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Spitzer's Hookergate Scandal Lives On And On
By
Jen Chung
Published Mar 4, 2010
Modified Mar 4, 2010
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By
Jen Chung
Published Mar 4, 2010
Modified Mar 4, 2010
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While Governor Paterson battles public perception about his administration—which just lost its third key official in a week—his predecessor's scandalous fall is also news. Former governor Eliot Spitzer is the subject of a tell-all memoir from his former friend and adviser and a lengthy Time magazine feature, in which he says of returning to politics, "You have to understand what my family would go through. It would be unbearable. I just couldn't do that to them. It would be day after day of the ugly stuff."
His former adviser Lloyd Constantine has produced a knife-twisting look at the Spitzer administration with "Journal of the Plague Year: An Insider's Chronicle of Eliot Spitzer's Short and Tragic Reign." The NY Times got a preview, "Mr. Constantine offers one diagnosis for Mr. Spitzer’s tempestuous behavior that perhaps only a wealthy Manhattanite could suggest: acute lack of tennis. Mr. Spitzer dropped his weekly game with Mr. Constantine in 2006, worried that a tender hamstring would cause him to hobble on the campaign trail. That 'deprived Eliot of an important physical release,' Mr. Constantine writes."
Constantine, who first met Spitzer when he hired him as his student intern in the state Attorney General's office, also says Spitzer called him the night before news of Spitzer's penchant for prostitutes broke: "Eliot was crying and said two jangling if not necessarily inconsistent things... He said, ‘You can throw me over if you want to, and I won’t blame you if you do.’ And then said, ‘As of now, you are my counsel...The Times will report that I have been involved with prostitutes... I can’t continue as governor and must resign.'"
The Love Gov, who calls the book a "self-serving and largely inaccurate interpretation of events mixed with unfounded speculation," tells Time magazine, "At one point I stood for something that was important and useful. I was in a place in time where I had a purpose, where it mattered. And then I destroyed it."
Tagged
eliot spitzer
governor paterson
Lloyd Constatine
PLague Year
scandal
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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