Kelly: Christie report renews question of when personal lives are fair game or out of bounds

By Mike Kelly

Record Columnist |

The Record

Full coverage: Chris Christie and the GWB lane closure controversy

It’s a dilemma faced by historians, corporate managers, journalists, even lawyers representing couples in divorce court. When is it appropriate to reveal details about someone’s personal life?

That question is the focal point of a debate swirling around the report released last week by a team of lawyers hired by Governor Christie that exonerated him from any blame in the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal.

At the center of the controversy is a conclusion that seems fitting for a novel, not a report on traffic jams that were alleged to be political payback: Bridget Anne Kelly, the former gubernatorial aide whose email suggested “some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” had been distraught, weeping frequently and behaving erratically after a romantic breakup.

The report said, “events in her personal life may have had some bearing on her subjective motivations and state of mind.”

No other figure in the investigation was described in such personal terms — including Kelly’s supposed boyfriend, Bill Stepien, who has also been linked to the lane closures, along with David Wildstein, a former Port Authority executive.

The report portrays Wildstein as orchestrating the lane closures that resulted in four days of crippling gridlock in Fort Lee last September. But it does not mention anything about his personal life or emotional state.

With Stepien, Christie’s campaign manager, the report offers a scenario — without attribution or any reference amid the more than 1,400 footnotes in the report — that seems to distance Stepien from Kelly a month before the lane closures in Fort Lee.

“By early August 2013, their personal relationship had cooled, apparently at Stepien’s choice, and they largely stopped speaking,” the report said.

The focus on Kelly’s personal life and the conclusions reached without substantial proof have resulted in a wave of criticism toward the report’s principal author, New York attorney Randy Mastro, a former federal prosecutor and ally of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Among lawyers, Mastro is known to play hardball. With Kelly (no relation to this columnist), he seems to have done just that.

Kelly’s attorney called Mastro’s revelations “venomous, gratuitous and inappropriate sexist remarks” that “have no place in what is alleged to be a professional and independent report.”

But what is appropriate? When is sex a necessary aspect of an analysis of public policy? When should it be out of bounds?

America has long wrestled with such questions. At the heart of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s were his sexual dalliances with a White House intern. Since the 1960s, presidential historians have debated whether it is proper to delve into allegations of President John Kennedy’s sexual affairs and their potential impact on public policy.

But an inquiry into the motives behind the lane closures at the GWB seems like an odd place to include references to sex. Clear guidelines for when to introduce someone’s personal life into questions of public policy vary depending on who is talking. No set of across-the-board rules exists.

But interviews with a variety of experts point to several shortcomings in Mastro’s report.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics, feels that Mastro may have violated legal ethics guidelines, notably a clause in the Rules of Professional Conduct for New Jersey lawyers that cautions against using “means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass.”

“It’s not enough to have some wild conjecture,” said Gillers, who has studied the Mastro report. “There has to be a pretty good reason to include it. And Mastro’s explanations are, to be generous, weak at best and certainly not substantial. So I have a problem from an ethics point of view.”

Gillers suggested that Mastro may have another reason for devoting so much attention in the report to Kelly’s personal life.

“I think this has to be read as a warning to Kelly,” Gillers said. “This is a way of sending a signal to Kelly that whatever reputation she has left is at risk.”

On the ABC News program “This Week,” Mastro said Sunday that the criticism of his description of Kelly was misplaced.

Invoking a line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” Mastro said the report’s critics “can’t handle the truth.”

“We believe we got to the truth,” he said, adding: “Bridget Kelly is the heart of the problem.”

Few agree completely with Mastro — even Republicans.

Former Gov. Tom Kean, who headed the 9/11 Commission, questioned the relevance of references to Kelly’s personal life.

“So they printed a rumor?” Kean said of the reported Kelly-Stepien romance. “I’d heard the rumor, too.”

In an interview, Kean stopped short of saying that Mastro should not have commented on the romance or other aspects of Kelly’s personal life. But he said he felt uneasy about its relevance in explaining the lane closures.

“If there is a link between the fact of the relationship and that it caused or contributed to the event, then it’s relevant,” Kean said. “If it has nothing to do with the event, then it doesn’t belong.”

The report ignores several well-known aspects of Kelly’s life — that she is a single mother with four children, that one of her children has a heart defect and that she commuted each day from Ramsey to Trenton. Could any of those factors have affected her? With so much focus on Kelly’s personal life, it’s stunning that none is even mentioned.

The review does not assess reports of the hardball political atmosphere in Christie’s circle. Did Kelly, who was not known as a tough political operative in Bergen County, try to buy into that? The report does not say.

Passaic County GOP Chairman John Traier, who knows Kelly and Stepien, said he felt the reference to their relationship — and other comments about Kelly’s emotions — had no place in Mastro’s report.

After serving in the Whitman administration in the 1990s, Traier, who is gay, became one of the first public officials in New Jersey to come out publicly when he ran for a seat on Clifton’s Board of Education.

But he said the experience of having to openly discuss his sexuality has given him a sense of empathy for any public servant whose personal life is exposed as part of an unrelated government inquiry.

“I think it’s irrelevant that the couple in question may have had sexual relations,” Traier said.

Robert Arenstein, the Teaneck-based lawyer who has represented Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould of the Baby M surrogacy case in the mid-1980s, says she still suffers from the way aggressive attorneys who fought with her when she sought custody of her daughter delved into her romantic relations.

Whitehead-Gould tried to keep custody of the baby she agreed to bear for a Tenafly couple as part of a surrogacy contract that was later termed unlawful by the New Jersey Supreme Court. In the ensuing court battles, questions were raised about her emotional state and her relationships. An unusual coalition of liberal feminists and women from the Catholic Right to Life movement joined forces to campaign on her behalf.

“Sex was used against her,” Arenstein said. “I think it was inappropriate.”

Robert Miraldi, a journalism professor and author of two biographies of investigative reporters, said the media was lured by Mastro into reporting on Kelly’s personal life.

“The press is trapped,” said Miraldi, who teaches journalism at the State University of New York in New Paltz. “Once it is mentioned in a public report, then the press has to cover it. The question is: Do you really need it?”

Like others who have analyzed the report, Miraldi questioned whether Mastro’s research was complete enough to consider any conclusion to be drawn from Kelly’s personal life.

In the end, Miraldi said, the holes in Mastro’s research raise questions about why he delved into Kelly’s personal life. Mastro’s staff of lawyers did not interview the four main figures in the lane closures: Kelly, Stepien, Wildstein and the former Port Authority deputy executive director, Bill Baroni.

“It’s like not having talked to H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, Henry Kissinger and John Dean and reaching conclusions about Watergate,” Miraldi said.

NorthJersey.com : News

March 30, 2014, 10:33 PM

Last updated: Monday, March 31, 2014, 7:39 AM