Paterson: 'Hyper-sexed' rumors untrue

by Mark Silva

New York Gov. David Paterson, confronting "orchestrated'' rumors about his personal life, which he denies, as well as people urging him to step down before Election Day, insists that "the ballot box'' will determine his political fate, and the only way he will leave office before that is "in a box.''

That's sort of where the embattled Democratic governor already is - suffering from plummeted approval ratings since he took over for a governor who resigned amidst his own personal scandal, former N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Paterson complains that he now is the victim of a "hyper-sexed'' and "racist'' rumor machine.

"For a person that has such weak poll numbers and hasn't raised enough money and has diminishing political support, someone is going very far out of their way to see that I'm not a candidate this year,'' Paterson said in an appearance on FOX Business Network's Imus in the Morning today. "I don't know who it is; I just know that it's a well-orchestrated attempt to do this..''

The way Paterson figures it, even the media is against him - media such as the N.Y. Daily News, whose front page dubbed the governor "Captain Chaos.'' And The New York Times, which was rumored to be on the verge of breaking a salacious story about the governor, a tale of marital infidelity and worse, a story that never surfaced.

"Even when I start to gain support they keep writing that poll numbers are down,'' Paterson told Don Imus. "I think the special interest and that relationship with certain media outlets is creating this scenario that somehow I should not be re-elected....

"I'm black, I'm blind and I'm still alive,'' Paterson said. "How much better do they want me to be?"

He maintains that he has not cheated on his wife.

"I think I have been depicted in a way that has been racialized, sexualized, hyper-sexualized,'' the governor said. "It is hard to diminish this kind of uproar when it gets started."

Asked about an allegation that a reporter caught him kissing a woman in a restaurant and in a closet, Paterson said: "I'm blind, but I'm not a dope. I know everyone in the restaurant is looking at me for 45 minutes. If I even got within three inches of her why didn't they take a picture? Because I didn't... We don't have a utility room in the executive mansion."

Twitter was abuzz Sunday with rumors that a scandal was about to break involving the governmor. The governor's top aide has written a letter to the Times complaining that it let rumors of a "salacious" scoop about Paterson run rampant while neither denying them nor backing them up.

"At any point, the Times' editors could have easily issued a public statement clarifying that the profile neither contained nor supported the salacious stories being sourced to it," the aide wrote. "A public clarification would, however, have spared the public the misleading spectacle of the last week," he wrote. "Common decency, if not journalistic ethics, demanded as much."

The media coverage of Paterson's problems includes one of the world's most influential newspapers, including a rumor that that scandalous story was about to break. "Obviously we are not responsible for what other news organizations are reporting," Times spokeswoman Diane C. McNulty said. "It's not coming from The Times."

The Times ran a short article on the "self-feeding, self-referential frenzy" the story had raised, but did not confirm or deny anything.

Paterson, defying calls from fellow Democrats to drop out of the race for a full term as governor in November, said on Tuesday that he would leave only if voters turned him out through the ballot box.

"The only way I'm not going to be governor next year is at the ballot box, and the only way that I will be leaving the office before is in a box," Paterson said during a news conference this week.

The previous governor of The Empire State resigned after it was revealed that he had employed a call-girl ring, Empire VIP.

"Most governors facing unsubstantiated rumors and unspoken innuendo would either say nothing or issue a forceful denial and move on,'' a Daily News columnist writes. "Not in Albany. Not our accidental governor, David Paterson, bless his heart. If Paterson wanted to tamp down the buzz surrounding him, his truly astounding press conference on Tuesday only added to the din.''