Official: Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide

Tarpon Springs, Florida--I haven't been reading my email for several days, but this was no surprise and nothing missed. Jeane Palfrey killed herself by her own hand. Not to be outdone by reality, entrepreneurial demagogues like Alex Jones are going to keep digging deeper holes insisting that there's a cover-up. Keep digging, Alex, everyone cranes their necks at a car wreck. At least ethically-impaired author Bill Keisling understood what we were looking at on May 1st of this year--suicide. I'm not so sure in the case of Palfrey's erstwhile civil attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley. Recently, he seemed to be leaning towards a strong possibility that Palfrey was the victim of foul play. Why exactly that would be necessary for his version of the narrative escapes me. Doesn't it seem obvious that the woman was unwell?

The unasked question remains: why was there no competency hearing during the legal proceedings of Deborah Jeane Palfrey? Are the answers in sealed court documents? I'm saying yes. How sick and depraved is it to use the legal system to run a mentally-unbalanced woman to her death? What kind of message does that send? At best, a pretty weird one. This was a witch trial-of-sorts, make no mistake of it. But it wasn't the kind that Ms. Magazine and other outlets are saying it was. Palfrey was a businesswoman, a capitalist, an employer, but most of all, she was a pimp. She wasn't an ordinary one, however, and there's no indication that she was any more abusive and exploitative than any other American employer. She was not.

But her clients were extremely well-heeled, even incredibly powerful. Does that mean they "murdered" her? No. There was no reason to after her conviction, and she was holding a bad hand--there were no more "big" names that Palfrey was aware of. By the end, it was a bluff on her part, though it's possible there are other names yet to be revealed in her remaining phone records. She was playing a very dangerous game considering her clientele. Her crime was telling us some their names, their identities. The common mistake of the press--namely the mainstream media--was that this was all about "big names," a trap that Palfrey fell into herself. The reasons for this error on their part is complicated, and this new report isn't going to fuel anything but the most base and paranoid of imaginations. Proof: you have none. She killed herself because she was disturbed. Get over it, and yourself.

Along with the Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham scandals, Palfrey proved that there's an institutionalized culture of bribes that include sex in Washington D.C., and that blackmail is likely a part of a very noxious-mix. In a surveillance culture like our own, someone is always watching, taking notes, and that the implications for frail politicians (and the rest of us) are grim. The government and the mainstream press did their best to keep the rest of us from knowing that what she did was commonplace in the nation's Capital.

The downing of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer during her legal proceedings only underscored the fact that the government is constantly watching and cherry-picking who gets "outed" based on who's running the executive branch at the time. The case of Republican Senator David Vitter's treatment after his own indiscretions were made public just makes the hypocrisy all-the-more obvious. Justice? Good luck finding much in America these days, guilty-or-not. My former co-researcher Monique Rawlings (aka "SP Biloxi,") is likely to contend that Jeane was "innocent," another assertion that I find not only intellectually dishonest, but utterly bizarre.

That's not important now, the truth is. I told you so.