Scott Brown Scandal – Memoir Material?

Yesterday I wrote about how newly elected Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown got himself a book deal with Harper Collins. He was going to pen a memoir about his life and his political career. Though these two things have been intriguing, I questioned whether it was too soon. The political life has a way of turning upside down overnight and so one man’s memoir might all of a sudden be a joke, a reminder of a falsely erected persona that came crashing down.  Then news breaks today of a strange suit that was filed against Brown in 1998. From Gawker:

Did you know that Scott Brown—the new star Republican Senator—was accused of harassing a female campaign worker in 1998? We have the documents to prove it. Did the Democrats blow an opportunity to keep their 60th Senate seat?

In 2000, Scott Brown was a freshman state representative in Massachusetts. A few years earlier, he’d served on the Wrentham, Mass. Board of Selectmen. Jennifer Firth, a local mortgage banker who was elected to the Board of Selectmen in 1999, filed a civil defamation suit against Brown in July of 2000, alleging that he had harassed her when she worked on his campaign in 1998, and then tried to smear her reputation around town with forged letters and emails.

According to Firth’s complaint, Brown engaged in ‘offensive’ conduct that caused her to quit his campaign; he then tried to ‘defame and humiliate’ her by spreading rumors to her colleagues that she ‘had made sexual advances’ towards him during his campaign. She also alleged that Brown told several people that he’d had an ‘intimate relationship’ with her and that he had a stack of sexually explicit letters that Firth had sent him. In her suit, Firth says that she’d never been sexually intimate with Brown, nor did she ever send him the aforementioned letters. A 2000 article in the local paper, the Sun Chronicle reported that Brown had denied the charges; for her part, Firth said she felt that filing the suit was ‘the only way I could stop this.’”

Then, oddly, two days later Firth dropped the suit claiming that her lawyer told her she had no chance of winning. Gawker points out that Democrats missed out big time in not even letting a whisper of this slip to the press during Brown’s campaign against Coakley. In terms of the recently bought memoir by Harper Collins, this is exactly the type of thing I was cautioning against. Writing your memoir at such an early stage in the politics game seems like jumping the gun. Who knows what could come out in the next year before the book publishes. This strange lawsuit is only one example of what can happen.

via The Scandalous Scott Brown Lawsuit that no one Told you About.