Leopold Jason - News Junkie

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Copyright 2014 by Jason Leopold

REVISED EDITION

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Distributed in the US by Publishers Group West

ePub ISBN: 978-1-940207-55-1

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

Leopold, Jason.
News Junkie / by Jason Leopold.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-940207-23-0
Revised edition.

1. Leopold, Jason. 2. JournalistsBiography. 3. JournalismUnited StatesHistory21st century. 4. PressUnited StatesHistory21st century. 5. Enron CorpCorrupt practices. 6. Drug abuse. 7. Journalistic ethics. I. Title.

PN4738 .A38 .L46 2014
071/.471/092dc23

For Lisa: My wife, best friend, and soul mate
who always wanted me to be honest with myself

INTRODUCTION

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A n orgy of disclosure. Thats how the journalist, Jason Fagone, characterized News Junkie in a profile he wrote about me. It feels like the outpouring of a guy who realizes hes been destroyed by the secrets hes kept and vows to never keep one again.

Its true. News Junkie is a book I needed to write. Everyday, I would wake up and try to expose the secrets of some corrupt politician or corporate executive. Yet, I was haunted by my own dark secrets. I felt like a hypocrite and a fraud.

So yeah, I purged myself of feelings of guilt and shame in the pages of my memoir. I confronted my demons. I was brutally honest. It was the only way I could tell my story.

I wanted you to feel the adrenaline rush when I landed my first scoop. I wanted you to experience the metamorphosis after I snorted my first line of cocaine. When I was at my lowest point, standing on the George Washington Bridge, looking over the side of the railing into the Hudson, I wanted you to understand why I seriously considered jumping. When I met my wife, Lisa, I wanted you to see my soul mate.

I thought breaking my own story would finally set me free. I thought it would be my path to redemption. But I fucked it all up.

The first edition of News Junkie was published in May 2006right around the time I erroneously reported that George W. Bushs former deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, had been indicted by a federal grand jury over his role in the unauthorized disclosure of a covert CIA operatives identity. I had been writing about the Valerie Plame affair for more than two years and, after speaking with FBI sources I had cultivated, believed I scored an exclusive. I rushed to publish a story based entirely on anonymous sources. My colleagues in the media pilloried me when the case was closed with Karl Rove escaping a perp walk.

It did not help my cause that I wrote a book and revealed that I was a convicted felon, recovering drug addict and alcoholic, liar, and thief at the same time I had asserted, without so much as a single caveat, that one of the most powerful men in politics was going to be prosecuted. It didnt help my cause that the story I wrote was published on a website called TruthOut . It didnt help my cause that I had repeated the same exact mistakes I had copped to in News Junkie , which I vowed never to repeat again.

I paid dearly for botching that story. It cost me my credibility. Karl Rove called me a nut with Internet access in his own memoir, Courage and Consequence .

Ive spent the past eight years methodically rebuilding my trustworthiness as an investigative journalist. Instead of relying on anonymous sources, I use the governments most coveted documents (which I obtain through the Freedom of Information Act) to break news.

During the course of my reporting, I stumbled upon a family secret that had been concealed from me. It explained why I have been compelled throughout the course of my two-decade long career to chase down secrets. The remarkable and disturbing discovery forms the basis for the next installment of my memoir.

I realize that I left a lot of carnage behind and News Junkie does not address the people who trusted me whom I have hurt. To you, I sincerely apologize and ask for your forgiveness.

Ive changed since I wrote my memoir. Im a father now. I can finally look back at my life and say that all of this shit I carried around for so many years is truly in the past. Good riddance. But this book is about the choices that I made before that realization. This is the story of what my life used to be like. This is what it was like to live inside of my skin. This is what it felt like to be a news junkie.

Jason Leopold, July 2014

News Junkie

ONE

I guess you could say I was lucky. Maybe I was in the right place at the right time. Perhaps some higher power was looking out for me. Whatever the explanation, something made me call Steve Maviglio one Sunday afternoon in July 2001.

Maviglio had been Governor Gray Davis press secretary for nearly a year and was miserable. He hadnt had a girlfriend in three years and people were beginning to question whether he was heterosexual. He was forty-two years old and lived alone in Sacramento with his cat, Enzo.

His job was to make the governor look good by any means necessary, and Maviglio considered himself gifted at turning a bad situation into a positive news story. The lonely bachelor despised reporters, particularly those who called him only for information. His primary nemesis was a feisty reporter for The Wall Street Journal , Rebecca Smith. Whenever Smith called Maviglio for a comment, shed push his buttons with, Cant you do better? or Is that really what you want to say? I would see Maviglio turn beet red, veins popping out of his pockmarked forehead, when he was on the phone with Rebecca.

Maviglio and I, however, got along quite well. I genuinely liked the guy. He could count on me for a good laugh. At least once a day I would send him e-mails making fun of the governor or the other reporters. We were both transplanted East Coasters. Im from the Bronx. He grew up in New Jersey, a total Guido. When we reminisced about East Coast cuisine, I discovered that Maviglio had a soft spot for hot pastrami on rye, so I surprised him with one when he was holed up in the governors Los Angeles office doing damage control on the energy crisis.

I spoke to Maviglio more than any of my other sources. It made me feel important to say that Governor Gray Davis press secretary was a friend. When Maviglio flew to Los Angeles, I would pick him up at the airport and comp his meal on my Dow Jones American Express card. Most of the time Maviglio seemed depressed and sounded robotic, never showing any sign of excitement. I always felt the need to cheer him up.