Close Encounters with Infamy: Foley, Weiner, Fleiss & Strom

One of things that I enjoy watching on YouTube are short videos about the "Scandalous Life" of this, that or another historical character. Usually these "scandalous" people are just women who dared to have sex with more than one man.

Hadly scandalous.

But as I've progressed through this badly written dark comedy called life, I have either encountered -- or been adjacent to -- people who might be called Infamous. People whose names have became synonymous with scandal, disgrace, and overall moral turpitude. Truly scandalous people. 

Let me be clear: I never knew these people, never was intimate. I just happened to be either in their presences, shook their hand, or knew someone who knew someone.

I briefly met Anthony Weiner, the once-brilliant Congressman who was brought down by texting his nasty bits to ladies. Before all that I shook his hand at a fundraiser when he was running for mayor. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "You shoook his hand? Ewwwww!"

But wait! That's not the only congressman with a nasty sexting habit whose gross hand I shook: in 1997, when I was interning in DC, I briefly met Mark Foley. This was years before he was exposed as another gross sexter (this time to underage kids, really vile stuff). 

So yes, I had the (dis)honor of shaking the hands of America's most famous, infamous Congressional sexters -- one a Democrat, the other a Republican.

And yes, I've scrubbed my hands thoroughly. 

Also, in 1997, I was part of a team that was showing Japansese politicians around DC. And in that exercise I got to be in the office of Strom Thurmond. (If you're under the age of 75 you might not know that name but he was an evil, racist segregationist Senator from South Carolina.) Ol' Strom was about 95 years old at the time, and I saw him sitting behind his huge desk, a gorgeous view of the Capitol building behind him. He looked like an animated corpse. His staff was telling him everything he had to to, he was totally out of it. But he did say that he loved Japan because it was a great "military" power. Yeah, that wasn't weird -- and the Japanese folks were polite enough not to correct him. Btw Strom served in the Senate for 48 years, a quite damning thing to say about our country.

Finally, Heidi Fleiss (she's back in the news because a new movie is being made about her). The Madame to the Stars, in the early 1990s it was revealed that she was pimping women to half of Hollywood. I never met her but my mom worked on a project with her father (a pediatrician) around the same time her daughter was going to jail. So that's my "adjacent" story to that particular scandal.

So those are my somewhat close encounters to the truly scandalous, people whose names will live in infamy.