(This column was posted on 5/17/13 and buried here)
I’m not writing about local politics currently, and have archived this here merely for historical posterity.
On 8/30/2012, I said:
Knowing Mr. Lopez, it does not surprise me that his office was a "hostile environment." That would be true even if sex were not a factor. But the consistency of the allegations made by a parade of young women employed at different junctures portrays a man lacking impulse control or empathy for the feelings of others who basks in his omnipotence. Not a pretty picture.”
The recent report on Mr. Lopez’s activities by JCOPE confirms this.
I have to say that everyone is missing the real story–this isn't really about sex–sex was just one element of Vito's technique of humiliation and control. Frankly, I doubt that the disease ridden old bastard could even manage the act anymore, which probably only made his need to sexually humiliate others so acute. This probably accounts for why these incidents all seem to be of such recent vintage.
The sexual incidents are really of a really of a kind with the non-sexual incidents documented in the JCOPE report and elsewhere, including in my own experience, which al detail Lopez’s sometimes horrifying need to dominate others by humiliating them and ultimately forcing their submission.
To me, the most telling incidents in the JCOPE report are Lopez’s forcing his former local Chief of Staff, Deborah Feinberg, to put drops in his eyes (from which she got conjunctivitis), the fact that he made his Albany Chief of Staff, Jonathan Harkavy give him massages (page 21), and the fact he made others feel his tumors.
This is akin to Lyndon Johnson making his aides talk to him with the door open while he pooped.
Frankly, you lacking standing to be doing such things until you’ve passed Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act.
Lopez once publicly tried to make me submit to his will in front of an audience. I won’t say I was a pillar of strength in response, because I wasn’t, but I could not agree to do as he ordered. I had a sit down with him right afterwards and thought I had resolved it, only to be subjected to even worse a couple of weeks later (after donating his County organization a three day weekend of time better spent with my family).
Even afterwards, he had me cowed enough to refuse to talk to two different reporters about what had occurred.
Today, one brave soul wrote to me, arguing, and not without some points, that Vito is being unjustly portrayed as being a different kind of monster than the one he is.
Perhaps.
And perhaps at this point he isn’t even the biggest villain in this saga (which I’ve been saying since August 26, 2012).
But, I regard Vito like Jonathan Pollard.
There may be some injustice here, but I’ve got more important things to worry about.
Like where to take my mother-in-law to dinner on her birthday.