The Power of Words. There aren't many, but perjury stories are out there

1.20.99
Tracy Breton: There aren't many, but perjury stories are out there

Related: Sex, lies and the courts: perjury charges are rare

        I'd like to take the credit for this story idea, but I can't. As the House began considering whether to launch a Clinton impeachment inquiry, Tom Heslin came up to me and asked if I could find out how common it was for people to be prosecuted for lying under oath about sex in civil cases.
        Tom and I both thought the result of my research could result in a national story. But what ensued was a reporter's nightmare.
        How could I find the cases — if there were any — to build my story around?
        I knew that perjury prosecutions were pretty rare. And I also had a hunch that most civil perjury stemmed from divorce cases (where so many people lie about extramarital affairs). So I began a national query of domestic-relations experts and judges to see what I could find. The search took me from the chief judge of Rhode Island's Family Court to a bunch of matrimonial experts I found through ProfNet to the man who is arguably the most famous divorce lawyer in the country, Raoul Felder, of Manhattan. In between, I talked to Monica Getz, the widow of jazz musician Stan Getz.
        I had to do a zillion interviews before I found what I wanted!
        It was Felder, who at the very end of a 30-minute conversation, told me about the case of the VA psychiatrist who had been prosecuted for lying about an affair she had with one of her patients. He didn't know any details — just that he remembered reading something written about it in the New York Post.
        I was having difficulty on my antiquated computer getting the stories I wanted on the Internet, so asked the night librarian, Frank Carnevale, if he could search the New York Post database.
        Within an hour, Frank had found enough information — name of the shrink, and the name of patient — so that, the next day, I was able to do more research, which led me to more Internet stories, the Idaho court where the case was filed and the Justice Department prosecutor who had handled the case.
        I found the other case — the one involving the clerygman — by finding a vague, one-line reference to it in a January 1998 article written by Ruth Marcus, of the Washington Post.
        Because I don't have access to Lexis/Nexis here, I called a friend, Ray Marcaccio, who is one of our libel lawyers, to see if he could quickly find any reference to this case in his libel journals or on Lexis. Ray found a decision relating to the man's libel suit, and that was enough for me to get the criminal end of the story — through calls to the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Illinois court where the clergyman had been prosecuted and the prosecutor himself.
        After the reporting hassle, the writing came easily. I set the story up with the Clinton predicament, then quoted Monica Lewinsky's lawyer saying he bet reporters couldn't find one civil perjury case that had been prosecuted criminally at the federal level over the last 100 years. Then, I showed how William Ginsberg was wrong.
        Tom Heslin was right. My story got picked up by the Knight Ridder National Wire and ran in a bunch of newspapers around the country. Readers from as far away as California sent me clippings and letters about it.

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