[Xcqjwarl]

NYDAILYNEWS.COM
Gov. Paterson admits to sex with other woman for years




Monday, March 17, 2008

Gov. Paterson admits to sex with other woman for years

Monday, March 17th 2008, 9:44 PM
Goldfield for News Gov. David Paterson admits to sleeping with another woman while he was married to wife, Michelle.



David Paterson married Michelle Paige in November 1992.




The thunderous applause was still ringing in his ears when the state's new governor, David Paterson, told the Daily News that he and his wife had extramarital affairs.


In a stunning revelation, both Paterson, 53, and his wife, Michelle, 46, acknowledged in a joint interview they each had intimate relationships with others during a rocky period in their marriage several years ago.
In the course of several interviews in the past few days, Paterson said he maintained a relationship for two or three years with "a woman other than my wife," beginning in 1999.


As part of that relationship, Paterson said, he and the other woman sometimes stayed at an upper West Side hotel — the Days Inn at Broadway and W. 94th St.


He said members of his Albany legislative staff often used the same hotel when they visit the city.


"This was a marriage that appeared to be going sour at one point," Paterson conceded in his first interview Saturday. "But I went to counseling and we decided we wanted to make it work. Michelle is well aware of what went on."


In a second interview with Paterson and his wife Monday, only hours after he was sworn in to replace scandal-scarred Eliot Spitzer, Michelle Paterson confirmed her husband's account.


"Like most marriages, you go through certain difficult periods," Michelle Paterson said. "What's important is for your kids to see you worked them out."


The First Couple agreed to speak publicly about the difficulties in their marriage in response to a variety of rumors about Paterson's personal life that have been circulating in Albany and among the press corps in recent days.


They spoke in the governor's office even as scores of friends, family members and political supporters were celebrating in the corridors of the Capitol his ascension to the state's highest post.


Given the call-girl scandal that erupted last week and forced Spitzer's

stunning resignation, Paterson conceded that top government officials are bound to come under closer scrutiny for their personal actions.


The governor flatly denied what he called a "sporadic rumor in Albany that I had a love child" by another woman. "That's just not true," he said.
"Don't you think he'd take care of a child if he'd had one?" Michelle Paterson said, in obvious disgust over that persistent rumor.




The romantic relationship he did have, Paterson said, lasted until sometime in 2001. He did not identify the former girlfriend.


Asked if he had stayed with anyone else since 2001 at the same West Side hotel, Paterson said, "From time to time I used to take Michelle to that hotel."


While Michelle Paterson did not speak much Monday, she touched on the subjects of marriage and infidelity in an interview last week with my colleague, Heidi Evans.


"I feel life is very fragile," she said. "You never know what could happen.

That is why you shouldn't judge people.


When asked if she worried about "other women," given how much time she and her husband spend apart, she replied, "Not really. I have a philosophy in life: You have to let people live their life. I feel my husband loves me and is devoted to the family. And I know he loves me. I am not going to worry about that stuff."


He and his wife went to the West Side Days Inn when they were trying to rekindle the romance in their marriage, he said.


They did so after a marriage counselor he used recommended they introduce "new and exciting things" into their relationship, Paterson said, and so they could be alone and away from their children.


"It's convenient since it's only four subway stops from my Harlem office," Paterson said.


Asked if he had used government or campaign funds to pay for any rendezvous with his former girlfriend, Paterson said he had not.


All this, of course, would normally be considered part of the private life of any government official.


But after the sordid saga of Eliot Spitzer, and the ever-wackier escapades of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey and his estranged wife, Dina, it seems no political leader can escape the magnifying glass that is destined to be placed over his personal life.

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

[gopsbousperie]

yes this is all true. He was actually somewhat seperated from his wife during their problem stages and they both had a significant other and I know that straight from the sources. They were both aware of the "others" but after all was done, decided not to get a divorce and work things through. Hey...it happens.

[BqTyG9eS]

yes this is all true. He was actually somewhat seperated from his wife during their problem stages and they both had a significant other and I know that straight from the sources. They were both aware of the "others" but after all was done, decided not to get a divorce and work things through. Hey...it happens.

[grofvuri]

^^

[ringtonesmannq]

WHO CARES!

The Spitzer case is much more than him just using prostitutes. His case is about money laundering, using campaign funds for the sex, cover-up, fraud and more. As a highly skilled prosecutor he knew what he was up against and he resigned quickly - thank god.

Paterson was separated and he and his wife had a few flings. Big deal.

It really is time that people come to terms with the fact that we had one generation of politicians with character - the founding fathers. They weren't saints, but their commitment to public good was untarnished and unassailable (exept Aaron Burr).

Keep my taxes low, keep infrastructure maintained, defend the constitution, uphold my rights, be diplomatic and peaceful, stamp out hate - and go out and have all the sex you want (just not on the public's credit card.)

[offemyJuccete]

^amen!^

[fhutiussk]

Good post, BR. I was thinking the same thing. Who cares! This is really getting out of hand.

[Jifyicyfuhpop]

That unassailed character, more-or-less, of America's Founding Fathers. Earl Taylor is yet another "patriot" that has all the proof that he needs from "The Real" Andrew Allison. (Are these ‘Myths’ or another person's ‘White Wash’? You be the judge.)





Dear Friends,
…

This letter contains short explanations concerning myths spread about three of our Founding Fathers. They are all taken from the American Classic Series published by NCCS. They are given here to remind us all that there really are answers and to encourage a full reading of the referred to texts for documentation and related information.


Myth #1 - George Washington sent a letter to Sally Fairfax which some historians claim indicates he was passionately in love with Sally.

Of this letter and the charges hurled at Washington down through the years, Andrew Allison writes:

We have little to go on, little to tell us of George's feelings for any woman before he found Martha Custis, the one who was to be his heart's companion for life. Even the obscure letter quoted above, in which Washington confesses himself a "votary of love," is difficult to interpret. After carefully reading the letter, all that one can say for certain is that Washington was in love and that he was confiding his secret to his friend, Sally, who knew the "lady" Washington had given his heart to. But who was she? We don't know.

That letter holds another problem, every bit as difficult as its internal vagueness. The letter remained undiscovered for more than a hundred years, until March 1877, when it was published in the New York Herald. The next day it was sold at an auction-but in neither case was it subjected by a known authority to the usual authenticating tests. Was the letter a forgery? Was it written by someone else? Was it quoted correctly? None of these questions can be answered, since the letter has long since been lost, never having been subjected to the necessary tests of handwriting, paper, and ink.

When scholar John Fitzpatrick was collecting Washington's writings into a huge and exhaustive thirty-seven-volume set earlier in this century, he seriously considered omitting this letter, since its validity is so questionable. In the end he included it-but only with a warning that one must consider it with caution.

If the letter was authentic, if Sally was a flirt with George, if the young colonel was indeed attracted to his friend's wife-all these combined give us an opportunity to see the depth of George Washington's character, even at that early age. All evidence suggests that, regardless of his personal feelings, he chose to conduct himself properly, keeping himself entirely free from any immoral or improper encounter with the wife of his neighbor and close friend.

As the eminent scholar Douglas Southall Freeman has noted, "There survives not one echo of the gossip that would have been audible all along the Potomac had there been anything amiss in their relations." (The Real George Washington, pages 68-69)

Myth #2 - Benjamin Franklin was a womanizer in France and America and fathered as many as thirteen illegitimate children.

Of this charge Andrew Allison writes:

Carl Van Doren, whose masterful biography of Franklin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, noted that "there is no support for the tradition which insists that the philosopher was a lively lecher in France." Another historian has asked, "Did he really have affairs with French women? There is no shred of evidence. In that age of diaries and memoirs not a single Parisienne ever boasted that she had captured the famous philosopher." And a third scholar places the whole matter in perspective:

In any sophisticated social gathering at which the name of Benjamin Franklin comes up, somebody is almost sure to remark with a leer, "Say, that old boy was quite a man with the ladies," or "Wasn't he the old reprobate?" This concept of the worthy doctor seems to have started many years after his death and to have grown during recent years-there is no reference to it in early writings about him, except for scurrilous political slander regarding his son William's legitimacy.

There is not one iota of evidence in history to justify this image. True, Franklin liked women, and many women adored Franklin. He was closely associated with several, ranging from eleven-year-old Catherine Shipley in England to sixtyish Madame Helvetius in France. He spent much time in their company, and some of his most interesting writing is in correspondence with female friends. But there is nothing to indicate that his relations with any of them were other than gallant and intellectual.

No wonder Jefferson wrote in later years: "I have seen, with extreme indignation, the blasphemies lately vended against the memory of the father of American philosophy. But his memory will be preserved and venerated as long as the thunder of heaven shall be heard or feared." (The Real Benjamin Franklin, pages 232-233)

Myth #3 - Thomas Jefferson fathered slave children by one of his slave women named Sally Hemings.

Of this charge, Andrew Allison writes:

One of the victims of the Sedition Act who was pardoned by President Jefferson in 1801 was James Thomson Callender, a Republican journalist who had been an unrelenting critic of the Federalists during the last presidential campaign. But Callender wanted more than a pardon: later that year he plainly told James Madison, the new Secretary of State, that he hoped to be appointed postmaster in Richmond, Virginia.

When it became clear that he was not going to be offered any government post, the embittered Callender sought revenge by going to work for a Federalist newspaper in Richmond. In March 1802, he began publishing various charges against Republican leaders in Congress and certain members of the Cabinet. By autumn he was training his guns on the President.

Callender has been described as "the most unscrupulous scandalmonger of the day,.a journalist who stopped at nothing and stooped to anything..[He] was not an investigative journalist; he never bothered to investigate anything. For him, the story, especially if it reeked of scandal, was everything; truth, if it stood in his way, was summarily mowed down." True to his style, he fabricated a series of scandalous stories about Jefferson's personal life, the ugliest of which charged him with having fathered several children by a mulatto slave at Monticello, a young woman named Sally Hemings. Although Callender had never gone near Jefferson's estate, he alleged that this was common knowledge in the neighboring area. He included many lurid details of this supposed illicit relationship among the "entertaining facts" he created for his readers, even inventing the names of children whom "Dusky Sally" had never borne.

Other Federalist editors took up these accusations with glee, and Callender's stories spread like wildfire from one end of the country to the other-sometimes expanded and embellished by subsequent writers. The President was charged with other evils as well; the torrent of slander never seemed to let up. As one biographer has written, "He suffered open personal attacks which in severity and obscenity have rarely if ever been matched in presidential history in the United States." (The Real Thomas Jefferson, pages 228-229)
Dr. Allison included this footnote on pages 231-232 of The Real Thomas Jefferson because the Brodie publication referenced in it is still widely used in college courses today as the "authority" on Jefferson's so-called extramarital affairs. He says:

The most widely distributed of these works in recent years is Fawn M. Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1974), which relies on slight circumstantial evidence and amateur psychoanalysis. The book has received very poor reviews by scholars who are familiar with the life and times of Jefferson. David Herbert Donald, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, observed that Mrs. Brodie did not seem to be troubled by "the fact that she can adduce only slim factual support for her tales of what she primly calls Jefferson's 'intimate life.'. .. Such absence of evidence would stop most historians, but it does not faze Mrs. Brodie. Where there are documents, she knows how to read them in a special way.... Where documents have been lost, Mrs. Brodie can make much of the gap.... Mrs. Brodie is masterful in using negative evidence too.... But Mrs. Brodie is at her best when there is no evidence whatever to cloud her vision. Then she is free to speculate." ("By Sex Obsessed," Commentary, July 1974, pp. 97-98.) Historian and author Garry Wills, after noting the abundance of obvious historical errors in the book --"one can only be so intricately wrong by deep study and long effort"-remarked that Brodie's writing "involves heroic feats of misunderstanding and a constant labor at ignorance. This seems too high a price to pay when the same appetites can be more readily gratified by those Hollywood fan magazines, with their wealth of unfounded conjecture on the sex lives of others, from which Ms. Brodie has borrowed her scholarly methods." ("Uncle Thomas's Cabin," New York Review of Books, 18 April 1974, pp. 26-28.) One other representative comment comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jefferson biographer, Dumas Malone: "This determined woman carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity. The resulting mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture, is not history as I understand the term.... To me the man she desc ribes in her more titillating passages is unrecognizable." Quoted in Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981), p. 132. It is interesting to note that Brodie's three earlier biographies of historical figures also dwelt on their supposed sexual misconduct and were written in a similar vein.
Americans must be armed with the words of the Founders themselves. Studying these three books will lead an honest student to exclaim: I cannot believe the lies told and immoral charges made of these men. They emanate a different spirit than what comes from the pen of the critics. These books are a must for each family's I Love America shelf!


Sincerely,
Earl Taylor, Jr.

SOURCE – NCCS

[Nothatspecial]

What wil make this a potential problem is one of the many women he has slept with got a government job thru him so they may investigate this

[patuvammnogoo]

What wil make this a potential problem is one of the many women he has slept with got a government job thru him so they may investigate this

what can you do all politicians are crooked! better yet most human beings prob have skeletons hiding in their closets...so what can you do?

[lidya-sggf]

Gov. Paterson admits to sex with other woman for years Now we have Governor David Paterson admitting to drug use, including cocaine, during an interview.

Actual Interview:
"NY Governor Paterson admits trying
marijuana and cocaine"

CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO ACCESS
YouTube Video



Agence France-Presse (AFP) / Courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

Runtime: 02:01
This must be part of the new politics of 'confession before it becomes an issue.' Senator Barack Obama made similar confessions about drug use as a youth, in one of his books. Seems to have innoculated him if it were to be brought up later, as a supposed revelation. Least we forget, President George W. Bush admitted to being some kind of an alcoholic before finding God, and President Ronald Reagan admitted to being a 'liberal' Democrat before evolving/morphing into a 'conservative', some would term 'right-wing', Republican. (Opps! That last analogy didn't quite fit. )

We shall see what this all means, as Mr. Paterson fills out the remainder of this term.

Late Show with David Letterman:
"Governor Paterson Confesses All"

CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO ACCESS
YouTube Video


Courtesy cinemablend.com

Runtime: 01:08

[Deseassaugs]

zephyr: What's the big deal?

[MaickiP]

Since you asked ...

That post is a reflection of my sarcasm. Quite frankly, I see Governor Paterson's latest confessions as stepping just over the line of ploy, and into the world of the ludicrous. (Letterman captures the thought perfectly in that litany of added questions regarding Mr. Paterson's past behaviour.)

In my prior posts, I understood that the sex scandal - which involved monies that were not former Governor Spitzer's right to use - was a legitimate reason to ask and get his resignation. And it is well-known his past use of anything necessary legally to bring down transgressors eventually shaded into otherwise less justifiable targeting of ordinary opposition, making this a serves-him-right moment, as it were. Yet I found some of the discussion which followed to be a platform for the Puritanism that infects American sensibilities to an extraordinarily destructive degree. I have never accepted this "holier than thou" requirement for a politician. If we are looking for the best for the job, by looking for the perfect, we will likely get the worse, by getting the mediocre, or at least the hypocrite.

Now this may all seem, as you say, to be a big deal as I am presenting it. But as I see it, the whole matter is more of a pet peeve than a big deal.

[HotboTgameR]

OK, I get it now ...

I agree that the "Paterson in a hotel" scenarios are far removed from the "Spitzer is the stupidest hypocrite in a long time" scenarios.

And you're absolutely right that the swift move to Puritan ranting is ridunkulous -- but it is quintessentially American.

Seems that more sex -- honest, open and joyful -- is what is called for

[sbgctsa]

The most Amazing thing is that the blind guy is getting more action than most guys that have perfect eyesight. And even though Paterson is legally blind, he likes to do it with different women (I guess he distinguishes them by smell) -

I would love to understand how he was able to find so many different women in such a short period of time considering his handicap. Seems like this guy has a special skill. He should write a book for the rest of us.

[Uciaucrx]

Money and power.

Women look for that (pseudonyms for success) more than they look for other things in a manner similar to men looking for, well, looks.

Which brings an interesting counterpoint.... How could he tell? What were his standards? Some you van definitely tell (complexion, fitness, etc) but others (facial symmetry, eyes, etc) are a bit harder for someone with only 10% sight....

that and he can't feel a TV commercial or a billboard, so he has not been programmed like the rest of us as to what is attractive and what is not.

I am sure he is told, however...