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"...I should have run to the press."
Susan would tell her story to a number of other men who frequented the same spots she did, including Dave Peters, then a deputy Multnomah County district attorney, and criminal-defense lawyers Mark Morrell and Mark Smolak.
Smolak dated Susan and also encouraged her to seek legal help. "She told me about her involvement with Neil Goldschmidt and asked me for advice," says Smolak, who met Susan when she was 28. "As a friend and an attorney, I felt that I was too close personally to pursue any sort of legal remedy myself." (Susan eventually retained lawyers Jeff Foote and Jana Toran, who won a $350,000 out-of-court settlement from Goldschmidt in 1994 in return for Susan's silence.)
Morrell and Peters declined to comment for this story.
For more than 15 years, the media, including this newspaper, has danced around the conduct of Sheriff Bernie Giusto, who was an Oregon state trooper and Goldschmidt's bodyguard and driver from 1987 to 1989, the first two years he was governor.
Giusto was always more ambitious than the average cop. A graduate of Willamette University with a degree in political science, he won the first of three terms on the Gresham City Council in 1989 while serving as Goldschmidt's bodyguard.
Around that time, according to numerous Goldschmidt staffers and state officials, Giusto also began an affair with the governor's then-wife, Margie Goldschmidt.
While Giusto's dalliance with the wife of the man he was protecting is the stuff of soap operas, the greater significance is that Giusto knew about Goldschmidt and "Susan."
Last month, Giusto appeared before the Senate Rules Committee for a confirmation hearing on his reappointment to the board of TriMet, the regional transportation authority.
Under questioning from state Sen. Vicki Walker (D-Eugene), Giusto acknowledged that he had learned the story about Goldschmidt and the young girl but did not say exactly when or how.
Giusto didn't report the information to his superiors, he testified, because he believed the statute of limitations had expired. (Law-enforcement officials say he was correct.)
Giusto argued he had no duty to pursue further information because there was no evidence that Goldschmidt represented a danger to other children. "In my two years with him, I never saw anything that led me to believe that there were other victims," Giusto said.
In a follow-up interview, Giusto maintained that had he alerted superiors, he might have smeared Goldschmidt unjustly. "It would have been unethical for me to have opened an investigation," Giusto explained. "My only obligation was to make sure there were no other victims around--it was not to quit or confront him."
While Giusto says he didn't pass information about Goldschmidt on to law-enforcement colleagues or others acting in any official capacity, he wasn't completely discreet. He told at least two other people in Goldschmidt's administration.
Debby Kennedy says she did not believe the story Bernie Giusto told her about Goldschmidt and doesn't recall telling anyone else about it. "The whole thing makes me sad," Kennedy says today.
One is Debby Kennedy, a former Nike executive who was then serving as the state's director of tourism and now heads "Brand Oregon" for Gov. Ted Kulongoski.
Kennedy says that early in 1990, Giusto told her the governor had had a "messy situation" with a young girl years earlier. Kennedy says she told nobody and did nothing.
"I just can't tell you how many rumors there were about him then," Kennedy says. "So many were ridiculous, and this struck me as just another. I mentally flushed it down the toilet and don't recall ever talking about it to anyone else."
But another person Giusto confided in did talk. As The Oregonian first reported in June, Fred Leonhardt, Goldschmidt's gubernatorial speechwriter, says Giusto told him in the summer or fall of 1989. As the man who wrote Goldschmidt's famous "Children's Agenda" speech and who often traveled with the governor to children's events, Leonhardt found Giusto's news particularly disturbing, although he wasn't sure he believed it.
Leonhardt passed the story on to a number of people, including Goldschmidt's gubernatorial press secretary, Gregg Kantor.
Kantor was a true Goldschmidt believer. When Goldschmidt announced his candidacy for governor in 1986, Kantor quit his job at the Bonneville Power Administration and sold his house so he could afford to volunteer for the campaign.
So when Leonhardt told him Goldschmidt might be a child rapist, Kantor was more than a little skeptical.
"I just didn't believe it at the time. I didn't take it seriously," says Kantor, who is now senior vice president of the state's largest gas utility, NW Natural.
Kantor says he was deeply disappointed by Goldschmidt's admission this past May that the story was true, but he declines to say how he feels about Goldschmidt today or if he wishes he had confronted his boss when he first heard.
In addition to Kantor, Leonhardt says he also told another former Goldschmidt press aide, Lee Weinstein. Leonhardt says he told Weinstein the story, including the victim's name, at a meeting around 1992, well after Goldschmidt left office. "Lee's eyes got big," Leonhardt recalls, adding that Weinstein told him that he had heard the story before--from the victim herself, whom he had, coincidentally, dated in high school.
Weinstein, ...
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