{"id":4086,"date":"2005-08-11T07:52:48","date_gmt":"2005-08-11T07:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-clark-tapes.html"},"modified":"2005-08-11T07:52:48","modified_gmt":"2005-08-11T07:52:48","slug":"the-clark-tapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/the-clark-tapes.html","title":{"rendered":"The Clark Tapes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Daily News has more details<\/a><\/p>\n

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On the day Laura DeFilippo was caught on camera with Msgr. Eugene Clark at a Hamptons motel, she allegedly had told her husband they were heading to a storage facility 30 miles away in Riverhead, L.I., to sort through some books. <\/p>\n

Instead, the telltale tape made by her husband’s private eye reveals DeFilippo picked Clark up at the St. Patrick’s Cathedral rectory – and drove to the White Sands Motel in Amagansett, L.I., on July 21. <\/p>\n

They made only one stop – to pick up some fast food for the road, the investigator told the Daily News. <\/p>\n

When they got to the motel at 11:07 a.m., the tape showed the 79-year-old rector of St. Pat’s walking into the motel office while his leggy companion sat in the van and reapplied her lipstick. <\/p>\n

The tape does not show what the investigator called Clark’s "high sign" after he got a room. <\/p>\n

"It was like a field goal sign," the investigator said. "He had both hands up in the air, like he just scored a touchdown."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

EWTN keeps Clark on the air for now<\/a><\/p>\n

Responses:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Lawyers for both Clark and Laura DeFilippo denied any impropriety. <\/p>\n

"Monsignor Clark is deeply upset and saddened that innocent events have been distorted and sensationalized causing harm and public embarassment to Mrs. DeFilippo and her children," Laura Brevetti, Clark’s lawyer, said in a statement. "It will be made clear that the allegations have been contrived and that there is nothing to them." <\/p>\n

The wife’s lawyer, Michael Berger, called the allegations "totally false and outrageous and completely without merit" and said they were made in an "desperate effort" to coerce Laura DeFilippo into accepting her husband’s demands in the divorce.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Frankly, I’m have a little bit of trouble getting past the "eeeww" factor on this one, myself.<\/p>\n

But that aside, some points: On various boards where people are commenting on this, I’ve already seen the "I’m relieved – at least it’s with a woman" response. Why one would be relieved at a champion of orthodoxy discrediting all he claimed to believe was true and worth living for? I don’t get it.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I saw some sniping at the press. "Oh, you can’t believe anything the anti-Church press says." Well, it’s not as if the story originated with investigative reporting – it’s a report of something that’s going on in the court system. Finally, there’s some disgust that the press is playing the orthodoxy-moral hardliner card. Well, why wouldn’t they?<\/strong> It’s not as if there hasn’t been considerable glee out here in Comment Land when a "liberal" falls and inevitable  attempts to tie his (usually) fall to his ideology (i.e. Weakland, Lynch, etc). No, that’s never happened. <\/p>\n

Oh, and do read the hot tub detail in the Daily News<\/em> story. Do.<\/p>\n

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The NYPost story, which is behind a registration wall, makes clear how nasty the whole situation is from the husband’s end. He’s bitter:<\/a><\/p>\n

Sources told The Post yesterday that Clark and Laura DeFilippo were victims of an attempted shakedown by her husband, who threatened to tell Egan about their eyebrow-raising tryst if she didn’t give him everything in the divorce settlement \u2014 their Eastchester home, custody of their two kids and alimony from her paycheck. <\/p>\n

Philip DeFilippo first tried to coerce his wife into giving him an uncontested divorce, sources said, then allegedly contacted Clark and threatened to tell Egan and the press about the video if the priest did not convince his wife to agree to his divorce demands. <\/p>\n

They both rejected his alleged threats. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The story also goes over the "sources say" that the two stopped in the hotel because she was tired and needed a nap. But it also mentions that the hotel is a ten-minute drive from Clark’s house that he’s had for 46 years in that area, and that they didn’t use real names in the registry…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Daily News has more details On the day Laura DeFilippo was caught on camera with Msgr. Eugene Clark at a Hamptons motel, she allegedly had told her husband they were heading to a storage facility 30 miles away in Riverhead, L.I., to sort through some books. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}