The New York Post reports that former governor Eliot Spitzer, the infamous “Client 9” who resigned amid a prostitution scandal, was accused of choking a woman at The Plaza hotel.
One of Spitzer’s former hookers described violent behavior during their trysts in a 2013 book.
John Spitzer demonstrated an amazing ability to rebound from one of the most infamous scandals in recent memory. First, just two years after his resignation, CNN chose him to co-anchor their 8 p.m. hour. The suits ignored the warnings:
In June, [CNN’s Jonathan] Klein announced that he would hire the famously black-socked and disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer. Klein faced stiff internal resistance to hiring Spitzer. When one CNN executive expressed to Klein the concern that viewers risked being turned off by Spitzer’s hooker scandal, Klein had snapped, “I don’t give a f***.”
To the surprise of no one, Spitzer rubbed his female co-host, Kathleen Parker, the wrong way; Parker left the show after four months.
The ratings flop from Spitzer’s CNN efforts didn’t harm his career in television; he was promptly hired by Al Gore’s Current TV. His nonexistent ratings on that network didn’t seem to bother him; he told an interviewer, “Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time.” He departed shortly after Gore announced he was selling the channel to Al-Jazeera.
He ran for New York City comptroller in 2013, declaring, “It’s now been five years, I hope the public will extend its forgiveness to me.” He almost got it; he lost the primary narrowly, winning almost 48 percent of the vote.
When Spitzer’s CNN show was canceled, at the end of the final episode, Spitzer closed the program by reading a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt that inspired his show’s title. He quoted, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs; who comes short again and again.”
Sometimes the man in the arena is a terrible human being.