Website Claims Scoop on Jackson Testimony
The three-man staff at the Smoking Gun had been crashing on the story well into the wee hours Wednesday night and then through the day Thursday -- scrambling to review, scan and post hundreds of pages of what the website claimed was grand jury testimony from the Michael Jackson child-molestation case.
"We need a back room full of monkeys to put all this stuff up there," said William Bastone, co-founder and editor of the New York-based news outlet. "We are not called on very often to process this much stuff."
Tired but ebullient, the Smoking Gun's operators appeared, once again, to have scooped the nation's biggest media outlets -- and plenty of tabloid competitors -- by obtaining and publishing much of a 1,903-page document that had been sealed by Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville.
Repeatedly over the last eight years, the tart, celebrity-centric website -- thesmokinggun.com -- has found and posted original documents about the missteps of the rich and famous -- and those who aspire to the same.
The site once outed the dream-groom of Fox Television's reality program "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?" showing that Rick Rockwell had been the target of a restraining order for allegedly threatening an ex-girlfriend.
It obtained and posted the 1977 Oui magazine interview in which future movie star and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had bragged about his sexual escapades. Also making its debut on the site's colorful pages: a judge's account of former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith's difficulties with math and her finances. (She couldn't seem to decide the right number of zeros when balancing the books.)
The website's targets have routinely been angered, but unable to dent the credibility of the reports.
Many of the revelations, however, have challenged mainstream media outlets, where news managers must decide whether to republish the information.
On Thursday, editors at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were among those who decided not to run accounts of the purported grand jury testimony in today's editions. Neither newspaper could confirm that the transcript on the website matched that on file in Santa Barbara County Superior Court. Associated Press, which supplies stories used by many newspapers and broadcast outlets, took a similar position.
