Report: Gore Accuser Failed Lie Detector Test

[stevedeshazer]

http://www.kptv.com/yourvote/24263736/detail.html

PORTLAND, Ore. -- A masseuse who accused former Vice President Al Gore of groping and kissing her at a downtown hotel in 2006 failed a lie detector test and had a history of falsely accusing people of mistreating her, according to a report in this week's Portland Tribune newspaper.

Tribune editors said they found out about Molly Hagerty's sex abuse allegation against Gore 3 ½ years ago, but they didn't print an article because the newspaper's reporters thought her story lacked credibility.

The National Enquirer first reported the story last month and detailed Hagerty's accusations that Gore made unwanted sexual contact at Hotel Lucia in Portland.

Tribune editor Mark Garber said Hagerty's lawyer asked her to take a lie detector test and she failed, but that wasn't the reason they didn't print the story. He said the newspaper reporters' "personal interaction" with Hagerty raised red flags.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. Now that's a surprise. Al Gore is a loose cannon who needs to be stopped!

:crazy:

[denverbill]

2. I'm sure this will get as much coverage as the original accusation. /sarcasm

[Botany]

3. Fox dropped that story like a hot skillet

They were pushing the Gore is a rapists 24/7 but then dropped it.

[KansDem]

9. I wonder if Fox Newzak puts these pathetic types up to hurling false accusations...

...so it can "report" on them thereby keeping their market share up. :shrug:

[Botany]

13. I think Fox was very much worried about a law suit

A false charge of rape might very well start for legal action.

[Oceansaway]

4. K&R...n/t

[CoffeeCat]

5. Translation:

'Even though a lie detector test showed that she was a bald-face liar, that wasn't the reason
that reporters didn't run with the story. Reporters failed to print the story because she was
obviously a certified loony tune wack-a-nut.'

[KansDem]

6. "He said the newspaper reporters' "personal interaction" with Hagerty raised red flags."

:wtf: So what's this all about!

"Personal interaction?"

[Eric J in MN]

8. next paragraph explains

"We became concerned throughout dozens and dozens of conversations that she had with another editor and the reporter," Garber said. "They both became concerned about credibility issues as it relates to her story."

[KansDem]

11. But it took a "lie detector" to suggest she wasn't upfront with her accusations?

If they "became concerned" after "dozens and dozens" of conversations, then that should have been the deciding factor; not whether or not she "passed" a lie detector. And what if she did? Would they still have "concerns" about her credibility? Or would they continue feeding FOX NewZAK?

[stubtoe]

63. See post #5 above

[Bitwit1234]

7. Wanta bet all the republican owned MSM

won't print anything about this. Of course it will bring more publicity, but Gore should sue her ass off she deserves to be stopped. What is she pulls this crap again against someone else. She must be mental.

[spooky3]

12. the problem is, it's very hard for public figures to win defamation lawsuits in the US

partly because courts don't want to suppress free speech. Even if she's entirely in the wrong and he's entirely in the right, it will be a huge hassle for him and he may not win, and it would just keep the story alive.

[hatrack]

10. I'm sure Drudge will post this right under the siren . . .

. . . NOT.

[xchrom]

14. gasp!! no...really? failed the lie detector? i'm shocked. nt

[sinkingfeeling]

15. Well, she's already done damage to his reputation. Poll shows his

favorability down 14 points.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/14/poll-positive-opinion-of-gore-drops/?hpt=Sbin&fbid=Y09lShoamaG

A Gallup survey released Wednesday indicates that 49 percent of the public holds an unfavorable view of Gore, with 44 percent saying they see him in a favorable light.

The 44 percent favorable rating is down 14 points from October 2007, the last time Gallup polled on Gore, which was soon after he was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.


Putting Al Gore only 3 points below Cheney in 'unfavorable'.

[glitch]

18. Mission accomplished. And 20 years from now idiots will still be parroting this meme

as if it had never been discredited.

[NYMdaveNYI]

20. Meh.

no, it seemed pretty legit at the time. He was DIVORCED over this... It’s calming to know these charges are false... He’d still make a GREAT president... better than Dubbs. he should have a Cabinet job like Energy Secretary or something. I know he’s on a bunch of panels for Tech companies too.

[senseandsensibility]

21. He was not "DIVORCED" over this

Tipper was quoted as saying this had nothing to do with their separation. Link for your claim? Oh, and welcome to DU.

[NoGOPZone]

26. Legit? A four year old claim that the police had rejected and a newspaper

refused to report on because it didn't pass the smell test?

[glitch]

28. Disagree - didn't seem legit at all, I thought it seemed b-grade Larouchian

Pure speculation that this is what his divorce is about -- reporting a four-year old creaky claim was more likely opportunistic on the news of the divorce.

[senseandsensibility]

29. Not to mention that although our friend above

calls it a "DIVORCE", and all in caps no less, the Gores are not divorced. They are separated. Tipper has been quoted as saying this issue has nothing to do with it. And last I heard, they were still trying to work out their problems.

[glitch]

30. Oh that is excellent, I hope they do.

Some couples give you hope for marriage, they're one.

[Uncle Joe]

32. That's a LIE on two levels.

They're separated not divorced and Tipper has already come out and said it had nothing to with infidelity.

[BlueMTexpat]

48. Legit??

And when did Al get divorced? I thought that they were just separated - and not because of this.

[Wednesdays]

56. *crickets*

Sigh...I should become a hit-and-run poster too, I would get so many more comments.

[meow2u3]

49. Not to mention the damage she did to his marraige to Tipper

Her lies may have caused the Gores to separate. If I were he, I'd sue her blind!

[newspeak]

53. actually the MSM did more damage to his reputation

Instead of checking out the facts with reporters in the area, they ran with it. Why? It seems that their intention was to damage him.

[newspeak]

54. actually the MSM did more damage to his reputation

Instead of checking out the facts with reporters in the area, they ran with it. Why? It seems that their intention was to damage him.

[lonestarnot]

16. Of course.

:eyes: Fucking rubbish.

[UTUSN]

17. K&R #29 n/t

[Uncle Joe]

19. Kicked and recommended, the entire article is well worth the read.

"We became concerned throughout dozens and dozens of conversations that she had with another editor and the reporter," Garber said. "They both became concerned about credibility issues as it relates to her story."

Hagerty told the National Enquirer recently that she had Gore's DNA saved on a pair of slacks. But this week's Tribune report said DNA tests showed there was no semen at all on the pants.

"What she told us about the pants was that she had had them tested and the test showed it did not contain Al Gore's semen," Garber said.

Thanks for the thread, stevedeshazer.

[catgirl]

22. I hope Gore presses charges

She deserves jail time for this BS. Anything for money and publicity. Remember balloon boy?

[Name removed]

62. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[malaise]

23. Duh!!!

I had her on ignore from day one.

[barbtries]

41. me too

i dismissed the story and have only been aware of it in passing. figured it for bullshit ages ago.

[backscatter712]

24. TOLD YOU SO!!!

C'mon, we all know enough of Al Gore to know he's better than what this crazy woman accuses him of!

[Name removed]

64. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[uppityperson]

I distrust lie detector tests, but her history is something.

[eShirl]

25. "and had a history of falsely accusing people of mistreating her"

Funny, I don't remember reading that in any of the previous reports.
Huh.

[Kingofalldems]

27. Somebody was trumpeting that story recently

Hmmm, I can't seem to remember----->:shrug:

[stevedeshazer]

38. If you're referring to me, I just posted the Oregonian articles without comment.

I have no axe to grind with Al Gore.

Just for the record.

[BR_Parkway]

31. Live interview with her tonight on FAUX at 6 now that she's qualified! (joke)

[Uncle Joe]

33. Kicked for the 3:03 CST crowd. n/t

[SoCalDem]

34. BREAKING FOX NEWS:

Gore Accuser Failed Lie Detector Test

[annabanana]

44. really. . .n/t

[JoeyT]

35. Lie detector tests are about as reliable as flipping a coin to see if someone is telling the truth.

The only people that support lie detector tests are people that are giving them and people that can use the results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

We didn't need the polygraph to know it was nonsense anyway. The facts pretty much bore that out.

[Warren DeMontague]

36. Wow. And her commentary about being part of the "Portland Birkenstock Tribe" sounded so genuine.

Really, like nothing James O'keefe and some Breitbart goobers might have coached her to say. :eyes:

[fascisthunter]

37. it's all the right wing whackos have.... talk about inferior

[spicegal]

39. Not surprised. Her claims sounded fishy all along.

Al Gore just doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would do something that incredibly stupid, and it just doesn't fit his personality.

[disndat]

51. Gore seems too strait laced

to end up with a paternity suit like Edwards.

[pattmarty]

40. The right is out there trying it's best to slander or marginalize ANY........

........person with liberal/progressive tendencies that is getting any kind of positive publicity. And, here you have the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Savages that continuously spout their hate and falsehoods and ........... Look at what happened to Acorn, they were successful in destroying a good (liberal) organization.

[greenman3610]

42. this is an info war

we all have a lot at stake.
Make sure this gets disseminated on your network.

[newspeak]

52. and what purpose would Murdock have to trot this out?

Just like the ACORN lie fest. It seems that Gore is to be minimized maybe because his stance on the environment--and what are we facing today? The BP carnage of every damn living thing in the Gulf? I find the timing very suspicious.

These so called news agencies, like Faux, are nothing but corporate propaganda machines against the people. With their blatant untruths, they've aided in destroying or discrediting those who actually work to benefit the people and the environment. Like I said, the timing is very suspicious.

[marions ghost]

57. +1

totally agree

You can trust nothing coming out of MSM.

[Uncle Joe]

61. Not just the environment, Gore is a strong advocate for the Internet and

I believe the corporate media propaganda machine see the growing power and influence of the net-roots as a threat to their monopoly on the dissemination of information.

I believe that's the primary motivation behind the effort to kill net neutrality, and probably Leibermann's "Internet Kill Switch," the corporate supremacists fear the rise of people power and are actively searching for ways to neutralize it.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/071510.html

Through the federal taxing power, Washington could put Americans to work preparing the nation for the future, building high-speed rail, developing clean energy, improving education for all, advancing medical technologies, repairing the environment, and addressing a host of other national priorities.

"The Media Imbalance"

But a second hard truth about today’s America is that the political/media structure is such that these steps are almost unimaginable. In the power centers of New York and Washington, in particular, Corporate America and its right-wing allies have built a propaganda apparatus that makes any serious discussion of these options political suicide.

This propaganda machinery, which reaches across the United States through right-wing talk radio, Fox News and a variety of other outlets, guarantees that any politician (or media personality) who pushes too hard or too effectively for questioning the Reagan orthodoxy will be demonized.

President Barack Obama is only the latest politician to learn this lesson. Though many on the American Left denounce Obama as a weak-kneed centrist too eager to compromise, he is portrayed to the rest of America as a radical socialist, sometimes even likened to Hitler and Stalin.

It doesn’t matter that these comparisons are as absurd as they are offensive. The point about propaganda is that if ugly attacks are repeated enough about some individual, many in the public will be influenced, consciously or subconsciously, to think of the person in a negative light.

[peacetalksforall]

43. It would be nice if there was a way to look at her bank account..

[Joe Bacon]

45. Your Whore Press In Action

I'm still waiting for liars like Frank Rich to apologize to Al Gore for what they did to him in 2000. And until that liar apologizes for making up the phony "Love Story" baloney, he can go to hell.

[tanyev]

46. Aha! So maybe it was a newspaper reporter who helped her gin up that story.

[dballance]

47. Wow, the Trib is a Right-Wing Rag.

I'm surprised by their restraint on the original story and their publishing of the facts. Good for you Tribune for having some values.

[penndragon69]

50. Linda tripp lives.

I knew that this story was a bunch of BS when this tramp produced a pair of slacks in a zip lock
storage bag.

Did the RNC pay that criminal linda tripp to coach this crackpot on how to make
it appear that her accusations were legitimate with the slacks in a baggie stunt?

RefugniCONS are a pathetic joke.

[Wednesdays]

58. Of course...that's how propaganda works

The whole thing sounded like a rerun of the Clinton thing with Lewinsky and Paula Jones (the suggestion of oral sex, the semen-stained clothing, the hotel room), and that was no accident. It's subliminal suggestion designed to tie Gore in with the Clinton scandals, and makes Gore seem like a sex animal.

It works, because even after there's complete exoneration, people still have that image in the back of their minds.

[DefenseLawyer]

55. The lie detector is worthless. Period.

Her story is dubious at best, but lie detector tests are and always have been junk pseudo science and utterly worthless.

[Wednesdays]

59. True that, but the clothing thing is the clincher

If the report is true that there's no DNA on the clothing in the plastic bag, then she has zero credibility.

[DefenseLawyer]

60. And if she had "passed" the lie detector test?

Would people suddenly ignore all of the holes in her story and her lack of credibility?

[EnemyCombatant]

65. After all of this, apparently The Nation is defending the accuser.

After all of this, apparently The Nation is defending the accuser.

I am quite outraged.


The media outlets that bothered to report on the story have hardly reported the story. With one dubious exception, I couldn’t find a single source that did what any reporter with the most basic questions about the charges should have done: interview an expert on sexual violence who might be able to provide context and comment on the likely credibility of the story. Instead, they trotted out excuses in Gore’s defense, often going the way of The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who in musing about whether the mainstream media would pick up the story, treated it as a choice between defending Gore’s integrity or indulging in a base appetite for celebrity scandal, as if there wasn’t a possibility that a real 54-year-old woman had suffered a violent assault. Salon ran a story titled “3 Reasons To Doubt The Al Gore Sex Assault Story,” which not only claimed that the Portland Tribune’s decision not to cover the allegations should be good enough for us (more on that in a bit), but also reminded readers that “We have seen plenty of cases of baseless (if vivid) sexual allegations against celebrities before.” In fact, false reports of sexual assault are rare (somewhere between 2 and 8 percent of cases filed), and tend to be seemingly ironclad stories designed to evoke only sympathy, with no ambiguity or perceived chance for escape (such as some claim the accuser had when she was packing up her table and equipment). What's more, most male celebrities manage to spend their lifetimes being rich and notable without attracting a single accusation of sexual assault. Ever heard a sexual assault charge against Obama? Tom Cruise? Heck, for all the money and bad press Tiger Woods has earned, has anyone ever accused him of sexual assault? The truth is, there are hundreds of filthy rich, incredibly famous men, and only a small handful of them have been accused of sexual assault. If inventing a rape accusation were a great way to make money, it would be a lot more popular. There are valid reasons to dismiss a sexual assault charge out-of-hand – the woman who accused Tucker Carlson of raping her in a city he’d never visited comes to mind – but none of those reasons are present in this case. All we have are a set of behaviors (not fleeing the room at first opportunity, uncertainty about how or when to pursue legal justice) that are so common in victims of abuse as to be almost textbook.

The other reasons that have been offered for doubting the story in articles, blogs and comment threads can also be debunked. Authorities didn't take the charges seriously? Not surprising: if law enforcement took sexual assault allegations seriously, there wouldn’t be tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of rape kits languishing untested in police labs across the country. No wonder 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported. She considered filing a civil case but was hesitant to pursue criminal charges? Many victims do that for legitimate reasons that have nothing to do with financial profit, and lots to do with the amount of control a victim can have over the handling of a civil case as opposed to a criminal one (you can read about those reasons in detail here). She waffled about filing a report and took years to finally do it? “Delayed reporting for rape victims is extremely common, especially where the offender is someone known to them (the vast majority of rapes),” says Colby Bruno, Managing Attorney at the Victim Rights Law Center, citing trauma-induced cognitive impairments, feelings of shame, self-doubt, anxiety, confusion, and other factors as frequent culprits in causing victims to delay reporting. He wouldn't assault someone when he would surely have had no problem finding a willing partner? Men who are sexually violent don’t assault women because they’re hard up for sexual contact. They assault women because they like assaulting. Even if they’re rich and famous. It’s ugly, but it’s true.

And now the Portland Tribune, whose now-famous disinterest in the story has been used repeatedly by other outlets to justify not taking it seriously, has published a detailed account of their reasoning for passing on the scoop. The piece boils down to this: they had no physical evidence, a victim who was ambivalent about going public, acted "troubled and fearful" and was easily emotionally triggered, and wanted to remain anonymous (pretty common characteristics of trauma survivors), and they couldn’t find anyone else who’d leveled a similar accusation against Gore. The Tribune did consult experts on sexual assault in their reporting, who told the newspaper that it was common for victims to delay reporting to the police, but the Tribune apparently didn’t find that persuasive, nor were they convinced by the evidence she provided that she called a sexual assault hotline in the immediate aftermath of the alleged assault. They also discredited one of her corroborating witnesses--a friend she'd called the night of her encounter with Gore--simply because he was now homeless.

The Tribune piece asks the question, "How can you judge the credibility of a sexual assault charge when there are no witnesses and apparently no physical evidence?" It's a good question, but why not ask, "Why, in cases of sexual violence, is the victim assumed guilty of lying until proven innocent?" We assume that accusers of other crimes are credible enough to report unless there's clear evidence to the contrary: a repeated history of making false claims, for example. Or evidence that the two people in question weren't in the same place at the same time. Barring these sorts of clear contravening evidence, media outlets should consider sexual assault accusations credible enough to report.




Edited to conform to DU's fair use policy for copyrighted material. Lithos DU Moderator

http://www.thenation.com/article/37642/how-media-should-treat-sexual-assault-allegations-against-al-gore

[SpiralHawk]

66. Another hole in another pack of republicon lies

as usual

[panzerfaust]

67. "Lie Detectors" are pseudo-science

No, am saying nothing with respect to the allegations against Gore: I am saying that "Lie Detectors" and their latest iteration "Voice Stress Analyzers" are completely bogus and perform, in multiple actual tests, no better than chance.

That does not stop them from being a multi-million dollar business, any more than lack of function stops "remote electronic explosive/drug detectors" from enriching other snake-oil salesmen.

All of these devices can ruin (or actually cost) lives - just as the equally bogus "E-Meter" can change your life and drain (clear) your bank account.

Flashing lights, buzzers, and dials are a long proven way of separating fools from their money.

[Stinky The Clown]

68. You woud think President Gore's enemies woud find a more credible accuser to employ.