Prosecutorial Effort To Humiliate Spitzer Is Seen
In taking down a high-end prostitution ring last week, prosecutors made sure to include an account of a sexual liaison between a prostitute who called herself Kristen and a man identified only as Client 9. Included in court papers was the detail that Client 9 was known at the prostitution service as a someone who would "ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe."
This week's disclosure that Client 9 is believed to be Governor Spitzer raises the question of why prosecutors included such a lurid detail. Much less detail about liaisons involving other clients was included in the court filing.
Some legal experts argue that prosecutors intended to humiliate Mr. Spitzer.
"This material seems to have been injected for purposes of humiliating and destroying the career of a particular political official," a law professor at Columbia University, Scott Horton, said. In an article posted this week on the Web site of the New Republic, Mr. Horton questioned whether the investigation into Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, by the Justice Department of a Republican administration was politically motivated.
Others say the prosecutors probably kept out their most vulgar details and treated Mr. Spitzer no worse than any of the other clients.
The court filing that included the details was intended to provide probable cause for the arrest of four managers of the alleged prostitution service, called Emperors Club VIP. The filing does not initiate any criminal proceedings against any of the clients or prostitutes.
The filing includes excerpts of a phone conversation caught on wiretap in which Kristen offers a debriefing to another woman at the prostitution service about her time with Mr. Spitzer. Prosecutors could easily have left the conversation out of their court filing, or even done without any mention of Client 9 at all.
It took four days from the time the court document was filed publicly for the New York Times to break the news that Client 9 was believed to be Mr. Spitzer. It is possible that prosecutors didn't anticipate the disclosure until they had progressed further in their investigation.
"There were ways to embarrass him and they didn't do that," one former federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, who has written about Mr. Spitzer's downfall for the National Review Online, said. "They treated him like the other johns, which meant assigning him a number."
Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, which is investigating Mr. Spitzer and Emperors Club VIP, may have written with some restraint in describing Client 9's tryst in the court filing. The description of Kristen's debriefing about her tryst includes many ellipses, suggesting that prosecutors are withholding details about that encounter from the public record.
"In this case it seems to me that they laid out more than they needed to and less than what they have," an attorney, Daniel Parker, who represents a woman accused of managing Emperors Club VIP, said.
Given news reports that the investigation of Emperors Club began as an investigation into Mr. Spitzer's finances, Mr. Parker said it would have been odd for prosecutors to have abstained from mentioning Client 9 in their court filings.
"If the governor was the main focus of this investigation, then, in essence, if they didn't include him as Client no. 9, in some ways it would have been intentionally misleading," Mr. Parker said.
In general, the case provided the "opportunity for prosecutor sensationalism," a defense attorney in Manhattan, Thomas Curran, said.
"But they didn't take it," he said of the federal prosecutors handling the case.
Mr. Curran suggested that Mr. Spitzer, who served as the attorney general for eight years, might have handled the case differently.
"If Eliot Spitzer were the prosecutor on this one, Eliot Spitzer would have been arrested Monday and his bank accounts would have been seized," he said.
