Kingdom of Fear (33 page)

Hunter S. Thompson, in an episode reminiscent of some of his books, has been charged with sexually
assaulting a woman writer who came to his house ostensibly to interview him last week.

Thompson, 52, surrendered at the District Attorney’s office on Monday and is free on $2,500 bond.

Thompson told the
Times Daily
he’s innocent and believes the alleged victim isn’t so much a writer as she is a business woman who wants publicity for her new venture, which is selling sexual aids and lingerie.

“She’s a business person in the sex business,” Thompson said.

He said he’s also suspicious of the motives of the District Attorney, who had six officers search his Woody Creek house on Monday for drugs. Officers said they found a small quantity of suspected cocaine and marijuana.

Thompson offered his own headline for the case: “Lifestyle-police raid home of ’crazed’ gonzo journalist; 11-hour search by six trained investigators yields nothing but crumbs.”

Lab Results Pending

District Attorney Milt Blakey said he’s waiting for the results of lab tests before deciding whether to bring drug charges.

Thompson is already facing charges of third-degree sexual assault for allegedly grabbing the woman’s left breast and third-degree simple assault for supposedly punching her during an argument about whether the interview should take place in a hot tub. Both misdemeanors carry a maximum two-year sentence in the county jail.

The woman making the allegations is a 35-year-old self-employed writer from St. Clair, Mich., who said she was visiting Snowmass Village with her husband last week.

The
Times Daily
was unable to contact the alleged victim on Tuesday. However, her story about the Feb. 21 incident was detailed in an affidavit for an arrest warrant written by district attorney investigator Michael Kelly.

Affidavit Tells Story

The woman said she had written Thompson before arriving in Snowmass to request an interview. Such interviews are the fascination of out-of-town journalists. Just last week
Time
magazine published a first-person account of another writer’s attempt to interview Thompson, a columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner
and national editor of
Rolling Stone
magazine.

The woman said she arrived at Thompson’s house in a taxicab, on Woody Creek Road, and was greeted by a woman named Kat who introduced her to Thompson and two of his friends, identified only in the affidavit as Semmes and Tim.

Drug Suspicions

Within a few minutes, the woman suspected the group had been using drugs, the affidavit stated.

“She suspected some members of the group might be using drugs because from time to time they would get up (and) go into the other room and then return in a minute or so,” the affidavit stated.

Then, about three hours after arriving at the house, the alleged victim said she saw Thompson carrying a green grinder that produced a white powder substance, according to the affidavit.

“This substance, which she believed to be cocaine, was then passed around to the group and that with the exception of Tim and herself each
ingested (snorted) some of it into their noses by means of a straw,” the affidavit said.

Paranoid Group

“She observed the group becoming increasingly suspicious and paranoid,” the affidavit said.

The woman writer said she got up and called her husband, a move which made the group suspicious that she might be an undercover agent.

She assured them that she wasn’t an agent, she explained. Then Semmes and Tim left the house and Thompson gave her a tour of the residence.

She said Thompson showed her his favorite room, which contained a hot tub, and he supposedly suggested that she join him for a dip in the water.

Next, she claimed that Kat attempted to persuade her to join Hunter in the hot tub by telling her things such as “He’s a harmless guy,” “(He’s) a little crazy at times, but he will never hurt you,” “He’d really like you to get into the hot tub with him,” etc., according to the arrest warrant affidavit. “She told Kat she had no intention of getting into the tub and that it was her intention to conduct a professional interview,” the affidavit stated.

Soon the argument began and the woman said Thompson lost control and threw a glass of cranberry juice and vodka in her direction. She said she ducked.

Then, she claims Thompson grabbed her left breast, “squeezing and twisting it very hard. He then punched her in her left side with his right fist, and finally pushed her backwards with the palms of [his] . . . hands,” the arrest warrant affidavit stated.

She said that Thompson then went to the room
where he keeps some of his guns and that she ran out of the house and sat on the porch. A cab took her away about 15 minutes later.

Thompson, in an interview with the
Times Daily,
said the woman was “real drunk, sloppy drunk.”

Thompson said the woman wanted sex with him.

“I pushed her away from me. She went backwards and one hand brushed her breast,” Thompson said.

Conflict of Interest

A day later, the woman called the sheriff’s department. Sheriff Bob Braudis said that because of his 20-year friendship with Thompson, he felt he would have a conflict of interest handling the case. Braudis gave the investigation to the District Attorney’s office, which has its own investigators.

Thompson said officers took 11 hours to search his house because they were frustrated they couldn’t find much evidence of drug usage or wrongdoing.

“I don’t know if that (11-hour search) helps my reputation or hurts it,” he said.

District Attorney Blakey said officers found possible drug paraphernalia and a small quantity of suspected marijuana and possible cocaine. The suspected drugs have not been weighed. Blakey said. All of the possible drug-related items have been sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab in Montrose, the prosecutor added.

Overzealous Cops?

Blakey bristled Tuesday at suggestions that Thompson—who has made fun of cops in his books—was set up by overzealous law officers.

“That’s absolutely not true,” Blakey said. “If
there was overzealous law enforcement here, he wouldn’t have been called and asked to come to the D.A.’s office (to be arrested).

“Hunter Thompson is just like anyone else; he’s going to get fair treatment under the law, no better or worse,” Blakey promised.

“For my part, I had lived about 10 miles out of town for two years, doing everything possible to avoid Aspen’s feverish reality. My lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any small town political establishment. They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable exceptions—both lawyers), and consistently ignored all rumors of madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided writing about Aspen
. . . in
my very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine; a thing best left alone as long as possible.”

Hunter S. Thompson
Rolling Stone
magazine
Oct. 1, 1970

. . .

The Witness case turned on the day they decided to search the house, the day I got arrested. I got in such a rage that it was war. From then on I was in a kill-or-be-killed scenario; until then I hadn’t really paid that much attention to it. It was a bag of shit. But my own lawyer got me busted. He invited me down to the courthouse to be taken and fingerprinted. I knew I was in trouble. So from then on it was just that rage. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s focus and concentration. It was a little bit like the Mailbox—when I made that decision to ask, “What Witnesses?” That eerie soliloquy . . . “It’s a matter of taste.” It always boils down to a question of taste.

The Mailbox incident was a confidence builder, I think, but it
didn’t teach me that I was smarter than they were. It taught me that they were not as smart as they thought they were. I did not plead guilty on that one, and I got in the habit of that. It is a red thread in this book. I have been looking for one, and that is what it is.

GONZO’S LAST STAND?

Sometime on the night of February 21, Dr. Charles Slater called the Sheriff’s Office to complain that Thompson had assaulted his wife—the precise time of his call is very much at issue, for the
Aspen Times Daily
has reported that the tape which automatically records all incoming calls is missing Dr. Slater’s. Later on that night (sometime between 2
A.M.
and 5
A.M.
on February 23, actually), Palmer’s former boyfriend and business partner Marco DiMercurio also called. Saying that he was speaking from Los Angeles, DiMercurio claimed that Thompson had in the course of the evening held a gun to Palmer’s head. He insisted that there be an investigation, but warned that Palmer couldn’t be interviewed until after 2
P.M.

By then, Sheriff Braudis had withdrawn from the case: A close friend of Thompson’s, he’d been criticized for not being sufficiently aggressive in investigating the dispute between Thompson and Floyd Watkins. Seeking to ensure the appearance of fairness, Braudis transferred the complaint to Chip McCrory, the deputy district attorney for Aspen. McCrory, formerly a prosecutor from a Denver suburb, was appointed to the Aspen office in 1985, becoming chief deputy after his predecessor resigned in 1988.

Though McCrory is neither well liked nor regarded as politically ambitious, the conservative down-valley Republican named Milton Blakey is affectionately
called “Judge Blakey” by those who like him well enough to tease him about his much desired judicial appointment. . . .

With Blakey’s encouragement, McCrory has moved sharply away from the path marked out by his predecessors who’d tempered the prosecutorial urge with a healthy dose of what the Supreme Court has called “community standards.” McCrory, for instance, recently brought—and lost, after less than an hour of jury deliberation—a felony case for the alleged sale of some $25 worth of cocaine. Even more problematic was his decision to seek a felony conviction against a well-regarded young woman who, while being booked for a DUI, pushed a recovered-alcoholic jailer who was pressuring her about the virtues of AA. Even members of the jury that had just convicted her were horrified to discover that the law that McCrory chose to invoke—which was designed to discourage incarcerated prisoners from assaulting their guards during riots—carried an inescapable mandatory prison sentence. (“Old Aspen,” including the mayor, has contributed generously to her appeal fund.) For the zealous McCrory, who’d been prominent among those criticizing the sheriff’s allegedly laissez-faire attitude toward Thompson, Palmer’s tale of sex, violence, drugs, and weaponry must have seemed a dream come true.

Whatever the cause, McCrory seems to have reacted to Palmer’s complaint with more speed than prudence. Without interviewing any of the other people who’d been at Thompson’s, McCrory drew up charges for assault and sexual assault, and then—after a local judge had passed on signing a search warrant—had it signed by a judge some 60 miles downvalley. The Village Voice,
May 15, 1990, Vol. XXXV, No. 20

. . .

There are a lot of jackasses in the world who think they are smarter than I am. There are a lot of smart cops. But most of them don’t get into this kind of chickenshit case.

D.A. MAY FILE CASE AGAINST ASPEN WRITER
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The district attorney of Pitkin County said yesterday he has enough evidence to file felony drug charges against journalist Hunter S. Thompson after a raid on Thompson’s home last month. . . .

At a county court hearing yesterday, filing of formal charges was scheduled in district court April 9. Deputy District Attorney Chip McCrory, who is handling the case, said the assault charges, both misdemeanors, and any felony charges will be lodged at that time.

Thompson didn’t make an appearance at the hearing yesterday, much to the chagrin of television crews outside the Pitkin County Courthouse. . . .

March 14, 1990

. . .

The whole case turned, in the beginning, on a hearing that I didn’t go to, in court. It was the first official thing that happened and I thought by not going I would lessen the effect of the case by not kicking up such a noise over the stupid thing. It was a misdemeanor at that time. Ho ho. I sent Michael Solheim as an observer to see what happened in the courtroom, and I didn’t expect much of anything, just an “Okay, you’re arrested.” It was a very pro forma kind of thing. Nothing was expected to happen. It was late afternoon when Solheim got back here and said, “It started out as a misdemeanor, but. . .” After a huddle in front of the judge, where the attorneys approach the bench—my attorney and the D.A. and the prosecutor—the judge announced that the charges had been changed to felonies. And that he was getting
rid of the case—out of his court—and it would be turned over to the district court, as felonies. I recognized at once when I heard the news that my own lawyer had participated. His record as a lawyer and as a human being is real weak: I can’t believe that fucking lawyer. I wish I could tell you his name, but let’s just call him “Chickenshit.”

From one little huddle, the case went from Magistrate Tam Scott’s court to District Felony Court. Solheim came out here to report that, and I got extremely agitated, and that is when I decided to fire Chickenshit. I called him and asked him what happened—he jabbered some kind of talk about “Well, it was just necessary,” or “It was obvious”—lawyer crap. He kept sending me bills for a year or two; I should have had him arrested for fraud.

It is a hard decision, to get rid of your lawyer. That’s always bad. Prejudicial, really; the defendant fires one lawyer, and brings in an outsider . . . and Chickenshit was an insider. It was a difficult decision to BOOM, just kick him out the door. The longer the lawyer’s on the case, the more information he has, but at that particular time, it was necessary.