen reported in The Post that the money and the
watch had been stuffed into Tripp's purse as a spoof by teenagers who had
been with her. The pranksters then called the police and reported a theft.
In court, the charge against Tripp was reduced to loitering, to which she
pleaded guilty. Loitering, under the New York Penal Code, is a violation.
As Leen noted, a violation is "less serious than a misdemeanor and does
not appear on an individual's permanent record."
I know of similar cases in which people with a violation were told by their
lawyers that if they ever were asked if they had been arrested, they could
answer rightly that they had not been. Tripp says she was told the same
thing by the judge.
In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer -- who had learned about Linda Tripp's
1987 security-clearance form by calling the Defense Department --
reported that Tripp had answered she had never been arrested. "Such a
statement," Mayer ominously wrote, "would be a felony under federal law."
Tripp has now been cleared by the Pentagon of lying on that form and will
retain her security clearance.
Asked by Republican Reps. Gerald Solomon (N.Y.) and John Mica (Fla.)
how this particular personnel information -- protected by the 1974 Privacy
Act -- was given to the New Yorker, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col.
Dick Bridges, told the New York Post that it won't happen again. "We've
learned our lesson."
In the March 30 Weekly Standard, Richard Huff, co-director of the
Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, says: "We would
not do that. It would be a violation of the Privacy Act."
On Court TV, former prosecutor Marcia Clark said: "The equivalent of
loitering? Is this what they bring out 30 years later?"
Meanwhile, that same Court TV program -- along with a number of
newspapers -- showed the 19-year-old Linda Tripp's mug shot. She looks
like a serial terrorist. Was it necessary to circulate that old, prejudicial mug
shot of someone who is innocent? There is no law against it; it's a question
of fairness -- if an editor chooses to raise that question.
Linda Tripp has also become the target of the American Civil Liberties
Union. In a paid ad that has been running frequently on some radio
stations, the ACLU asks: "How would you feel if all your phone
conversations last night were made public today?"
The ACLU commercial does not include such other current violations of
privacy as leaking a secret Pentagon personnel file to help a "gotcha"
journalist. Instead, the focus is on Linda Tripp, who is portrayed as the
very symbol of sinister eavesdropping. The ACLU's indictment:
"That's what Linda Tripp did to Monica Lewinsky, and what's more, she
gave those tapes to prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and he had Tripp record
Monica Lewinsky so she could incriminate herself. It's legal, but is it right?"
I agree with Justice Louis Brandeis's strong opinion that all wiretapping by
the government should be considered an unconstitutional search under the
Fourth Amendment. But the doomsday tone of this ACLU attack on Tripp
-- along with the targeting of her as the most dangerous privacy violator the
ACLU could find -- diminishes the ACLU itself.
Civil liberties is too important a subject to be sold like detergent.
Years ago, I saw an interview with a woman who, for the first time in her
life, had become a public figure. Asked what it was like to be in the public
eye, she said, "I felt that I'd been run over by a truck."
washingtonpost.com
Hentoff is an honest liberal.
Btw, someone posted the Star article
freerepublic.com |
