Friday, Oct. 27, 2006 | 7:38 a.m.
What if it's not true?
That is a frightening question.
Imagine if Rep. Jim Gibbons, the clear front-runner for governor, actually is innocent of any wrongdoing on Friday the 13th outside McCormick & Schmick's. Maybe nothing untoward happened, nothing certainly that should have resulted in 911 phone calls, a devastating police report, a media mauling and a potentially fatal political conflagration.
What if it's not true?
If it isn't, then a man's good name has been forever sullied, his reputation unalterably blackened and his political career possibly terminated. This bell can never be unrung, and it may toll louder for Gibbons come Nov. 7.
But beyond the political analysis of the damage, and the calculations of how to exploit and minimize it from both campaigns, we can't help but return to that scary question: What if it isn't true?
How then to justify the unparalleled marshaling of media resources, with reportorial teams mobilized as if this were the scandal of the century? What if this actually were a case where the congressman's word was golden and the accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo's, was pyrite?
The whole thing is hard to believe, isn't it?
A congressman, a man in public life for a decade and a half is reckless or dumb or drunk enough to risk the governorship for one night of partying at a very public place and a chance to have a tryst - forced or otherwise - with a young lady?
He would wait outside this very public place for as long as a half-hour, lurking until Mazzeo exited the restaurant so he could take advantage of her?
After getting her to the parking garage, a man who has never been known to use curse words, would become an F-bomb scattergun, venomously spitting out the word as he tried to force himself on the woman?
And who is to believe the fantastic stories that her California lawyer told to a private investigator hired by the Gibbons campaign folks, where he insisted the Titus campaign tried to contact him and claimed Mazzeo has been threatened with dismemberment?
It is, in a word, incredible.
What if it isn't true? A truly terrifying thought considering what this story has wrought.
It could cost Gibbons everything in his life, everything he has worked for personally and professionally. In the time it took him to get in out of the rain, sit down with his political adviser, Sig Rogich, and a group of women, including Mazzeo. Poof.
Maybe he shouldn't have been there so late. Maybe he shouldn't have tried to help the woman he described to police as "tipsy." That's what he gets for being a gentleman? The end of his political career? Thanks to a woman with a "troubled past" who has made "wild and reckless allegations," as his lawyer said?
What if it isn't true?
So what if the congressman's story is as flimsy, or even flimsier, than Mazzeo's? So it makes little logical sense that he would have walked an intoxicated woman - by his account to police and that of others there, she had been drinking - to her car? So it is simply bizarre that she would have stumbled and then righted herself and then suddenly the two would go their separate ways?
So that makes little sense. Disregard that.
And so what if Mazzeo says that Pennie Puhek, who was there with Mazzeo, made offers of money for her to recant her claims - and Puhek denies that ever happened. So what if Mazzeo's sister made a fourth 911 call and related what her sister had told her?
So what if Mazzeo has notes she says she took during conversations with Puhek when she says the latter implored her to tell police to withdraw the charges? So what if the private eye wanted to meet with Mazzeo to get her to sign what Richard Wright, her lawyer, called a "silence agreement?" So what if her California lawyer might have been exaggerating for whatever reason the threats and so forth? And so what if Mazzeo's "troubled past" - many of us have those, don't we? - may have nothing to do with what happened on Friday the 13th?
So what? Well, that does raise a question that is manifestly more frightening than the one I asked at the beginning of this column, one freighted with much more political, legal and personal significance:
What if it is true?
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