Reader Allison A. writes The Cable Game with this response to my post of July 5:
"You are wrong to imply that Joe Scarborough killed his employee. It's slanderous and morally wrong. He was working in Washington DC when she died in Florida. He never moved to NYC. He broadcasted Scarborough Country from a studio in Florida."
TCG is happy to stand corrected. I don't want to defame anyone; or at least I don't want to defame anyone who does doesn't deserve defaming.
Allison points to to an October 23, 2005 item in Newsmax.com, an online publication that TCG has great respect for, under the headline, "Joe Scarborough: I Didn't Kill My Intern."
Here's the text:
MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough is piping mad at Vanity Fair magazine after it implied he killed a female employee while he was a member of Congress.
The VF article in question, written by James Wolcott, appeared in October 2003.
In a letter to the magazine that has been published in the November 2005 edition, Scarborough writes that Wolcott's "libelous charge, pulled from a hate site on the Internet, led readers to believe that a good woman named Lori Klausutis carried on an adulterous sexual affair with a congressman before being killed in a sleazy sex-scandal cover-up.
"The article suggests that this imaginary sex scandal forced me to leave office. I was painted as the Republican Party's answer to Gary Condit, saved from prosecution by a right-wing media machine."
Scarborough said that in fact, Lori worked at an annex office and he met her no more than three times; he was never alone with her; he announced his retirement from Congress several months BEFORE she died.
Scarborough said he was willing to let the "lie" fade away without taking legal action.
But he's decided to "set the record straight" after a March 2005 Vanity Fair profile of Michael Moore included a Web site domain name that Moore purchased, JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com, which he feared would promote the magazine's "original reckless charge."
In a response to Scarborough's letter in the November issue, Wolcott wrote that he regretted "any emotional distress caused to Mr. Scarborough, his family, and the family and friends of the late Lori Klausutis."
As for Michael Moore, we expect no apologies.
However, this item, even if it exculpates Scarborough in Lori Klausutis' actual death, does not answer all questions about any possible relationship between Scarborogh and Klausutis, and the connection between her untimely demise and the demise of Scarborough's Congressional career.
Scarborough is free, of course, to make a full exposition of the case, and what happened, laying out all the facts. After all, he has his own show on MSNBC--plenty of time to devote to the full and complete vindication of his, uh, good name.
If he does, The Cable Gamer will certainly be watching.
