Mark Jurkowitz
Ombudsman
The Boston Globe
135 Morrissey Boulevard
Dorchester, MA 02107
Dear Mr. Jurkowitz:
Globe editor Matthew Storin has, through an intermediary, offered to meet with my partner and me. We haven't yet decided if such a meeting could serve any useful purpose. Unless we can be accompanied by a third party such as Harvey Silverglate, who would be present not as an attorney but as a witness and as a friend, there is no point in arranging such a meeting. Nor is there any point in scheduling an appointment before Mr. Storin is conversant with the facts. I'm crafting this letter to lay out some of the facts of an intricate story that can't be reduced to handy disposable sound bites. It won't be short.
My name is James D'Entremont. I am a playwright, a journalist, a teacher, and a founding member of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression (BCFE), an organization I currently head. Since 1970 I have had the privilege of sharing my life with Bob Chatelle, a software designer, journalist, and fiction writer. On May 6, in a front-page story ("Amirault Supporters Have Diverse Agendas"), my partner was targeted for character assassination by Globe staff writers David Armstrong and Kevin Cullen. I believe they were acting directly or indirectly on behalf of recent Pulitzer winner Eileen McNamara. I believe their goal was to nip a potential embarrassment to the Globe in the bud by demolishing the credibility of McNamara's most vocal critics. The implications of this maneuver are broad and appalling.
Bob Chatelle's passionate, lucidly reasoned defense of free speech has earned him a national reputation. He is a board member of two anti-censorship organizations, the BCFE and the Mass. Music Industry Coalition. He represents the National Writers Union (NWU - UAW Local 1981) at meetings of the New England Free Expression Network, founded last year by the ACLU of Massachusetts. He has represented his union nationally at meetings of the Washington-based Free Expression Network. The award-winning site he maintains on the World Wide Web is one of the richest and most complex free-expression resources anywhere on the Internet. It is in constant use by journalists, teachers and students. The erotic fiction currently found in one far corner of that site -- involving characters above the age of consent -- is part of the basis for the NWU's status as co-plaintiff in the ACLU's historic lawsuit to overturn the Communications Decency Act, a case soon to be decided by the US Supreme Court.
In more than five years as national chair or cochair of the NWU's Political Issues Committee, and during his term as a member of its National Executive Board, Bob has tirelessly championed the rights of writers. He has brought courage, intellect and skill to an array of censorship issues, often wading into controversies no one else would touch and emerging with solutions. He has applied to these situations a profound understanding of the First Amendment and a finely tuned sense of fair play. He has, I believe, done more for writers than any individual now employed by the Boston Globe, which has ended -- irrevocably -- his ability to address difficult speech issues in a public, meaningful, authoritative way. Two or more Globe staff writers have colluded to silence one of the most knowledgeable and tenacious writers' advocates in the country.
The chain of events that produced that result began four months ago.
On January 14, the Justice Committee, a San Diego-based group that monitors false accusations of sexual abuse, held a conference in Salem. The principal organizer was Carol Hopkins, the Justice Committee's Executive Director. About 200 presenters and attendees converged on Salem from across the US and Europe. The occasion was the 300th anniversary of the Day of Contrition, proclaimed in 1697 as a time of repentance for the witchcraft panic of 1692. Participants in the Day of Contrition-Revisited included Elizabeth Loftus, recently elected President of the American Psychological Society; author Donald Connery; Bucks County District Attorney Alan Rubenstein; psychiatrists Richard Gardner and Elizabeth Feigon; author and incest survivor Charlotte Vale Allen; journalists Debbie Nathan, Tom Grant, and Kathryn Lyon; attorneys Dan Williams and Michael Snedeker; and many more. Arthur Miller and William Styron addressed the gathering by videotape. 16 former prisoners, veterans of such notoriously discredited abuse prosecutions as the McMartin Preschool case and the Wenatchee "sex ring" debacle, attended with their families. Violet Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave were present, along with Gerald Amirault's wife and three children. The event was without precedent.
Bob and I attended out of a growing interest in these cases, which we believe reflect the same sexual McCarthyism that has nearly destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts, caused a measurable rise in censorship nationwide, and threatened freedom of speech in cyberspace. We were also drawn to the conference because Bob's friend and fellow NWU activist Debbie Nathan, co-author of Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, was among the speakers. Neither of us went to Salem as a representative of the Writers Union or the BCFE.
The conference was chiefly publicized via the Internet. Once it was announced, a storm of opposition swirled around it. An onslaught of hostile phone calls, faxes and email messages portrayed the event as a kind of child molesters' jamboree. At the last minute, the Peabody Essex Museum, advertised as the site of the conference, reneged on its commitment to provide meeting space. Fortunately the organizers were able to secure a function room large enough to accommodate the Day of Contrition at the nearby Hawthorne Hotel.
While local and national broadcast media did provide coverage, most Boston-area print media barely acknowledged the Day of Contrition. Apart from a blurb in "Names and Faces," the only coverage accorded the event by the Boston Globe appeared in Eileen McNamara's January 15 column "Hardly a Case of Persecution." Datelined Salem and referring to "a conference here" in its second sentence, the column does give the impression that McNamara had firsthand knowledge of what took place "at the Peabody Essex Museum." The column discussed the conference dismissively as a convocation of believers in "a mass conspiracy to railroad the innocent into prison cells in some hyper-vigilant attempt to eradicate child sexual abuse...." It stridently reinforced the myth that those who brand certain sex-abuse investigations witch hunts are denying the reality of child abuse altogether.
Those who had actually attended the conference found McNamara's characterization reductive, grossly inaccurate, and stingingly unfair. The column had no connection to the content of the Day of Contrition, which centered on serious discussion by distinguished professionals who by no means agree with one another on all points. People were deeply offended. Conferees felt especially insulted by the dateline and the apparent effort to give the false impression that McNamara had been present in Salem. As Carol Hopkins states in a Tom Mashberg piece in the May 8 Boston Herald, "I saw everyone who came in and out that day, and she was not there, period." Security concerns had mandated screening of all who came into the conference area at the Hawthorne Hotel -- which is, in any case, hard to confuse with the Peabody Essex Museum. Hopkins also confirms that McNamara, whom editor Helen W. Donovan of the Globe now says "went to Salem to get their materials," never claimed a press packet. If McNamara somehow did get her hands on conference materials, she never published a word displaying any knowledge of their contents. Matthew Storin, interviewed by Dan Kennedy in the May 16 Boston Phoenix, now asserts flatly (and troublingly), "She was in Salem, and she talked to people." No one connected with the conference believes this for a moment.
The truth counts. Apart from concerns about McNamara's apparently phony dateline, people were amazed by her disregard for the facts, a disregard so clear in her comments on the Salem conference (and later on the Amirault case) that it raises grave doubts about the reliability of every word she writes. There was also concern that the Globe's coverage of the kinds of cases discussed at the conference was frequently careless and biased. A number of letters went to the Globe on these issues immediately. Some were dispassionate; some were angry. None was printed. Bob Chatelle wrote one of those letters. He also complained to you in your role as Globe ombudsman. You promised to look into McNamara affair. We never heard from you again. For the next two months, we turned our attention back to its usual focus on challenges to free expression.
On March 24, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts reinstated the convictions of Violet Amirault and her daughter Cheryl, who had been freed on bail in 1995 following a lower court ruling that they were entitled to a new trial. In its 6-1 decision, the SJC conceded that due process had been violated on certain points, but that the Amirault case had dragged on long enough and the public's right to "finality" outweighed other considerations. For the growing number of people who believe them innocent, the decision was an outrage. (Not even McNamara, who complained in a March 26 column that the decision wasn't tough enough, was satisfied.) Bob, whose only previous entry into this arena had been at the Salem conference, began to assist Carol Hopkins in organizing a rally in support of the Amiraults. He did so not as a representative of the NWU but as an individual who values justice.
The rally took place at the Unitarian Universalist church in Harvard Square on the afternoon of Sunday, April 6. About 150 people sat through the program and afterwards joined in a protest march to Governor Weld's Fayerweather Street residence. People traveled to the rally from at least six states. Some of the organizers and spectators had attended one or both Amirault trials; many had spent long hours examining trial transcripts and related documentation. Speakers included Margaret A. Hagen of Boston University, Gladden Schrock of Bennington College, Gerald Amirault's wife Patricia, and (again) Bucks County DA Alan Rubenstein.
In the audience was journalist French Wall, editor of The Guide, a Boston-based nationally distributed gay monthly magazine. Wall, whose activism on behalf of the Amiraults had extended only to a few widely spaced pro-Amirault pieces in the Guide and several unpublished letters to the Globe, had been among scores of people to whom Bob and I had faxed information about the rally. (We are occasional contributors to The Guide, whose focus is on politics, travel, and entertainment. Some time ago Wall commissioned a piece from us on the Salem conference. The article will run in an upcoming issue.)
At the close of the rally, Bob took the podium briefly to announce that he was organizing a strategy session for Amirault supporters. The meeting took place the following evening, April 7, at the Atlantic Avenue offices of Silverglate & Good. The Globe, meanwhile, had published an account of the rally by James A. Duffy, beginning at the bottom of page B1. The story, reasonably accurate though perfunctory, seemed geared to underplay the extent of the Amiraults' support, describing the attendees as numbering in the "dozens." Extensive interviews with Rubenstein, Dorothy Rabinowitz and others had led Amirault supporters to expect something more substantial.
On April 7, it was announced that McNamara had won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, a fact trumpeted on the front page of the Globe the next day. McNamara was also beatified in a full-page ad on page B3. On April 9, in a column deploring lenient treatment of a 12-year-old boy accused of raping a 5-year-old boy, McNamara wrote: "We see that rallies are being staged (by people who never attended the trials or read the transcripts), to demand a pardon for Violet Amirault, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, and Gerald Amirault." Once again, Amirault supporters felt that McNamara was at best confusing fantasy with fact and at worst lying. Spontaneously, without consulting one another, people began drafting letters.
Carol Hopkins of the Justice Committee telephoned McNamara to congratulate her, to present the credentials of her organization, and to request a meeting. Hopkins reports that McNamara said, "I don't give a whit who you are or what your organization stands for. You and your supporters have already made your position on my Salem column perfectly clear. There is absolutely nothing you could tell me about the Amirault case which could change my opinion about the guilt of these people." As Hopkins began to reply, McNamara interrupted with "I don't have time for this conversation!" and hung up on her.
Bob Chatelle had invested a good deal of time in studying the Amirault case, and had worked hard to make the rally a success. He was offended by McNamara's uninformed dismissal of the April event, and perhaps even more offended by McNamara's treatment of Carol Hopkins, who had won his admiration and respect. On Friday, April 11, he wrote to the Globe to complain about McNamara's warped portrayal of the rally and its organizers, and to take McNamara to task for her rudeness to Hopkins. He reiterated his criticisms of her January 15 "Salem column," calling it "factually void," and stating that "A reasonable person can draw but one conclusion: McNamara was not there and her attempt to give Globe readers the impression she had been there was a deliberate fraud.... I am painfully aware that McNamara was recently named a Pulitzer Prize winner. I fervently hope that the Pulitzer Committee will reconsider and revoke this embarrassing decision. If allowed to stand, the Pulitzer will be cheapened and tarnished for years to come."
The letter concluded: "Like McNamara, I am a journalist. I'm also a longtime activist with one of America's largest and most respected writers' organizations, the National Writers Union. (I speak, however, for myself and not for the NWU in this letter.) A great many of my writing colleagues are journalists -- honest and hard working men and women. Because I know good journalism and good journalists, I say that McNamara is a bad journalist who discredits our profession." Bob's signature was followed by a formidable carbon-copy list including the Columbia Journalism Review, PEN, and playwright Arthur Miller.
Bob faxed and emailed his letter to the Globe shortly after 4 p.m. He then began faxing copies. He had faxed eleven of these when he received a call from Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, whose columns on the Amiraults have made a persuasive case for the family's innocence. She calmly and firmly laid out the reasons why she felt the letter was a mistake, insisting that it could muddy the waters in a way that might harm both the Amiraults and Bob. (I was present and heard Bob's end of the conversation.) He agreed to recall the letter. At 6:30 he notified the Globe by fax and email that he wished to withdraw the letter and had no intention of pursuing the matter. Then, as Nat Hentoff and others can attest, he contacted the eleven additional recipients, informing them that the letter had been recalled and asking them to disregard its contents. On Monday, Bob spoke directly to Glenda Buell, who edits the Globe's Letters to the Editor column. She assured him that his letter would not run. We don't know who at the Globe may or may not have read the letter by that time (or subsequently).
In any case, the letter began to acquire a life of its own. Two of the people who had received copies resisted Bob's request to let the matter drop. One was Alexander Cockburn of The Nation. The other was French Wall of The Guide, who was already aware of Bob's concerns regarding McNamara's Salem column. Both Cockburn and Wall were offended by what they considered serious improprieties on the part of McNamara. Bob said he would not encourage any attempt to confront McNamara and the Globe with the issues he had raised. Cockburn and Wall can confirm both Bob's reluctance and their promises to leave him out of it.
At the end of the monthly "News Slant" column in the May issue of The Guide, which appeared around April 20, French Wall published (under the headline "Duped Again? Pulitzer Goes to Dubious Journalist") a recap of Bob's letter, without naming Bob as the source. Alleging that McNamara had, among other ethical slips, lied about attendance at the Salem conference, the piece recalled the case of Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter whose 1981 Pulitzer was revoked when her prize-winning features about a 12-year-old heroin addict were exposed as fiction. "Compared to abusing one's position as a reporter to help railroad innocent people to prison," The Guide concluded, "making up a story about a fictional heroin addict seems almost benign." I firmly believe that it was this piece, coupled perhaps with letters Wall had sent to the Globe regarding some of McNamara's positions, that drew the Globe's attention and led to Wall's inclusion in the May 6 attack on Bob. French Wall points out that McNamara knew in advance that he was running an item about her in the May issue, since Guide staff had left at least one voicemail message (to which she never replied) informing her of it and offering her a chance to respond.
Cockburn, meanwhile, published an equally scathing piece on page 2 of the April 30 issue of CounterPunch, the newsletter he publishes with Ken Silverstein. The CounterPunch feature "Pulitzer Faker?" outlined the information provided by Bob about McNamara and the Salem conference, cited McNamara's "rabid abuse" of the Amiraults, and accused McNamara of only being interested in doing a "hit job" on the Day of Contrition. It described McNamara's depiction of the April 6 rally organizers as "a straightforward lie by the Pulitzer winner." McNamara, Cockburn notes, did not acknowledge his efforts to reach her.
On April 30, the Globe's David Armstrong called French Wall and interviewed him regarding the Amiraults. Wall discussed the case with Armstrong on the phone and faxed him material from The Guide. That evening Armstrong tried to reach Bob Chatelle by email. Bob and I had by that time left for New York, where I had been asked to speak at a May 1 memorial service for Leanne Katz, the late Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
On Thursday, May 1, the Townsman, the weekly paper of suburban Wellesley, where Eileen McNamara lives, ran a short "Wellesley Watch" item -- little more than a blurb -- entitled "McNamara Takes a Pulitzer Punch." The piece, which may reflect irritation with McNamara's failure to return the Townsman's calls when her prize was announced, began with "Maybe the Pulitzer Prize isn't all it's cracked up to be," and summarized Alexander Cockburn's negative CounterPunch piece on McNamara. (The intent was to report the attack on McNamara, not to endorse it.) Wellesley Townsman editor Cathy Brauner confirms that McNamara soon called to complain. "She was unhappy," says Brauner, "but fairly classy about it."
While Brauner is reluctant to discuss her off-the-record conversation with McNamara, others at the Townsman insist that McNamara charged that Louis Rice, the author of the "Wellesley Watch" piece, was remiss in failing to look into the origin of Cockburn's allegations. Reportedly McNamara claimed that since CounterPunch received its information from "a man who advocates sex with children and animals," the Townsman should consider the source. (Cockburn speculates in the current issue of CounterPunch that this was Bob Chatelle. It may instead have been French Wall -- who, though he does not "advocate sex with children and animals," is an outspoken proponent of sexual freedom who ran a piece on bestiality that described the phenomenon non-judgmentally in the March 1997 Guide. The feature is available online via The Guide's Web site.)
On Friday, May 2, Bob and I returned from New York to find an alarmed voicemail message from Carol Hopkins in San Diego. "It's essential that you call me at once," Hopkins said. "Something very distressing has come up that unfortunately involves you." David Armstrong had also made at least one additional attempt to reach Bob. In his email, Armstrong suggested that if Bob couldn't reach him, he should try Cullen.
On Saturday morning, May 3, Bob connected with Carol Hopkins, who warned him that Kevin Cullen had called her and said he was researching a piece on Amirault supporters. According to Hopkins, he asked if the Justice Committee's activities ever attracted unsavory characters with less-than-honorable motives. He wondered how she would feel if some of her associates in the Amirault support network turned out to be advocates for sex with children, people who have made it their business to promote intercourse between children and adults. She assured him that her organization had no use for such people and that it would be shocking to her if they could be found among the inner circle of Amirault supporters. Cullen then confronted her with "evidence" that Bob Chatelle was such a person, claiming that he was booster of NAMBLA who had material extolling the joys of child pornography and sex with children "in several places" on the Internet, and purporting to quote from some of Bob's pedophile manifestoes. He promised to email Hopkins the incriminating pieces of writing (something he accidentally or purposely failed to do). Cullen also cited French Wall, whose name Hopkins had never previously heard. Hopkins was baffled and horrified.
Hopkins says that Cullen told her he had had a similar conversation with Dorothy Rabinowitz earlier that day. Within the April 30-May 2 time frame, either Cullen or Armstrong called James Sultan, the Amiraults' attorney, to confront him with Bob's alleged hidden agenda. And Armstrong called Jonathan Harris, the Florida-based former MIT professor who maintains the Internet's Witchhunt Information Page, a detailed Web site on sex-abuse hysteria containing much archived material on the Amirault case. Harris has emailed to Bob that "Armstrong, when he interviewed me, said nothing about the accusations he was making against you. He did say that what inspired the article was the letters received responding to Ms. McNamara's column." Harris adds that Armstrong hinted darkly that McNamara's supporters were "well organized."
Infuriated by the allegations but amused by their ludicrousness, Bob quickly emailed Carol Hopkins the source of Cullen's innuendoes. Hopkins read it and saw how the material Cullen had used to discredit Bob had been ripped out of context and reassembled to trump up a smear. All the material came from a 14,000-word, 22-page essay, "The Limits to Free Expression and the Problem of Child Pornography". Cullen's interpretation impressed us as too inane to take seriously --it seemed preposterous that somebody could seize on this essay as if it were the smoking gun that revealed Bob's "real" motives in supporting the Amiraults. Bob was especially offended that Cullen, whom he had previously dealt with in connection with a speech issue at U. Mass.-Amherst, could be involved in this charade.
Bob's essay, which has been available on his Web site for over two years, expands and joins together two pieces Bob wrote late in 1993 and early in 1995. Both were published in the union newsletter he was editing at that time. They were inspired by the need to take a well-thought-out position on "child pornography" in a climate where the term is being applied to everything from advertising images to photographs by Sally Mann to family snapshots. The present essay, among many that Bob has written on difficult speech issues, is a work in progress that has been evolving into a possible nucleus for a book. It has been widely quoted, has provoked intelligent discussion, and has never before been characterized as questionable. One section addresses issues of consent, but most explicitly does not defend sexual relations with children. The suggestion that it promotes child pornography is vicious, ignorant, and deeply stupid. It is clear to us that Armstrong, Cullen, and/or some third party merely skimmed the essay uncomprehendingly, looking for ammunition -- or they read it, comprehended it, and decided to lie.
On Monday, Hopkins left Cullen a voicemail message informing him that she had read Bob's essay and had no problem with it. She told him he should read it, since he clearly hadn't. In a subsequent phone conversation, Hopkins says Cullen informed her he was working from quotes provided by a source he named but which she cannot remember. (It was not Armstrong or McNamara.) Bob, meanwhile, was in a quandary. Our friend and advisor Harvey Silverglate was out of the country and unavailable to help him assess the situation. Since Bob did not want to be portrayed as ducking the issue, refusing to return phone calls, he decided to talk to Armstrong.
Beginning around 5:30 p.m. on the evening of May 5 -- a day on which Judge Robert Barton of Middlesex Superior Court recused himself from the Amirault case and blasted the SJC's "finality" decision -- Bob and David Armstrong talked for about half an hour. Bob tried to explain to Armstrong the purpose of his essay. When the exchange turned to age-of-consent issues, Bob stressed that while age-of-consent laws contain inconsistencies and inequities, such laws may serve useful purposes. He further stressed that he had no fully developed position on the issue, since it had never been one of his central concerns. Armstrong pretended to listen sympathetically and with interest. After the conversation, Bob told me he felt he had set Armstrong straight and that there was virtually nothing to worry about. Armstrong, in any case, had said that the resulting article would appear at the end of the week. Later that night, however, he emailed Bob the news that the piece would run in the Globe the next day.
Early the next morning Bob and I read Armstrong and Cullen's "Amirault Supporters Have Diverse Agendas" online. We were stunned. I rushed out and bought the Globe. The edition that reached the stands was even more repellent, glaring at us hugely from the front page, flanked by a box encapsulating a leering, wildly dishonest description of Bob's Web site, claiming it "contains links on related subjects [to the Amirault case], including several sexually-explicit short stories written by Chatelle." The day's real Amirault story -- that Judge Barton had disqualified himself from the case, slammed the SJC, and stated, "These women did not receive a fair trial and justice was not done" -- was given short shrift on page 20 underneath a continuation of the Armstrong/Cullen sludge. Near the start of the purported discussion of Amirault supporters was an utterly false and libelous statement about Pennsylvania DA Alan Rubenstein, claiming he'd revealed that his office had "manufactured evidence" in an abuse case. This is just mentioned in passing. Were Armstrong and Cullen so busy manufacturing evidence themselves that they just got careless?
We were absolutely unprepared for the way sentences from Bob's long piece on the child pornography question had been hacked up, reconfigured and recontextualized to produce bogus evidence of sexual predation. Readers weren't even informed that those quotes had come from a single essay. Worse, two statements presented as fact were flat-out lies: (1) that Bob had "argued against laws that establish an arbitrary age at which sex between adults and minors is legal;" (2) that Bob "praises the controversial group NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, because it advocates for consensual sex between men and boys." None of the statements in Bob's essay that would contradict the impression Armstrong and Cullen wished to present were cited; only a trace of the statements Bob made to Armstrong that would have spoiled this lynching party made it into print. Are these people so loosely joined to reality that their fanaticism has escalated into psychosis? It was hard to believe that this could appear in the Boston Globe. The whole setup seemed to have crawled up out of the dank subcellar of some pestilent Murdoch tabloid.
I believe there is considerable truth to Tom Mashberg's assessment ("McCarthy Tactics at the Globe") in the May 9 Boston Herald: "The game is quite easy: Connect Person X in the public eye to some extremist, harrumph a bit about how `the vast majority of Person X's supporters don't hold such controversial views,' then tell everyone how loathsome the extremists are. Voila! The subject of the story is indelibly tarnished by the extremists' point of view." I don't think, however, that the primary purpose of the Armstrong/Cullen article was to immerse the Amiraults and their "good" supporters in guilt-by-association -- though I don't doubt Armstrong and Cullen were happy to serve that end. I am convinced that both Bob and French Wall were slated for demolition because of their letters to the Globe to or about Eileen McNamara, in addition to the "News Slant" piece in Wall's magazine. The aim here was above all to discredit -- and in Bob's case, destroy -- two of the three key people who had seriously questioned the journalistic ethics of the Globe's new Pulitzer laureate. (I suspect they considered Cockburn both too well-known and too heterosexual to attack, and in any case blamed Bob and/or French Wall as his source.)
Because the "diverse agendas" of the Amirault supporters weren't really part of their program, Armstrong and Cullen never seriously tried to find out who the major local Amirault supporters are, much less to interview them. These include representatives of groups across the political spectrum, including a few that are even considered "controversial" in some quarters -- organizations like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. It includes parents whose children were in daycare at Fells Acres. It includes individuals ranging from feminist law professor Nicole Hahn Rafter of Northeastern to an evangelical Christian couple. Except for one pro-Amirault activist whose daughter has retracted a "recovered memory"-based accusation, none of these people has ever, to my knowledge, been even remotely linked to child molestation. None has ever promoted sex between adults and children. I do not believe there have been any hidden agendas at work here, except at the Globe.
It's particularly telling that French Wall was dragged into the discussion. His active involvement in the Amiraults' support network has been beyond peripheral. It has been nonexistent. Armstrong contacted Wall without any clue to Wall's activism regarding the Amiraults except for a few pieces of writing hostile to McNamara. He did not know Wall had been a spectator at the April 6 rally until Wall told him. (Ironically, the Globe's behavior has prompted Wall to write to all 17 Globe reporters who have ever had Amirault-related bylines, probably his most overt personal gesture concerning the Amirault case.) While he refuses to join in the obligatory NAMBLA-bashing now required of gay activists, the Globe's depiction of Wall as somehow focused on sex with children is scurrilous. The implication that ulterior motives underlie his defense of the Amiraults is obscene. Worse, the story sleazily misrepresents a case in which Wall, fired from a City Hall job because of an outside political involvement, sued and won in Federal court.
It's worth noting that Bob and I were first drawn to French Wall by reading his astonishingly cogent and principled editorials on hate speech and other difficult First Amendment issues. Last fall French was among the brightest and most eloquent speakers in a symposium on hate speech sponsored by the BCFE. Like Bob and myself, French takes an absolutist position on the First Amendment, defending the free-speech rights of racists and extreme homophobes. (I have no doubt that he would also defend, as we do, the free-speech rights of Armstrong, Cullen, McNamara, and the Globe.) This position has been far more unpopular in Boston's gay community than any of French's pronouncements on sexuality. I doubt that Armstrong, Cullen, and McNamara combined could ever aspire to French Wall's level of integrity. While Bob and I do not agree with French in all areas, we are proud to know this man and would never dream of dissociating ourselves from him.
As the securely-employed editor of a gay magazine that has for years been tackling risky subject matter, French Wall does not stand to suffer any lasting damage from the Globe's Neanderthal portrayal of him. The damage to Bob, to me, and to our respective organizations is, however, lasting and profound. From the moment the May 6 Globe appeared in print, we have felt its poison seeping into every level of our lives. We have had to put everything else on hold and deal with this atrocity full time for the past two weeks. We have had to cope with its effects on our families, our neighbors, members of our organizations, and professional colleagues. People we have known for years now want nothing further to do with us. The leadership of the gay community seems to have cast us into that special section of the outer darkness reserved for people tied to NAMBLA. Certain members of the BCFE will not return my phone calls. One prominent member of the National Writers Union's Boston Local has been reducing people to tears with his rabid denunciations of Bob.
We are learning who our friends are. Once the dust settles, we may be reconciled with some of those who abandoned us so eagerly after May 6. Eventually our schedules will return to normal. The one effect of long duration will be the damage to our activism. Again and again, beginning with our defense of the Institute of Contemporary Art's right to display photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, continuing through testimony against over-the-top child-porn legislation that would affect the Museum of Fine Arts, through defense of artworks and family photos, through defense of books and educational materials, through opposition to the Communications Decency Act, through opposition to filtering software in public libraries, and on, and on -- we have had to deal with efforts to abridge constitutional rights in the name of protecting children. Our responses have ranged from quiet letter-writing to television appearances like Bob's CBS debate with right-wing zealot Bruce Taylor over a Cambridge photography student's innocent pictures of her 4-year-old son. We approached these issues with confidence, naively thinking there was nothing in our backgrounds -- except, for dedicated homophobes, our openness about being gay -- that could ever mar our credibility. The Globe has now fabricated something, and as a result, our credibility will never be the same.
The Globe has published two letters on this incident, including one from Bob in his own defense. This does not begin to be enough. No amount of money could repair the damage the Globe has done. Armstrong, Cullen, and McNamara -- along with whatever cognitively stunted editor helped facilitate this mess -- could apologize on their knees, and the taint of their actions would still adhere to Bob's reputation. The Globe could print a retraction and an exoneration of Bob, filled with embarrassing details, on the front page, and the May 6 article would linger on for permanent use by anyone who wished to discredit Bob in any area.
We have not, therefore, yet decided what course of action we will take in regard to the Globe. (It's bitterly ironic that Bob has always opposed strong libel laws and lawsuits based on "intentional infliction of emotional stress," because of their chilling effect on speech in general and the work of journalists in particular.) But we want, at least, the full story -- not the Globe's self-serving version, but the full story, the whole story -- to be made public. I wish I shared some people's optimism that this might occur. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I hold little hope of ever learning what really took place backstage at the Globe.
We do know that it is customary at the Globe for writers cited in letters to the editor to be given copies. This means that McNamara may well have seen Bob's April 11 letter, and certainly means that she would have seen his January letter, which was not recalled. French Wall has written to McNamara directly more than once, and has written to the editor in response to her columns. Jonathan Harris, you will recall, has declared in a written statement that David Armstrong told him that the inspiration for the piece on Amirault supporters was mail the Globe had received on McNamara. It does seem to me that a private citizen should be able to write a letter to the editor, to write a letter to or about a reporter or columnist, even an unpleasant and vindictive letter, without fear of reprisal. Is it now the Globe's policy to research the lives of its readers in order to dredge up dirt, real or synthetic, in order to discredit and punish those who question the conduct of its staff? Does the Globe now encourage its writers to sift through the work of their peers in search of the means to blow them away?
You may recall that in an email message to you about three months ago, in a moment of frustration over the paper's relationship to an important censorship effort, I accused the Globe of having "all the moral grandeur of an organized crime syndicate." At the time, I might have conceded that I was being hyperbolic. Now it seems I didn't know how right I was.
Sincerely,
James D'Entremont
cc: Interested parties.