{"id":197,"date":"2009-10-02T11:20:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T11:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/everydayethics\/2009\/10\/david-letterman-hero-or-creep.html"},"modified":"2009-10-02T11:20:26","modified_gmt":"2009-10-02T11:20:26","slug":"david-letterman-hero-or-creep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/2009\/10\/david-letterman-hero-or-creep.html","title":{"rendered":"David Letterman: Hero Or Creep?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now you’ve probably heard: David Letterman’s been the victim of a blackmail attempt to extort $ 2 million<\/a> to keep quiet about sexual affairs he had with female staffers. Instead, Letterman chose to go on the air and, well, air his dirty laundry before the blackmailer could.<\/p>\n

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Watch a clip here: <\/div>\n
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Amazingly, his audience seemed to laugh along with him, even cheer at times, though perhaps they simply didn’t know what to make of what he was telling them. <\/div>\n
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Personally, I always thought the guy was a bit of a lech and a creep, and I haven’t found his show funny since back in the days when he used to dress up in Velcro suits and fling himself at Velcro walls. There’s always been something derogatory in the way he leers at women, the way he speaks of his wife (and of avoiding marriage as long as he could), and I feel sorry for her being dragged through the mud along with these other women who will now surely also find themselves in the spotlight. <\/div>\n
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I’m not suggesting he ought to have paid the blackmail to keep his ‘creepy’ misdeeds quiet–blackmail is no better than infidelity–but I am saying, I think the guy ought to have considered his public position, his wife’s feelings, and the staffers as well before his own desires. Why did he have to go public about this? I suppose news of the arrest would have hit the news at some point, and Letterman was hoping to get out ahead of it. Still, I hope this decision to defuse the blackmailer’s threats publicly was made in consultation with his family as well as the women with whom he had the affairs (it’s not clear when he slept with them, whether before or after he finally married his girlfriend of 2 decades, Regina Lasko, though I’m not sure that would ameliorate any moral ugliness here).<\/div>\n
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Will the network keep him on? Almost certainly–he’s suddenly kicking Leno’s ass. Will you keep watching?<\/i><\/b> I won’t… but then, I found him unfunny before. Now I just find him unsavory as well.<\/div>\n
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By now you’ve probably heard: David Letterman’s been the victim of a blackmail attempt to extort $ 2 million to keep quiet about sexual affairs he had with female staffers. Instead, Letterman chose to go on the air and, well, air his dirty laundry before the blackmailer could. Watch a clip here:  Amazingly, his audience…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-hillary-fields"],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Letterman: Hero Or Creep? - Everyday Ethics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/2009\/10\/david-letterman-hero-or-creep.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Letterman: Hero Or Creep? - Everyday Ethics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By now you’ve probably heard: David Letterman’s been the victim of a blackmail attempt to extort $ 2 million to keep quiet about sexual affairs he had with female staffers. 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She attended St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she studied classics and philosophy, and then respectfully declined to spend the rest of her life in an ivory tower. Instead, she turned to the life of a writer and editor, penning three romance novels published by St. Martin's Press and contributing features to such periodicals as Cosmopolitan magazine. Her fascination with the moral dilemmas that crop up in everyday life--and the many intriguing ways people handle them--has always colored her writings. Now, that interest is leading her to take the discussion online; where, hopefully, the addition of reader feedback will bring these quotidian quandaries--and their potential solutions--vibrantly to life. When she's not plumbing the ethical mysteries of humanity, her passions include cooking (especially baking), origami, kittens, reading, watching really bad television and playing online scrabble. (And no, she doesn't cheat... much.)","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/author\/hfields"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/197"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/everydayethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}