Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (4 page)

It’s easy to see why some call her a cult leader: When she shines her light on you, you feel special and seen. Before the OMing demonstration, she told the room: “There’s all these questions as OneTaste gets bigger about fucking appropriateness… And there’s a reporter in the room,” she said, gesturing toward me. Daedone narrowed her eyes and continued: “But, quite frankly, as a human being I think you’re one of us witchy women”—then she winked at me, and my insides melted. That’s the thing about Daedone: she can disarm you with the bat of her lashes—or a flick of her index finger. She’s an extremely compelling and charismatic character, and all the more so because there is actual substance and intellect behind the sexpert shtick.

Ultimately, she elevates the female orgasm to a level of religious and spiritual practice. “Slow sex” is at first relatable and approachable but quickly turns woo-woo and New Age. Daedone’s philosophy is a refreshing counterpoint to the porny mainstream, but it’s certainly hard to picture Middle America embracing orgasmic meditation. Not even most coast-dwelling liberals are ready to be intimately stroked in a roomful of strangers.

Sex, Lies, and Hush Money

Katherine Spillar

This is the story of an illicit sexual relationship between a powerful US senator and his female campaign treasurer, and of the equally powerful male political figures who allegedly helped cover it up. It’s a story where so-called family values and religiosity meet abuse of power. And it’s the story of a handful of no-nonsense women watchdogs who have been trying to bring the culprits to justice.

The man at the center of this story is now former US Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.), who earned a 100 percent approval rating from the “pro-family” Christian Coalition. He stepped down from Congress on May 3, 2011, just a day before he was to give a deposition under oath to the Senate Ethics Committee—which had spent nearly two years investigating his actions. On May 10, the committee issued its stunning report, detailing “substantial credible evidence” that Ensign had violated federal criminal and civil laws, including lying to federal investigators about illegal payments to the woman and her husband.

Still seated in Congress is another major player in the saga, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)—another powerful conservative Republican, who has advocated the death penalty for abortion providers. Coburn, whose name is throughout the report, may have played a central role in trying to negotiate a settlement with the woman’s husband (also an employee of Ensign’s)—though Coburn has denied this. And playing a minor but still telling role in the report is the former Pennsylvania Republican senator and staunch social conservative Rick Santorum, who alerted Ensign to the fact that the whole sordid tale was about to be leaked to the media.

The cast of heroic women in this case is led by Melanie Sloan, executive director of the DC congressional watchdog group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington). It filed ethics complaints against both Ensign and Coburn, alleging that the latter helped cover up the affair. Carol Elder Bruce, a well-regarded DC attorney hired as special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee, authored the report that excoriated Ensign. And, finally, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)—chair of the Ethics Committee—ultimately won a unanimous bipartisan vote to refer the committee’s findings to the attorney general for possible criminal prosecution.

But significant questions remain. Why hasn’t the Justice Department prosecuted Ensign? Why hasn’t the Ethics Committee now turned its attention to Coburn’s role? In other words, why haven’t those men who so doggedly stand up for “family values” been brought to account for their not just hypocritical but possibly illegal behavior?

Special Counsel Bruce’s report to the Ethics Committee reads a bit like a cheap novel. In it, we learn that the woman Senator Ensign had a sexual liaison with, Cynthia Hampton, worked for him as treasurer of his campaign committee and PAC. Her husband, Doug, was Ensign’s top administrative assistant in his Senate office—really, his co-chief of staff.

But the Hamptons had been more than just employees. Cynthia was Ensign’s wife Darlene’s friend from high school, and the two men met while dating their future wives. At the Ensign wedding, Cynthia was a bridesmaid.

The Ensigns helped the Hamptons move from California to their Nevada neighborhood, providing tens of thousands of dollars to refinance an expensive house the Hamptons couldn’t quite afford. In addition, Ensign helped get both of them jobs in Nevada. The two couples sent their children to the same private school—with the Ensigns again assisting with tens of thousands of dollars in support. The families took vacations together, spent most Sundays together, and Doug and John played golf together several times a week.

Then, at some point in late 2007, Ensign began pursuing a sexual affair with Cynthia. This was certainly in opposition to the morality he espoused to the public, such as his 1998 call for President Bill Clinton’s resignation after a sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky, or his statement that “marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded,” delivered on the Senate floor in favor of the antigay Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004.

Moreover, it’s unlikely that this affair was truly consensual. Senator Ensign “just [wouldn’t] stop” and “kept calling and calling” and “would never take no for an answer,” explained Cynthia Hampton, according to the Ethics Committee report. Eventually she gave in.

“She was really worried about her family” is how Melanie Sloan describes Hampton’s motivation. “And by the same token … she and her husband relied on this guy [Ensign] for their incomes, and he paid for their kids’ school. She was worried about angering him. She would’ve ended it but he kept pushing so much.” Indeed, the Senate ethics report found substantial credible evidence that Ensign’s behavior constituted sexual harassment. It emphasized that Ensign had “enormous power” over Hampton and her husband, as they were both employed by him, and he ultimately forced them to leave his office because of the sexual relationship.

Doug Hampton found out about the liaison just a few weeks after it began and confronted Ensign (reportedly chasing him around an airport parking lot), and the senator and Ms. Hampton agreed the next day to end it. But on a trip with his boss to Iraq and Afghanistan in February 2008, Hampton discovered that it was continuing. Not knowing what else to do, he reached out to a man he thought Ensign might listen to: Tim Coe.

Coe is the son of Doug Coe, the powerful head of “the Family” (also known as the Fellowship Foundation), a secretive, mostly male, right-wing Christian fundamentalist group. Tim Coe recommended bringing Senator Coburn into the discussion, describing him as a “higher authority, someone much bigger than me.” When they were in Washington, Ensign and Coburn, both Family members, resided with other members of Congress at the group’s infamous 12-bedroom C Street row house.

Operating under the tax-deductible status of a religious organization, the Family, founded in 1935, cultivates and networks powerful key men in business, government, and the military, in the US and worldwide. It is best known for its one major public event, the annual nonpartisan National Prayer Breakfast. But as Jeff Sharlet pointed out in his 2008 book,
The Family
, it wields tremendous behind-the-scenes influence, sometimes in support of despotic leaders in places such as Uganda and Somalia.

And despite the religious mission of the Family, three of the most salacious political sex scandals in recent years have involved men who lived or prayed at C Street: Ensign, former South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford (of Appalachian Trail fame) and former representative Chip Pickering (R-Miss.), another ardent defender of “traditional marriage” who’s said to have conducted his out-of-wedlock liaison while residing at the C Street house.

“The Family doesn’t really care about political corruption,” says Sharlet, who lived undercover at a Family-owned house and met Ensign on a visit to C Street. “They think it’s wrong but they don’t care about it. So when Ensign starts messing around … it’s about preserving power.”

According to the Ethics Committee report, both Coburn and Coe essentially took charge of ending the affair. Coburn helped convene a Valentine’s Day meeting between the senator and Doug Hampton at C Street, where Ensign reportedly wept and vowed to repent. When Hampton began to become physically threatening, Coburn asked him to leave, saying, “We’ll take it from here. We’ll take care of this.” Two days later, Hampton saw Ensign’s car in a hotel parking lot and called Tim Coe again. Coe called the senator and told him, “I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you are doing. Put your pants on and go home.”

As the cheap-romance plot thickened, Doug Hampton confronted Ensign again the next day. But this time, instead of being contrite, the senator told Hampton that he wanted to marry Cynthia and that Doug couldn’t work for him anymore. He would tell Cynthia that he wanted Doug out so that he could meet with her more easily—without his aide’s knowledge of his schedule. The affair continued sporadically for months.

By forcing out Doug Hampton—and soon after that Cynthia—Senator Ensign would be leaving the Hamptons with no jobs and a large mortgage. That’s when talk of “transition finances” and a plan to get the Hamptons to move out of Nevada was formulated. According to the Ethics Committee report, Tim Coe, who spearheaded the plan, said he considered Senator Coburn part of the team to work out the “financial piece,” and that Coburn was supportive of the overall transition plan. Moreover, Coe explained that Doug Hampton thought Coburn could “deliver” Senator Ensign’s father, the wealthy casino mogul Michael Ensign.

Tim Coe told the committee that Coburn called the senior Ensign at his request. Whether or not this call happened is a matter of dispute: Coe insists that Coburn made it; Coburn denies it. Under questioning by the committee’s special counsel, Michael Ensign “allowed as how the call may have taken place.” While on its face this he-said/he-said seems unimportant, in political scandals it’s the cover-up that gets politicians into the most legal trouble.

In Sloan’s view, “It’s clear that Coburn lied, even in talking to Senate investigators—he told them he hadn’t talked to Michael Ensign. But Tim Coe remembers specifically that [Coburn] called Michael.” Sloan adds, “Lying to Senate investigators would be a crime.”

Meanwhile, Senator Ensign was working on his own transition plan for Doug Hampton, getting married political operatives Lindsey and Mike Slanker to let Hampton use their Nevada political consulting firm, November Inc., as a base for obtaining lobbying clients. The committee report detailed how Ensign made “extraordinary” attempts to set up various jobs for Hampton—even instructing his chief of staff to bully one constituent into hiring the man with the threat of cutting off access to Ensign.

Federal law, however, prohibits Senate employees from lobbying the Senate for a year after they leave their employment. Not only did it appear Hampton started lobbying immediately after he officially left Ensign’s office in May 2008, but the committee found substantial credible evidence that Ensign helped Hampton violate the post-employment contact ban at least 30 times.

In addition, Hampton—by his own notes—engaged with Senator Ensign in a series of negotiations in early April about a severance payment. On April 7, the Hamptons received a check made out to them and two of their children for $96,000 from the Ensign Family Trust—an account controlled by the senator’s parents, Michael and Sharon.

Senator Ensign and the senior Ensigns gave affidavits to federal investigators stating that the payment was simply a gift and that the senator hadn’t requested it. Under questioning by the special counsel, however, Michael and Sharon acknowledged they did not carefully review the affidavits before signing them, leading the committee to conclude that it was actually a severance payment. If it was, that is a violation of a federal law against private donations for Senate office expenses and constitutes an unlawful and unreported campaign contribution. Further, the committee found substantial and credible evidence that Ensign had made false statements regarding the payments.

But there’s more. A year after receiving the $96,000, Hampton hired Las Vegas attorney Dan Albregts to help secure an additional financial settlement from Ensign. Here again, the committee report states, Senator Coburn got involved.

In May 2009, Coburn began to negotiate with Albregts, looking to come up with an amount that Ensign could pay to make the Hamptons move out of Nevada. According to Albregts, he and Coburn eventually agreed on $2.8 million—a figure that Ensign rejected. In his testimony to the committee, Coburn denies being a “negotiator,” saying he was just passing information.

This is where ex-senator and then Fox News commentator Rick Santorum enters the picture. Asking for Santorum’s help, Hampton forwarded the former senator an email he’d written to Fox News, in which he laid out the issues and pleaded for a meeting. Instead, Santorum forwarded the personal communication to Ensign, effectively alerting him to the fact that Hampton was about to go public.

Ensign immediately called an emergency late-night meeting with his staff, telling them about the brewing situation and strategizing about how to deal with it. The next morning he held a press conference to publicly apologize for the affair. Three days later, his spokesperson would accuse Doug Hampton of blackmail and extortion in making “exorbitant demands for cash and other financial benefits.”

CREW stepped into the midst of the messy case after reports of the $96,000 “gift” were leaked. The watchdog group, which
Ms.
magazine wrote about when CREW was taking on alleged corruption by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, filed its complaint with the Ethics Committee in June 2009. CREW alleged Senator Ensign had discriminated “on the basis of sex in the form of sexual harassment” and alerted the committee to the possible illegal payment.