Ellen Goodman Has No Shame

Libels Clarence Thomas; Distorts Again

Ellen Stirred Up the Locals

By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick
August 2001

Ellen Goodman’s terrible lies about Robert Bork in 1987 made me aware that we needed MassNews desperately.

Her lies came during Bork’s appointment to the Supreme Court. She helped coin a new word for the English language, “Borked.” It is used when someone has been unfairly and maliciously attacked.

Now Goodman is out to destroy another judge who does not bow and scrape to the radical feminist agenda. And she is malicious, as usual.

She just wrote a piece on July 1, 2001 with the headline, “What do backers of Thomas say now?”

The answer to Ms. Goodman’s question is that the “backers” of Justice Clarence Thomas are proud as hell of him, and she has revealed once again that she is a treacherous person.

Why Goodman So Giddy?

What has made Goodman so giddy and foolhardy? After Thomas was confirmed on October 15, 1991, a writer named David Brock penned an investigative report about Anita Hill for the American Spectator magazine the following spring in March. He later wrote a book. He has now recanted and says he made false charges against Hill.

The simple answer is, “So what?!”

If an author made false statements about Anita Hill many months after the nomination process had ended, what does that have to do with Clarence Thomas? What does that make him guilty of? He has no control over what other people write about him or about Anita Hill.

The important fact is that the American people were fascinated by the hearings and 66% of them did not believe Hill. I watched every minute of the hearings, staying up late to see what would be said. I still remember Thomas’ impassioned reply to her charges against him. And then we waited to hear what she would say because we had been assured by her handlers that she would answer.

But she chose not to appear.

The Committee was waiting. Why would a witness not appear to defend herself? There is only one answer: she knew her story was beginning to unravel and she was afraid to face the Senators again. Any lawyer knows that you don’t put a witness on the stand if she will not stand up to scrutiny.

Most Believed Thomas

Although the American people believed Clarence Thomas, the liberal press such as Goodman immediately began a giant drive to resurrect Hill and destroy Thomas. They have done a good job over the past ten years in their machinations. They even outed Brock as a homosexual during the process.

Ellen Goodman openly lied about the Senate vote in her new article. She says that Thomas won by “a bare two votes.” But a little research shows that the count was 52-48. That’s four votes, not two.

Goodman says that David Brock is unreliable and that people “accuse him of lying about lying.” He deserves that criticism, she says. Who knows when he is telling the truth? He is in the business of selling books. But she so passionately wants to destroy Thomas that she will believe and repeat anything if it will help her agenda.

She doesn’t tell us that Sen. Arlen Spector wrote in a new book this year, Passion for Truth, that Committee Chairman Joe Biden “believed Anita Hill was lying under oath.” Spector quoted Biden from a 1998 conversation, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying.”

She doesn’t tell us what part of Brock’s book about Hill was accurate and what was false. Some of it must have been true.

This is not the first time that Brock has had problems in deciding what he believes. He wrote an article for Esquire in 1997 under the title, “I Was A Right-Wing Hit Man.”

The pressure that people such as Goodman can exert is tremendous and it apparently had its effect on Brock.

How Goodman ‘Borked’ Bork

This is what Ellen Goodman wrote in her attack on Robert Bork in 1987.

“Think about [Judge Bork’s] role in the dramas of our private lives. Think about the Franz family.

“In 1976, after eight years of marriage and three children, William Franz became a divorced father with visitation rights. Five years later, his ex-wife went into hiding with her new husband under the Federal Witness Program. Franz was effectively and permanently cut off from his children. He sued to get visitation rights back, and eventually that suit went up to the three-member Court of Appeals in Washington.

“As sometimes happens, messy family stories make good law for the rest of us and Franz won his case. The majority ruled that severing the ties between parent and child without their participation and consent violated the constitutional right to privacy.

“But Bork wasn’t part of that majority. Bork dissented. He disagreed that there was a right to ‘so tenuous a relationship as visitation by a noncustodial parent.’

“Yes, Bork said, the state had an interest in maintaining families and the institution of marriage. But the same could not ‘be said of broken homes and dissolved marriages.’

“Indeed, he wrote, protecting the relationships after divorce could have the tendency ‘further to undermine the institution of the intact marriage,’ He said this in 1983 when there was one divorce for every two marriages.

“The point is not Bork’s ease in dispensing with such ‘tenuous’ relationships as those of parent and child. Nor is it his notion that protecting the bond of noncustodial parent and child would loosen the bond of marriage. His co-judges called this “sufficiently ludicrous as to merit no rebuttal.’

“But the Franz case is just one study of Bork’s view.....

“When Bork enters the scene from stage right - far right - it isn’t his presentation that matters as much as his point of view. Don’t just follow the new script. Read the old record.”

What Bork Really Said

Ellen Goodman either had no knowledge of what she was writing about Robert Bork or she was intentionally trying to mislead her readers. Which would be worse?

While she had every right to oppose his nomination to the Supreme Court, we would have hoped she would have done so in a fair and honest manner which would excite an intelligent debate.

However, before we get to the meat of her lies, let’s look at how she started the article, on his physical features:

“Robert Bork is bound to have trouble living up to his billing. Portly, scruffy around the edges, no matinee idol ...”

Is that the way to begin an article about a possible Supreme Court justice?

Then she moved on to the real character assassination. She informed us that Judge Bork wanted to stand in the way of a divorced father who was prevented from seeing his children.

After reading the article, even I was doubtful. What type of monster is Robert Bork? So, being a lawyer, I went to the law books and read the case.

The truth is that all three of the judges would have given the father the relief which he requested – including Judge Bork. His agreement was clear. Even Ellen Goodman could have understood it if she had read the case. He wrote:

“I agree that the judgment [by the trial court against the father] must be reversed. The complaint stated a claim for relief and should not have been dismissed.”

If that’s true, why did he dissent? Judge Bork wrote, as any law student learns during his first year, that a judge must not find any law to be unconstitutional if he can find any other way out of the dilemma. It’s an awesome power to declare that a law is unconstitutional.

While the other two judges went running off in great glee to find a new constitutional right to enhance their power as judges, Judge Bork said that we should do this only as a last resort and we should not assume that when Congress wrote a law that they meant it should be exercised by the Attorney General in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

All of the judges agreed that this case must go back to the trial judge. Judge Bork said that the trial judge should decide the following:

Does this father have a right to visitation? (No one could tell from the record despite what the Globe reported.)
If so, would the state court change the rights of a father to visit if the safety of the children or others was endangered?
Could a suit be brought in state court against the federal authorities for interfering with the father’s rights? Judge Bork appeared to believe that the U.S. and its officers could be sued.

But he also wrote that if none of this worked, then the court should look at the constitutionality of the proceedings. He said, “It would be inappropriate to speculate now about the constitutionality.”

All of this was apparently too difficult for Goodman to understand. Or else she wrote her mendacious piece in an attempt to “Bork” the judge.

All that Bork did was what any conscientious judge would do. He said that this father should be helped, but not by declaring an act of Congress to be unconstitutional unless that became absolutely necessary.

Any lawyer reading his opinion knows that is true.

If you wish to read the case for yourself, it is Franz v. U.S., 707 Federal Reporter Second 582 and 712 Federal Reporter Second 1428.

Ellen Stirred Up the Locals

August 2001

In the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Globe, there was a headline a few days later, New Doubts on Justice Thomas. It was about a letter from a reader in Brookline, Andrew M. Fischer, who responded to Goodman’s harangue with more vitriol.

“What do those of us who were defrauded do?” he asked. But what was the “fraud?” Talk about stirring up the crazy liberals with lies. Goodman is a master at that.

Another letter on the same day came from . . . where else? Cambridge. This reader, David Hayes, put the blame on Sen. Biden saying he “had the power to allow more testimony regarding Thomas’s harassment of women.” But where was he going to obtain more testimony? The Democratic majority had already milked everything they possibly could to destroy this good man.

Meanwhile, most readers of the Globe still believe they’re buying a newspaper, not a propaganda sheet.