She wasn’t.
“So, Judith, do you have any children?” the host asked, a few minutes into the interview.
“No, no children.” I confessed, followed by a petition for indulgence: “I have a niece and nephew.”
“Do you touch your niece and nephew?”
“Of course I touch them.”
“And how do you touch them?”
I could feel where this was going, but was powerless to escape. “I hug and kiss them, I stroke their hair, I rub their backs.”
“And at what age would you say it was appropriate to start touching your niece and nephew in order to initiate them into sex?”
I gulped, then declared, “Never, never!” But it sounded feeble. She’d already asked me when I stopped beating my wife.
I hung up the phone and dialed my publicist, Katie. “Tell the next person who calls that Judith is unavailable,” I said. “It’s the second night of Passover, and she’s out eating Christian children.”
A few minutes later, a friend phoned in from her car: “Hey Judith! I just heard Dr. Laura denouncing you on the radio. Congratulations!”
So, Dr. Laura was the force behind my sudden fame. I’d soon learn that she had been alerted by Judith Reisman, who also called Robert Knight, with whom she’d worked at the Christian-conservative Family Research Council. He was now at a sister organization, Concerned Women for America. In the mid-1990s, CWA had run a massive campaign against America’s flagship advocate of mainstream comprehensive sexuality education, the Sex Information & Education Council of the U.S., generating 30,000 letters to Congress calling SIECUS and its sex-ed guides “blatant promoters of promiscuity, pornography, abortion, pedophilia, and incest.” Now Dr. Laura had uncovered another member of “the pro-pedophile lobby.”
I started to weep. It was late, but I called Katie again. My voice was little: “I’m cooked.”
Katie answered with the un-flak-like candor I would grow to love. “You’re right. It’s pretty bad.” She put me on hold to decline several invitations from other AM talk-radio shows. When she returned, she’d regained her professional pluck. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll spin it.”
The good news was the book would get tons of publicity. Within the next two months, it was covered by scores of media outlets, from the Lancaster, PA, New Era to the New York Times, the gay and lesbian out.com to the neo-Nazi Jeff’s Archives, WNBC Radio to college stations in rural Wisconsin. The bad news was that most of the publicity was about a book I didn’t write.
Never mind what Harmful to Minors is about, though. Most of my critics didn’t read it. And even those who did, and took it seriously, felt obliged to lead their stories with the allegation that it was an apologia for sexual abuse, “the most controversial book of the year.” Spending up to 12 hours a day being interviewed, I just could not spin the story back to sanity.
In these stories, my “critics” got equal time. These were always the same few. Knight led the charge. Although he hadn’t read the book, he pronounced it an “evil tome.” Reisman made more secular, if no less satanic, associations. She had not read the book either, she told one major daily, but she didn’t have to. She averred that she hadn’t read Mein Kampf and she knew what was in it. I thought of writing a letter to the editor noting a small evidentiary difference between that book’s author and myself: I had not yet invaded Poland.
As in the Rind attack, politicians got into the act. Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay introduced a resolution calling on former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to remove her preface from the book (unsurprisingly, Dr. Elders felt no inclination to oblige the conservative members of Congress). A New York City Councilman from Queens introduced his own resolution denouncing the book. But it was local politicians in the Press’s home state who had the greatest effect and reaped the greatest benefit. Minnesota House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty, who was also vying for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination, condemned Harmful to Minors as “disgusting,” and “an endorsement of child molestation.” He got more than 50 legislators to demand that the University suppress the book’s publication. With alerts on the Christian Right Web sites, hundreds of e-mails and calls poured into the Press’s office supporting this demand. None of these people had read the book, which was not yet available. When a protest at the university president’s house drew only a few participants, its organizer, the lone member of his own political party, undertook a hunger strike (reliable sources observed him drinking a canned protein shake, after which I called him my dieting striker).
For some of my attackers, though, ordinary political activism did not suffice. In the heat of that cool spring month, I received a death threat. A university policewoman told me that her colleagues were doing all they could to track down the owner of the hotmail account. But the writer was too far away and appeared too disorganized to carry out any promises. His missive, originating in the aptly named Escondido, California, was addressed to “that woman who wrote the book” and e-mailed in care of the Press. Not to fret, the officer assured me. This was a “benign death threat.”