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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
As police prepare to grill Rep. Gary Condit about his relationship with Chandra Levy, are her mother's ever-changing stories simply evidence of confusion -- or a media-savvy attempt to smoke him out?
Jun 22, 2001 | There might have been a brief period in recent weeks when Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., thought the scandal over missing intern Chandra Levy was finally beginning to wane, that he would be able to once again walk the corridors of the Capitol without being tailed by camera crews and reporters.
The reprieve lasted nearly a week, starting at the end of May. Newspapers began running redundant "Levy still missing" headlines. Whole stories were written about the Washington police department's third dog search for a possible body around the Capitol's swampy edges. Susan Levy, Chandra's mother, told a reporter that she wasn't ruling out the help of psychics and astrologers.
The story lost its luster. It had reached that critical point where, most professionals say, all hope of finding a missing person is essentially lost. "After a month's time, you have to think you're looking for a corpse," says Ron Jones, a case manager for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ironically, a center championed by Condit, who keeps a prominent link to the group from his home Web page). And the only connection with Condit was early innuendo by Levy's friends, mostly culled from e-mail, that he might have been far more than just the "good friend" to the 24-year-old intern he claimed to be.
Then, on June 7, the Washington Post reported that Levy had once, and possibly more than once, spent the night at Condit's, according to law enforcement officials. The story suddenly matured into a national scandal. And it exploded last week when Susan Levy, after more than a month of denying it, confirmed that her daughter had told her she had been seeing Condit romantically.
With that, the Levys moved center stage into their daughter's story, pulling Condit into the spotlight with them. This week they made headlines when they traveled to Washington, having hired attorney Billy Martin, the so-homespun-he's-slick D.C. celebrity lawyer, to pressure the D.C. police to upgrade their investigation into Levy's disappearance from a missing-person case to a criminal one -- just as police spokesmen had been telling the press they were planning to devote less energy to it. The Levys even reportedly secured a face-to-face meeting with Condit Thursday night, apparently getting to him before police, which had been trying to meet with the congressman for a follow-up interview for 10 days.
The Levys' hiring of Martin, who represented Monica Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, during the Ken Starr investigation, closed the circle on the quirky parallels with the Lewinsky case. Both interns were bright, curvy, California Jewish girls in their early 20s with big hair and big smiles for the camera in all the photographs we've seen of them. The intersection of sex, politics and scandal was already steamy enough; Levy's possible abduction or murder made the story irresistible to tabloid and highbrow media alike. From the Washington Post and Slate to Talk and "Inside Edition," reporters have flocked to the story, hungry for dirt and detail.
And the Levys have made sure their hunger has been duly fed. The couple -- Susan Levy, in particular -- have been enterprising media brokers who have shrewdly or desperately (or both) fed the scandal ever since Susan appeared on "Good Morning America" May 14 to proclaim that "we're going national with this," and launched a media campaign that saw her appear every few days on national TV for the better part of a month and a half. Their inexperience has been apparent. Susan Levy has now changed her own stories so often that her word has come to seem like a work in progress, as she denies a story about her daughter on TV one evening while a newspaper quotes her corroborating it the very next morning.
But the strategy has worked. Even as Martin claimed the Levys were "trying to go on with their lives" and care for their "other children" as he handled the case, their only other child, Adam, was appearing intermittently throughout the day Thursday on MSNBC in a taped interview, another Levy family exclusive.
The Thursday press conference was the latest offering; Martin switched tactics, and calmly urged Condit to come forward with any information he had. He released a toll-free number (800-860-6552) and a Web site (which, Wednesday night, still linked only to Martin's law firm, Dyer, Ellis & Joseph). Within a few hours, Condit was quoted in one of his own press releases for the first time in a month and a half, saying, "Anyone who saw Dr. and Mrs. Levy today at their press conference cannot help but feel their deep concern and worry," and promising, ''If there is any new information I can provide, I will do so without hesitation."
Martin's stolid demeanor comes at a crucial moment for the Levys, whose fraying media campaign has started to cause more confusion than attention. It's hard to fault desperate parents for doing whatever they can to find their missing child. But the Levys' strategy has been hard to read. In one way, they've simply seemed like devastated parents, urging the police to look harder for their child. Lately they've appeared to be running a dueling media campaign to that of Condit, who has tried desperately to stick to a strategy of silence.
The Levys may be irrationally, though understandably, flailing around; or they may be intentionally trying to turn up the heat on Condit, never coming right out and saying that he had something to do with their daughter's disappearance, and likely murder, but creating so much suspicion about his activities and distrust of his denials that attention is now focused not only on whether Condit was Levy's lover but on whether he's hiding something else. Daily, the police department is asked whether Condit is a subject of its investigation into Levy's disappearance, which so far it denies.
Thanks to the Levys, that question isn't going to go away anytime soon.
