Yesterday to no one's surprise, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after evidence surfaced from a federal wire tap that the governor had made payments to a call girl. At first glance, this seemed like just another sex scandal, and a particularly juicy one, given Spitzer's self-representation as a crusader against corruption.
But Spitzer's downfall is revealing a far more complicated picture of the man and the ways in which he fostered his own vulnerability to getting caught in a kind of behavior that may be as much about “catch me if you can” thrill-seeking as it is about sex.
For one thing, Spitzer does not appear to be a big fish caught in the net of a corruption probe against prostitution rings. Instead, in one of the many ironies of the case, it was Spitzer's pattern of making financial transactions that triggered a flag from a software program designed to root out money-laundering.
Whereas transactions over $10,000 used to raises such suspicions, since 9/11, banks are using more sophisticated software programs to search out patterns of repeat transactions under that threshold that add up to large sums, a requirement that Spitzer himself demanded financial institutions in New York State implement. This means that Spitzer was the target of the wire-taps all along, not simply a random client caught in a prostitution sting.
Even his supporters readily admit that the governor is often arrogant and abrasive and has made himself more than a few enemies during his short tenure in Albany. The same brashness that made Spitzer a great prosecutor have not served him as well as an executive. For this reason, many have compared Spitzer to those heroes of Greek plays with their tragic flaws, or in a comparison closer to home, to the minister John Dimmsdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tragic morality play, A Scarlet Letter.
In an interview with Catherine Gallagher, a Professor of English Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, NPR Day to Day reporter Anthony Brooks noted the parallels between Spitzer's life and great works of literature and asks Professor Gallagher to explain the connections.
She pointed out that in both cases there is a kind of “poetic justice” or “some neat symmetry between what one is guilty of and what the instrument of the punishment will be,” particularly because “great literature is interested in the psychology behind” such hypocrisy. Gallagher also observed that such ironies show up at those moment in a culture where there are “Puritan forces” trying to reform things in society and that the most zealous crusaders of such reforms can be presumed to have “some kind of personal interest in this themselves, that is that they are either trying to prosecute something because they want to root it out of themselves, or they are trying to prosecute something because in fact it will help them personally. So very often the Puritan is seen as the primary kind of hypocrite,” (“What We can Learn from Hypocrisy in Literature,” March 12, 2008).
Yet even this psychological reading of the puritan as hypocrite cannot fully account for Spitzer's motives in playing with fire as he both sought to criminalize the sex trade and engage in it himself. In one of the strangest twists of Spitzer's involvement with prostitution, Juhu Thukral, director of the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, points out that while a coalition of groups were simply advocating for legislation against human trafficking in the sex trade, Eliot Spitzer pushed personally to create stronger criminal penalties for clients or “johns.” From her perspective, Spitzer's approach was counterproductive because it discouraged these clients from cooperating with authorities to protect women they suspected were being abused, even as it created a great legal liability for the governor himself now that he has allegedly been caught in the position of a “client” or “john,”
Perhaps the strangest reading of the Spitzer scandal has come from Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who claimed in an NPR interview that Spitzer should remain in office because what he did was a “private matter,” and in his view such dealings with a prostitute were really “a victimless crime,” (“Is Prostitution Really Such a Big Deal?” March 11. 2008. At least one NPR listener responded to this assertion by pointing out that Mr. Spitzer's wife and daughters might disagree that were no “victims” in this crime, but one should also consider how autonomous a party Mr. Spitzer's alleged prostitute was as well.
After all, unlike the adulterous relationship Mr. Dershowitz points to in the case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Spitzer was paying a woman for a sex act she would probably not have chosen to engage in without this monetary compensation. Moreover, as those investigating the women who worked for this “call girl” ring have discovered, may of these women were not trading their bodies purely for financial gain but in many cases to support a drug habit or simply to make ends meet. The fact that some of the “call girls” were let go for leaving a “tryst” to care for a child or for having too debilitating a drug habit suggests that the women in these rings are not glamorous “pretty women,” a la Julia Roberts, nor even autonomous businesswomen, but in many cases, women who are desperate to earn money any way they can.
What conclusions can we draw them from the fall of Eliot Spitzer? Why did he risk so much for so little? Was it arrogance, hubris, thrill-seeking, a Puritan fatal attraction to the very sin he crusaded again, or some combination of all of these?
Whatever the answer, Mr. Spitzer's sudden departure from Albany draws the curtain on the first serious attempt to disrupt business at usual at the one of the most dysfunctional legislatures in the country. If for no other reason than this, we many find more to lament in Mr. Spitzer's political implosion than the pleasure we take in its exquisite poetic justice.
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