Wonder how much of your money the Reagan administration gave an unknown songwriter to get off on sexy cartoons?
Judith Reisman’s $734,000 Thrill
So you think the Pentagon’s $600 toilet seats border on the outrageous? You might be surprised to know that the Justice Department has paid $734,000 to an ex-songwriter for “Captain Kangaroo” to read 660 issues’ worth of cartoons published in Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler.
My first knowledge of this little enterprise came in an anonymous package left at the offices of the House Subcommittee on Human Resources, for which I was a staff director, in January 1984. It didn’t come in a brown-paper wrapper, but perhaps it should have. From a taxpayer’s perspective, it was every bit as pornographic as the material it presumed to study. It was a copy of a federal grant, awarded without competition to American University for the amount of $798,531 (eventually scaled down to $734,000), for a study to be carried out by Dr. Judith Reisman. Its stated purpose was to study the relationship between juvenile delinquency and pornography. Some months later, I described it officially “as incredibly wasteful, irresponsibly prepared, and a giant rip-off of the American taxpayer.”
As staff director for seven years of the Human Resources Subcommittee, with jurisdiction over a number of federal agencies, I had seen anonymous packages delivered before. During both the Carter and Reagan administration’s, nearly 100 questionable grants had been brought to the subcommittee’s attention.
But this grant proposal was different. It had already been signed by Alfred S. Regnery, the controversial administrator of the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. It would be considerably more difficult to stop than others that arrived still unsigned.
Moreover, the project director, Dr. Reisman, who was reaping the benefit of the Justice Department’s largess as a self-described “media sexology specialist,” seemed to lack the credentials of a social scientist. Two and a half years later, in March 1986, Regnery would lament his decision: “The grant was for too much money, I don’t think there’s any question about that. And that’s probably my fault.” Although Regnery would also try to blame others in his agency — “I got bad advice from my staff on it …” — his own department auditor warned him in August 1983 that the proposed study could be done for less than $60,000 — which was $674,000 less than what Reisman was asking for. Regnery would also acknowledge that the study was a failure, and that given the chance, he would have “done it differently.”
Noncompetitive grant-making within the Justice Department is not illegal. However, its own regulations permit such a practice only when the grantee has such unquestioned qualifications and the work to be done is so urgent that the need to proceed without competition is obvious to all. Dr. Reisman was not widely known, and her proposed review of “informal sexology magazine literature and data (from Playboy to Hustler, etc.)” seemed anything but urgent.
In the first place, the relationship between pornography and delinquency had been examined numerous times before, most notably in 1970 by a presidential commission appointed by President Johnson in 1967. No relationship had been found. Why was the Justice Department spending all this money on studies instead of going after actual child pornographers involved in organized crime? Was that too tough, or was there just not enough political payoff?
The significance of this proposed research paled compared with the need for research into such serious youth problems as child abuse, teen suicide, being placed in adult jails, and runaway, homeless, and missing youngsters — all of which Congress had given Regnery a much clearer mandate to investigate.
The idea that nearly $800,000 was to bee spent investigating so-called soft porn in the face of such crying needs was frustrating from the start. As I began to examine the proposal, frustration turned into anger.
The Office of Juvenile Justice had been headed for slightly more than a year by Regnery, who had first drawn public attention, shortly before his Senate confirmation hearing, when CBS News caught him driving to and from his $70,000-a-year job in the Justice Department with a bumper sticker captioned HAVE YOU SLUGGED YOUR KID TODAY? This was the man selected by the President to head the largest single federal agency with responsibility for trouble kids. Now his “humor” had extended to federal grants, and the joke seemed to be on the American taxpayer.
The first odd element of the proposal related to its budget. Dr. Reisman, who was purportedly a full professor at American University, was to be given a seven-day trip to Israel, at taxpayer expense, to collect “research files.” She sounded like a winner on “Wheel of Fortune.” But there was more. The American taxpayer was also going to pay an additional $9,000 for her “relocation” expenses from Israel, including $700 in long-distance phone calls. Why was it necessary to relocated a professor at American University in Washington, D.D., from Israel to Washington?
Still more foreign travel was planned. Dr. Reisman was also to be sent to Europe to participate in a panel studying drug use. That seemed to have little relation to pornography. Besides, government reimbursement for foreign travel was almost unheard of.
After the government paid for her relocation from Israel and sent her to Europe, she estimated that she would need to make 26 trips within the United States. She already had 12 conferences picked out — again, all expenses paid. The bill for her travel and relocation expenses would come to about $30,000. By now, this was beginning to sound better than “Wheel of Fortune.” Even if the Reagan administration felt a need to have Playboy and Penthouse scrutinized, wasn’t there some researcher already living in this country who could do the job without needing to be relocated from some foreign country and without such a yen to wander?
Who was to stay on top of Playboy and Penthouse in her absence? Well, she wanted five or six staff members — in addition to consultants. They, too, would need to travel. Their conference expenses would total more than $10,000. She never said exactly how many consultants she would need. But, in all, she said she needed 590 days of their time — at $135 per day. (some would later be paid nearly twice that amount.) Why did Dr. Reisman need staffers if she was going to use so many consultants? Why did she want an additional $10,000 for “Graphic Art Production”? Was she going to study pornography or have it drawn?
All of these rather excessive expenses were made more disturbing by a copy of a memo that accompanied the anonymous packages It was from Pamela Swain, director of research for the National Institute for Juvenile Justice. The memo was to Regnery. In it, Swain, who had evidently reviewed the Reisman proposal, made her recommendations. She suggested that suck similar research had already been done, but if another review was needed, it could be done in-house for between $20,000 to $60,000. The Reisman grant was 1,200 percent more than Swain’s recommendation! Specifically, Swain wrote, “I believe this project can be accomplished in a much shorter time period, and at a considerably reduced cost to the Federal government.”
Judith Reisman’s résumé only deepened the mystery. Extending for seven pages, it seemed an amateurish attempt to pad a decidedly undistinguished academic career. In fact, for someone 48 years old, her academic accomplishments had been exceedingly slim (only four years) and recent (ending in December 1979) — certainly not sufficient to make her an undisputed authority in any field whatsoever.
Remarkably, she had never received an undergraduate degree! In merely four years and two months — from September 1975 to December 1979 — Reisman had gone from a high school graduate to a Ph.D. Moreover, she was neither a scientist nor a social scientist. She was a mass-media communication major — with a doctoral concentration in what she termed “the application of Aristotelian and Systems Analytic Theory to Mass Media Effects.” She said that her bachelor’s degree had been waived “in lieu of professional experience.” What was her professional experience? She had written children’s songs for “Captain Kangaroo”!
What were her “published works”? For two pages of her résumé, she listed them: “My Daddy’s a Policeman”; “I Haven’t Any Friends”; “Merry Magic Morning”; “Daytime, Nighttime,” which she listed twice for good measure; and so on. These ditties may well have ranked high on the Captain’s Top 40, but they were not the sort of professional accomplishment for which one expected a university like Case Western Reserve to waive an undergraduate degree. Nor would they seem to merit the rank of full professor at American University, as the proposal claimed. A full professorship was usually given years after tenure had been achieved. Judith Reisman did not appear to have been out of school long enough to have been tenured, much less promoted to full professor.
I read the rest of her résumé with considerable interest. Her “publications” were not really publications at all but, instead, generally material “awaiting publication” or “to be submitted for publication.” Usually one waits until after articles are published to put them on a résumé. Very little of her work had actually been published, and very little of that appeared in recognizable, professional journals.
She claimed to have written and delivered papers on everything from Dr. Alfred Kinsey to pedophiles, but the topic of pornography was predominant throughout. Perhaps most remarkable was the paper she said she delivered at a conference in Minnesota in 1978, while presumably still a student at Case Western. It was titled, “Teen Toilet Room Talk II: Drug/Pornographic Language in the High School Bathroom.” The picture of this middle-aged doctoral student tucked away surreptitiously in the stall of some high school bathroom with a pad and pencil in hand, voyeuristically taking notes while eavesdropping on the conversations of unsuspecting students, seemed to be taken straight from some sexploitation flick — a real-life Porky’s Revenge.
I asked the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress to do a check on all the articles and books Dr. Reisman claimed to have written. It found none. I then asked it to check under her name and the name “Judit Bat-Ada,” which she seemed to have used for the last year or two. Only two references were found. One was an article written by feminist Laura Lederer. It was actually a transcript of an interview with Judith Bat-Ada, published along with some 30 others, in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. For having an interview appear, Judith Reisman — or Judith Bat-Ada — evidently thought it appropriate to take credit for the entire book. It was during this interview that Dr. Reisman likened Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt to being “every bit as dangerous as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the political fascist triumvirate of World War II.”
Ms. Reisman claimed to have published an article in the New York University Law Review, one of the nation’s more prestigious legal journals. The Library of Congress found no such article. However, by doing a cross-check under the name “Judith Bat-Ada,” they did find one, a nine-page article in N.Y.U.’s lesser-known Review of Law and Social Change. This piece had evidently been written while she was still in school and was published in the spring of 1979. Interestingly, the Review described her as already having a Ph.D., having 20 years of experience in the field of mass communications, and being the author of a forth-coming book, The Playboy Strategy: From Object to Incest. The Library of Congress had no record of it.
Reisman’s status as a “full professor” at American University was also questionable. From the $798,531 grant, $238,777 was to go directly to American for “indirect cost,” even though the university was being reimbursed for nearly every expense. Another memo included in the package gave the strong appearance that Reisman had been appointed, only a few months before Regnery signed the grant, not as a full professor but rather as a “research professor“ — an untenured position primarily reserved for recipients of federal or foundation grants. A vice-provost of the university told me that the designation was sometimes even given to wealthy contributors who wanted a title and an office.
Even Reisman’s appointment as a research professor seemed to have been made only on the condition that she be accompanied by money from the Justice Department. The dean of the School of Educations, Myra Sadker, said in a closing memo, “Obviously, my recommendation that Dr. Reisman be appointed as a research professor is contingent upon receipt of external federal funding.” That one sentence seems to reveal several things: Judith Reisman was not associated with American University while in Israel, and certainly was not a full professor with tenure, as her proposal led one to think. Moreover, there must have been some discussion between the Justice Department and American University about Dr. Reisman prior to the grant’s approval. Rather than American University developing an idea, cockeyed though it appeared, to investigate Playboy and Penthouse, employing Judith Reisman to head it, and then approaching the Justice Department had approached the university and promised money before receiving any proposal whatsoever.
Questions were also raised about the relationship between then — presidential adviser Ed Meese and American University. Meese was listed as a member of the university’s National Advisory Committee, and his wife, Ursula, was on its board of trustees and was employed with the university on a special project at a reported $40,000-a-year salary. The question arose as to whether Meese, even at the time rumored to be headed for the position of attorney general, might not be exerting undue influence in the selection of American as the noncompetitive grant recipient. The Justice Department might not only be improperly making noncompetitive awards, but actually soliciting the individual and university that would receive the funds.
Capitol Hill staffers were not the only ones outraged by Reisman and Regnery’s idea of research. As reported in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor, University of California, Irvine, psychologist Gilbert Geis, an experienced grant-reviewer for the National Institute of Mental Health, was adamant: “I’ve never seen anything like this in 33 years of looking at grant proposals. It’s just a crazy, wild proposal. She doesn’t know anything about statistics or the Delphi Oracle.”
Slowly, a scenario began to emerge. It was said that Reisman not only was not a full professor at American University at the time the proposal was drafted, but also that she had not been a professor in Israel either. She had described her status in Israel as being equivalent to that of an associate professor at the University of Haifa. It was rumored, instead, that she was in fact only a “research fellow.” That rumor would be verified by Senate investigators in the summer of 1984 and further substantiated as recently as January 1986, in a letter from the rector of the University of Haifa, Professor Uriel Rappaport.
In her résumé, Ms. Reisman claimed to belong to eight “professional” organizations. Six of these required no professional credentials to join. For example, she listed the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which costs about $15 per year to join and comes complete with a magazine subscription. As reported by Larry Bush in The Village Voice, five organizations had no record of her membership.
Judith Reisman also claimed to have won a number of awards during her career. On in particular, the ACT award (Action for Children’s Television), she claimed to have won from 1976 through 1981 while working for “Captain Kangaroo,” which was surprising since she would have been a student and then in Israel throughout this time period. One journalist talked to the producers of “Captain Kangaroo.” They said that the show had indeed won the ACT award, but that Judit Reisman had not.
“Perhaps most remarkable was the paper Reisman said she delivered in 1978: LSQTeen Toilet Room Talk II: Drug/Pornographic Language in the High School Bathroom.’”
How did she come to be accepted as a research professor by American University’s Department of Education? An anonymous source from that university suggested that she had been turned down by three other departments, including the speech department, before the education department head agreed to accept her. One department head reportedly said that when he first interviewed Reisman, he thought the president of American University was playing a practical joke.
Her eventual acceptance in the education department was said to have been accompanied by some pressure from the president of the university, Dr. Richard E. Berendzen. Why would someone have pressured a department head to accept Dr. Reisman? Unbelievably, the White House was said to have been involved, although the source did not know from what level.
How had Judith Reisman come to be discovered by the Justice Department? According to her own account, it was because she had been asked to “present a review of my Kinsey documentation on Patrick Buchanan’s radio and television programs in Washington, D.C.” During one of the radio shows, she was perfectly willing for people to assume she was a psychiatrist with a worldwide organization. Following that presentation, according to Reisman, “the staff management of the Office of Juvenile Justice requested an immediate meeting.” She met with Regnery and, afterward, “was offered federal sponsorship.”
In other words, without one word of a proposal being written, Regnery was seemingly so taken by Judith Reisman’s “Kinsey documentation,” as presented on “The Braden-Buchanan Show,” that he offered her federal sponsorship immediately. What was this “Kinsey documentation” which so riveted Regnery and the Justice Department? Barely three years out of a Ph.D. program in communications, the esteemed Judith Reisman had decided that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, of Kinsey Reports and Indiana University fame, was “involved in what amounts to the vicious genital torture of hundreds of children.”
What was her evidence for this incredibly serious charge? Did she have witlessness? Had she talked to victims? Did she have written accounts? Well, no. In fact, during the show she never once said exactly what her evidence was. The best that can be surmised from the transcript is that Dr. Kinsey had included material in one of his books a little too explicit for Reisman’s taste.
As all of this became publicly available through the media, what was the reaction of the Justice Department officials? Did they reward the whistle-blowers inside the agency? Did they terminate the grant, thus saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars? Did they immediately demand that Judith Reisman be replaced for having misrepresented her professional credentials?
Hardly. The Justice Department’s reaction to the public exposure of wasteful grants within the Office of Juvenile Justice was sure and swift. As reported by ABC News, they locked the filing cabinets and searched the files for fingerprints! Several suspected whistle-blowers were interrogated without being allowed to have counsel present. This was your U.S. Justice Department at work. They also allowed Judith Reisman to rewrite her grant proposal at public expense. Surely, sooner or later, she would get it right.
The House Oversight Hearings were held in Washington in April 1984. At those hearings, it was determined that Dr. Reisman had indeed been offered federal sponsorship prior to submitting a proposal, and that about 85 percent of the federal funds that were under Regnery’s control had been awarded non-competitively.
The real answer to what Judith Reisman was about, though, came from a Senate hearing held in August 1984. During that hearing, Reisman testified along with officials from American University. Several suspicions were confirmed. First, and most amazingly, there had indeed been pressure directly from the White House. During questioning, American University President Berendzen acknowledged that on June 7, 1983, some two weeks after Reisman’s appearance on Patrick Buchanan’s radio show, James Wootton, Regnery’s deputy, had called him and said that the “Justice Department was interested in Dr, Reisman’s work and that it would support her next stage of research.”
Then, in January 1984, as word of the grant began to leak out, Bruce Chapman, director of planning and evaluation at the White House, who worked under Ed Meese, called Berendzen and said, “He had heard there might ne problems with her [Reisman’s] appointment,” Berendzen said, “and if that were true, he would be disappointed.” He said he was calling because the White House was “concerned about child abuse.” That was singularly amazing since two weeks later, in February, the President would suggest cutting federal child-abuse funds by more than $9 million.
It also became quite clear that Judith Reisman had never been a full or associate professor at American University. Dr. Berendzen described Reisman’s research status in scathing terms: “Such an appointment does not confer membership on the faculty. Persons in these ranks shall have no presumption of a right to reappointment. These appointments carry no implication of or credit toward academic tenure. A person holding such an appointment must have his or her salary entirely funded by sources outside the university.”
Dr. Frank Turaj, dean of American’s College of Arts and Sciences, also testified about whether Reisman’s appointment had been contingent upon receipt of federal money. Like Dr. Berendzen, Dr. Turaj was explicit: “The appointment would have been contingent upon not necessarily the receipt of that amount of money [$798,531] particularly that you have mentioned, but it would have to be upon receipt of a grant. Otherwise, Dr. Reisman would have nothing to do at our university.”
Although Reisman, even at the hearing, claimed to have served as an associate professor at the University of Haifa, officials at the director general’s office at the university had quite different notions about her status there. They advised Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, who was questioning Reisman, that she had never been an associate professor but only a research fellow, and that she was not paid by the university but rather “financed by the minister of absorption,” as was usually the case for persons who stated a strong intention to stay in Israel and seek citizenship.
Furthermore, Reisman stated in her résumé that her assignment at the University of Haifa had been to prepare a curriculum for the new Department of Communication, which she would head. However, the director general’s office advised that the university did not have a Department of Communication, nor did it intend to have one.
Judith Reisman was caught in the United States Senate with one of her many slips showing.
“Dr. Reisman’s résumé only depended the mystery. Extending for seven pages, it seemed an amateur-ish attempt to pad a decidedly undistinguished academic career.”
After the hearings, in the fall before the elections of 1984, there were rumors that funds for the Reisman grant had been suspended — that she would be allowed to finish the year and then be closed out. Things quieted down and some of us around the House and Senate began to think that maybe a small victory of sorts had been won on behalf of the American taxpayer. While Regnery had not recalled the grant, it seemed that it would end nonetheless, and a good deal of money would be saved. Such was not the case, however.
Plans for the suspension, if they were ever more than rumors, ended after the elections. With the President safely re-elected, Reisman was back, too — this time with still another freshly rewritten grant proposal. There would be no more talk of new definitions of pornography. No, this time the enemy would be clearly identified by name: Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler. Now she was going to do what she did best — the “content analysis” of cartoons! According to her own quarterly reports, Dr. Reisman, sponsored by the American taxpayer through the beneficence of the Department of Justice, was not entering as a pioneer into the brave new world of what she called “cartoonology.”
To quote Reisman’s new narrative: “This investigation will analyze the content of all child cartoons and child pictorials in all editions of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler from the date of initial publication to December, 1984.” If time allowed, she also hoped to get around to a random sample of all published letters to the editor and advice columns. No stone would be left unturned.
In February 1985, I left the House subcommittee and accepted a position with the Child Welfare League of America, an organization dedicated to serving the needs of children, especially those who are abused. More than two years after becoming acquainted with Judith Reisman, I still follow news of her grant and wait for results. Why? Why should anyone who passionately cares about children’s welfare mind if a rather eccentric woman parades as an expert on “pornology” and “cartoonology”?
We have now come to a time when even Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States find it necessary to label some right-wing antipornography initiatives as “thought control.” Certainly Judith Reisman makes a convenient if unintended accomplice to such ideological intrigues.
However, the main reason I am concerned about Reisman and her research concerns child abuse. There is no question that reports of sexual abuse are rising. Between 1983 and 1984, every state reported increases. According to a survey by the Child Welfare League, reports of child sexual abuse rose by an astounding 59 percent.
Most abuse occurs in the home — not by child molesters stalking the streets dressed in raincoats. Much of the abuse occurring in the home can be much more directly correlated with economic stress in the home — a fact that the Reagan administration may be all too willing to ignore. Finding scapegoat villains like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler is sometimes all too convenient for some people. It covers a multitude of sins with regard to our federal economic policy, while providing political pablum to administration allies on the Far Right.
Tragically, it leaves untouched the real victimizes of children outside the home — those involved in real pornography, those who wait at bus stations for the runaway and homeless, those whose trade is the eight-milimeter film or the underground videocassette, those who lure children into prostitution and into the big business of organized crime.
The Reagan administration cannot have it both ways. If this line of study is important, they must have qualified researchers to undertake it — the best in the country — not recently graduated speech majors with little to recommend them other than their extreme dedication to highly value-laden beliefs. That is not to criticize those beliefs. Women’s rights are important. But that “war,” as Judith Reisman has called it, needs to be waged by misconstruing and misrepresenting the scientific search for truth, to the extent that is waged by ideological pranksters who attempt to purchase academic integrity, it is a war that cannot be won.
EPILOGUE
In late March 1986, the following headline appeared in The Washington Times: OFFICIAL SAYS $734,371 TO PEER AT PORN WAS WASTEFUL. The story that followed detailed an admission by Alfred S. Regnery that he had made a mistake in funding the Reisman grant to determine how children are portrayed in the cartoons of Playboy and Penthouse. “The grant was for too much money, I don’t think there’s any question about that. And that’s probably my fault,” Regnery said. Several weeks later, on May 21, he announced his resignation.
While the Reisman grant was by far the most controversial grant approved by Regnery, it was not the only highlight of his controversy-studded years as the presidentially appointed head of the Justice Department’s juvenile-justice program. Following are some milestones of what The New Republic recently termed “the pathetic career of Reagan’s juvenile justice chief”:
November 1982 — Regnery, a former official of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, is named by President Reagan as administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
March 1983 — Only weeks before his Senate confirmation hearing, CBS News catches Regnery, a father of four, driving a car sporting a bumper sticker asking, HAVE YOU SLUGGED YOUR KID TODAY?
April 1983 — Regnery approves and then, after disclosures by The Washington Post, discontinues a $98,000 grant to a Senate aide to publish a book for which Regnery would have been paid $1,000 to write a chapter.
April 1983 — During his Senate confirmation hearing, Regnery attempts to explain away his lack of experience by saying he had done “considerable reading and other study” on juvenile-justice issues. When pressed, he is unable to name, on the spot, the title of a single book or reference that he used in his self-education.
May 1983 — Regnery is confirmed by the Senate.
October 1983 — Columnist Jack Anderson reveals that Regnery plans a $500,000 study to detect latent criminality by conducting medical tests on 2,000 nine- to 12-year-old boys, including tests to measure galvanic skin response to mild electric shocks. Left-handedness is also suspected as a criminal trait. Regnery kills the grant a week later, after public outcry.
December 1983 — Regnery makes a noncompetitive award of $798,531 to Judith Reisman, as ex-songwriter for “Captain Kangaroo,” to study the role played by pornography in juvenile delinquency. Nearly $250,000 in indirect costs is directed to American University, where Ursula Meese, wife of presidential adviser Ed Meese, is employed and serves on the board of trustees.
January 1984 — Regnery makes a noncompetitive grant award of $4.25 million to George Nicholson, defeated Republican candidate for attorney general in California and personal friend of Ed Meese, to disseminate school-safety information. About $400,000 is directed to Pepperdine University (though Nicholson will work more than 300 miles away), where Mees is listed as “Pepperdine Associate.”
April 1984 — Regnery tells Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Report that he sees a pornography/child-murder link.
July 1984 — “ABC Nightly News” reports that three Juvenile Justice employees were summoned by Justice Department attorneys, locked in, refused counsel, placed under oath, and questioned about their alleged whistle-blowing activities regarding the Reisman and Nicholson grants. Grant files are locked and checked for fingerprints.
January 1985 — Regnery approves a new, revised grant award to Judith Reisman for $734,000 to conduct a “content analysis” of the cartoons in Playboy and Penthouse.
March 1986 — While freezing other grant funds, Regnery makes a $186,710 noncompetitive grant award to an official of Rev. Falwell’s Liberty University to design a high school course on the Constitution, even though another Justice Department grant to that official had just been suspended for nonperformance.
March 1986 — Regnery admits that Reisman porn study was a mistake.
May 1986 — Regnery announces his resignation.
June 1986 — An article in The New Republic reveals — as originally reported in the November 1985 Penthouse — that when police searched Regnery’s home, shortly after an alleged assault in 1976, “they found a cache of pornography, including ‘several catalogues for various prophylactic devices and erotica.’ The police also found ‘a book with numerous color photos of various sexual gratifications, including oral sex and the placing of objects into the vaginas,’ a German sex magazine, and a copy of Penthouse.” In the article, Regnery concedes that he “probably had a little [pornography] around the house,” but denies that he was a consumer.
You know, articles about outrageous Government waste appear all the time, and Judith Reisman was neither the first nor the last beneficiary of bureaucracy. We just picked one because honestly we had no idea “Reader’s Digest” was still around. I guess we still have grandmas, so there must still be a market.
