I ran into Eliot Spitzer last week at New York University. He struck me as a man doing everything possible to redeem himself, but that’s not going to be easy to do given America’s obsession with infidelity and, of course, the hypocrisy of a lawman frequenting a prostitute.
Click here to read the column I wrote about it.
I hadn’t seen Spitzer since since 2005. He was at the top of his game as the Sheriff of Wall Street, and he was gracious enough to grant me an interview in his office in lower Manhattan, as you can see by the photo above.
At the time, I was a business columnist for The Denver Post, and not part of the New York media, but as New York’s Attorney General, Spitzer was going after our hometown mutual fund company, Janus, for improper trading, and decided to give me about 30 minutes.
I liked Spitzer because he was doing what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators refused to do: Go after white collar fraudsters. I came back to Denver and wrote a piece lauding him, noting that yes, he may be using legal extortion, as his critics contended, but it was difficult to feel sorry for many of the people he was extorting. Spitzer then went on to become governor of New York and then Client No. 9 of a pricey prostitution service – and the rest is history.
Nobody in the small audience at NYU seemed the least bit interested in this history, though. How many times does a guy have to apologize? Spitzer is a brilliant and gutsy man with deep flaws. Will he ever deserve the redepmtion he seeks?
