Tiger Woods, Text Messages, and the Golden Age of the Sex Scandal
Some people savor literature; others, fine wine. I prefer to relish the really exceptional sex scandals of our time.
Right now, obviously, that's the Tiger Woods inferno. Its dimensions keep expanding, from a bizarre home dispute to a single infidelity, to serial adultery, to Tiger's seeming to have slept with every club hostess along the pro tour. The laundry list of women claiming dalliances is now so large that it obscures the importance of two early revelations: a panicked voice mail and cheesy "sexts" Woods sent one of his alleged paramours. Bear with me here—there is a reason you're reading this on a technology blog—because I think those digital communications are the clearest sign yet that we're entering a golden age of sex scandals, one with far juicier details, because they come straight from the smartphones of those directly involved.
Don't get me wrong: we already had it pretty good. Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupré; John Edwards and Rielle Hunter; and, of course, the greatest affair of our time, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Affairs for the ages, all. But the sordid details of those scandals—the blue dress, the calf-length dress socks—came only after costly and drawn-out investigations by the government and/or the news media. The best nuggets were pried loose mainly by subpoena and deposition.
The evidence in the new generation of sex scandals has been compiled by the protagonists themselves, in the form of text messages, voice mails, IMs, e-mails, and cell-phone pictures that one party, usually the less powerful one, has squirreled away. Digital communications are tough to avoid or erase, and they're easy to archive as text, audio, or video. Text messages in particular are "the new lipstick on the collar," says The New York Times, in a piece describing how SMS evidence has driven the Tiger Woods case and everyday divorces alike.
Now, when a former mayor gets into trouble for a relationship with a campaign aide, we get to hear the actual voice mails he left the woman. When a congressman crosses the line with his young pages, we get the actual transcripts [PDF] of their instant-message conversations. When a married governor decides that an Argentine woman is his soulmate and pretends to be on the Appalachian Trail while he visits her, we get their actual heartfelt e-mails. I don't know about you, but as a scholar of the tawdry,I find the prospect of working with primary documents exhilarating.
Consider the example of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose affair with his chief of staff spiraled into his resignation and more than three months in jail. Not long ago, this would have been a fairly humdrum affair. But thanks to the magic of text messages—14,000 of them, to be exact, unearthed by the Detroit Free Press—the relationship between Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty is illuminated in sensational detail. Even the mundane stuff takes on a perverse sheen. One SMS exchange involves Kilpatrick and Beatty rendezvousing at a hotel, but before they can do so, there is a comic exchange of mistaken room numbers, back-staircase instructions, and the like. It's even possible to tell exactly how long they were together because there are time-stamped messages sent immediately before and immediately after they met.
Other texts are genuinely touching, forcing the shameless, gawking rubbernecker (read: me) to remember that these are real people, with real, wronged spouses. "This is one of those little things I had to tell you," Beatty messages Kilpatrick at 6:56p.m. on Sept. 24, 2002. "Last night when I was laying on your shoulder in the car and you held my face and sang whatever song it was, that felt so good. It was just one of those little moments when you just made me fall some more." To use a journalistic term: holy crap. It all creates a layer of pathos that in sex scandals past has usually not come until the aggrieved wife writes a memoir.
The tendency of powerful men to cheat, and our prurient fascination: these are constants of American culture. Cluck if you like, but America loves to obsess about a scandal. And as in any passionate pursuit, it's the quality of the details, the grace notes and showstoppers alike, that elevates one over another. Thanks to the vanishing separation between action and digital record, they're only going to get more riveting.
Comments