TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Modesto Bee March 15, 2005:

Former Rep. Gary Condit on Monday settled his $11 million defamation lawsuit against author Dominick Dunne, just as it was entering a crucial and potentially embarrassing phase.

With the settlement, Condit secured an apology, the payment of an undisclosed sum and the freedom from further intimate questions about his friendship with the late intern Chandra Levy.[...]

Levy, 24, a one-time Bureau of Prisons intern who was raised in Modesto, was last seen alive on April 30, 2001. Her skeletal remains were found more than a year later in a Washington, D.C., park, but her death has never been solved and police have not identified any suspects. [...]

The lawsuit's settlement Monday morning coincided almost exactly with the scheduled start of a deposition that was going to press Condit for more details about that relationship. Previous depositions in this case have become public, and this one almost certainly would not have stayed secret for long. [...]

In bringing the lawsuit to an end, Dunne renounced a story he had told on the nationally broadcast "Laura Ingraham Show" in December 2001. On that radio show, and at fancy dinner parties, Dunne had cited a man called "the horse whisperer" as a source for claims that Condit had frequented Middle Eastern embassy sex parties.

Dunne said the man told him Condit had "created the environment that led to (Levy's) disappearance," through complaints that Levy was a "clinger" that the then-congressman "couldn't get rid of." Dunne cited his horse whisperer source as indicating Levy had been kidnapped and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. [...]

He did not refer to or apologize for other statements he had made about the case on CNN's "Larry King Live" or in USA Today and the Boston Herald. Condit had cited those other statements in filing his original lawsuit.
[...]

In his own first deposition, conducted last September, Condit declined to answer a number of questions about Levy, including whether they had a sexual relationship or physical intimacy of any kind.

Wood contended that such questions would lead to other lascivious questions irrelevant to the underlying lawsuit. But in a Dec. 8 opinion, U.S. District Judge Peter Leisure said the questions followed naturally from Condit's own actions.[...]

| Posted at 01:34 | PERMA-LINK |

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