It looks like Halderman is a real dumb jerk. He thought he saw a way out of his money problems by jerking both his girlfriend and Letterman.
Right now I’m feeling pretty bad for “Monty”. And it looks like Letterman was only half kidding when he said his partners would be more embarrassed than him.
Sure it can be, but it’s so hard to find a decently good romantic fit for yourself that we shouldn’t put up even more barriers to doing so. Bottom line is that unless there is actual harassment or rape or some sort of crime, I don’t give a rat’s ass who’s fucking who, and neither should the American public. The only one who should care is his wife/girlfriend, and if she’s gotten over it, then we the public are total assholes for getting on our soapboxes and blowing it up like some sort of scandal.
I sometimes think we should just have live sex on public TV at all hours of the day just so people can get over this inane sexual repression that dominates the national discourse. Kids can see it? GOOD! Sex is not a boogeyman, and children should not be taught that it is on par with drugs and stealing.
My guess is that the women involved were employees of Worldwide Pants, so CBS wouldn’t have any legal issues.
See above. The NY Post story I linked to says the Letterman/Birkitt romance ended after Lasko gave birth to Letterman’s son, Harry, in 2003, sources said. Be kinda tough for the romance to have been over before she even got pregnant!
Well, technically the limo driver was involved, knowingly or not. I don’t know which I’d find more surprising: the driver was in on it, or he would agree to give something to Letterman without knowing what the hell it was.
You find it surprising that Dave’s driver would give Dave an envelope from a CBS producer? Why?
From what I’ve heard and read, nobody has access to Dave except for a very select few. Maybe Les Moonves has full access to Letterman, but I’d guess he’s about it when it comes to CBS employees. I can’t imagine his driver (who I’m sure would know this rule better than most) would agree to simply hand over an unsolicited envelope that was given to him one morning before Letterman got into his car. It just seems a little…off somehow.
Letterman said he cut out his other women after he got married, so there’s no scandal here. Not there would be anyway, but a single guy getting laid is really not a scandal.
I have to admit I’m biased in favor of Letterman–I’ve been watching him faithfully since his “Late Night” years, and always preferred him to Leno–but it’s hard for me to understand the intensity of the hatred several of you feel for him. While I don’t like Leno’s style of comedy as much as Letterman’s, I don’t HATE Leno. I can see why people may not care for Letterman’s cranky personality (while fans of his, like myself, revel in it), but the schadenfreude that I sense from some posters rises to the level of partisan politics. What am I missing?
As for the alleged object of Letterman’s (presumably last pre-marital) fling–Stephanie Birkitt–I can’t say I’m terribly surprised if it is indeed her. Letterman’s always had an interesting chemistry with her, and it was fun to watch them interact in her bits on the show. I can remember her first appearances on the show were off-screen–Letterman would call her office during the Monday show, and ask her about her weekend, and she’d always have these funny stories (she and Dave share a propensity for long yet engaging stories about nothing in particular). During her later on-screen appearances, Letterman would tease her mercilessly (albeit good-naturedly), and in retrospect, it’s obvious he was flirting with her–but then, Letterman acts that way with many women, both guests and colleagues, so his behavior didn’t stand out at the time.
The one time I remember thinking “wow, Dave seems to know Stephie/Vicki/Monti [whatever nickname Letterman was calling her at the time] pretty well outside the studio” was a passing reference that Letterman once made about her not being somewhere because she had a Jenny Craig class that evening–and Paul Shaffer (I think it was) kinda gasped and said “she’s going to be furious with you!” and Letterman responded with something like “oh, come on–she doesn’t even watch the show.”
Just some odd thoughts…it mentions “several women” involved with DL. Wonder how many and over what period of time? Did all these “relationships” take place in DL’s office? And the affair with Ms. Birkitt, DL doesn’t like to go out/socialize, so did they rendevous in the office, too? What kind of affair is that??? “Stop into my office, Stephanie, before you go, I want to discuss the show”. What was written on the page from her diary, and what was the picture? If a screenplay was being written, would it have been made clear that it was based on The Affairs of David Letterman? If so, couldn’t DL have just ignored it? And would a movie/TV thing actually have been made? … This Halderman douche looks like he’s one step above a disgruntled loner, is said to be a surly drunk and womanizer, pays big child support - what on God’s green earth is the attraction??
I don’t expect we’ll ever know the answers to these little musings, not that we should, none of our business; but of course we can wonder.
The schadenfreude is, IMO, due primarily to two things: One, he is strongly partisan and use the bully pulpit of his show and politically sympathetic audience to lambaste conservatives and promote the liberal point of view. Secondly – and even more important in my estimation – is that he’s a mean-spirited asshole who has no qualms whatsoever about hurting peoples’ feelings and/or embarrassing them and making them look bad for the sake of a laugh. In short, he’s a prick.
Like Stephe96, I’m revelling him getting his comeuppance, and in such an ironically appropriate way. Once in a blue moon, the wheel of fate doles out justice to those who deserve it, and this is one of those times.
Being in a decades-long serious relationship with somebody does not equal “single”. I don’t really give a shit about Dave’s love life, but you seem to be going out of your way to misrepresent the situation. I’ve been in a committed relationship with my girlfriend for over 10 years, and we’re not getting married because we don’t really see the point (we’re not religious), but if either of us cheated it would be a major issue, as it would in most relationships.
I just don’t see how this is a “comeuppance”, though.
I’m not a fan of Letterman, I’ve never watched his show on a regular basis, I’m completely indifferent to him. I just don’t see where the huge scandal is. Unmarried man fucks women. There may be skeevy or skanky aspects to the whole thing - in fact, there probably is - but short of actual criminal activity I don’t see Letterman suffering from this.
Yeah, I’m not seeing a “comeuppance” either. I’d be surprised if the ratings for his show wavered in the slightest. If anything, he’s getting cred from people for standing up to the blackmailer.
Okay, I understand that you’re happy something embarrassing has happened to Letterman because you dislike him, but I don’t see anything “ironically appropriate” about this. Letterman makes mean jokes about people on his show so it’s only fitting that he be blackmailed about his sexual relationships? That isn’t the same thing at all.
But, he was mean to Sawaaaah!
You’ve repeated this like five times already and each time you’ve been told that the scandal is in the extortion plot and the sex with subordinate co-workers.
Some people care that Letterman cheated on his SO, but that is really only a minor part of the story. If that was all that happened then this would only make news in People magazine and a bunch of other tabloids.
And yet you tried to be a screenwriter.
By comeuppance, I’m not talking about career consequences; I’m talking about his being hoist on his own petard and finding himself the subject of embarrassment and the revelation of private details that reveal him as a hypocrite in making fun of the moral and sexual aspects of other peoples’ lives.
And if something happens to a mean-spirited person (and Letteman has been a mean-spirited jerk for decades before anyone ever heard of Sarah Palin, niblet-head) that causes him embarrassment and concern over the loss of job and perhaps even his marriage, it creates the sort of schadenfreude that Götterfunken was wondering about.
I’m still not seeing it. Part of Letterman’s job is making jokes about current events, but I don’t think he’s ever been the one to expose a celebrity sex scandal. He makes jokes about things that have already been reported in the news. I’m sure there will be plenty of jokes about Letterman now, but I doubt it will hurt his reputation and he hasn’t complained about it so far.
Letterman has never presented himself as a paragon of virtue, so there’s no hypocrisy in him having a somewhat sleazy sexual relationship. He’d be a hypocrite if he did start whining about people making jokes about him, but if he can take it as well as he can dish it out then I don’t see any hypocrisy.
Exactly. It’s an affair if Regina Lasko thinks it is. Or if he does, for that matter. Unless they had an arrangement where sneaky sex was OK, he was cheating. We have no way of knowing that, of course, but it stands to reason that monogamy was part of the deal.