Here's some more, douchebag...
The tabloids crucified Condit, and late night cable news channels followed those stories featuring so-called “experts” who didn’t hesitate to ramble on and on with baseless theories.
In 2002, a prominent criminal defense lawyer from California was quoted once as saying he could “prove” Gary Condit was responsible for Chandra’s murder and that he had her corpse dumped in Baltimore Harbor. In 2001, Dominick Dunne from Vanity Fair reported that he had sources in the Middle East that swore Chandra was sold there as a sex slave.
None of that was true.
It turns out her corpse was lying in Rock Creek Park as the alleged victim of a no-name, common criminal who had a history of violence. So much for the conspiracy theories about the Washington power elite. So much for Baltimore Harbor and being sold into white slavery to Middle Eastern sheiks. None of that was remotely true, which should make us all take a moment and reconsider the most important lesson that arose out of the Chandra Levy case, that journalism should be based on facts, not theories.
In 2006, I spoke directly with one of the lead detectives from the Washington, D.C. Metro Police Department who was assigned to the Chandra Levy case. I was intrigued when he told me they had “no interest in Gary Condit as a suspect,” and as a result, I pitched that story to several news outlets. To my surprise no one was interested in reporting it.
Maybe that’s because vindication isn’t as enticing as accusation.
The specific accusations that arose from the national media against Gary Condit were so detailed they couldn’t have been anything but pure fabrication or the result of journalists failing to properly investigate. In retrospect, some of them were totally absurd and laughable if the damage they caused to Condit’s life and career wasn’t so tragic.
