Fresh Revelations About Spitzer in New Documentary

Get ready to see a lot more of Eliot Spitzer. On April 7, the disgraced former New York governor told Fortune magazine that he was aiming for a political comeback and would not entirely dismiss the notion that he might run for office again this year. “I’ve never said I would never consider running for office again,” Spitzer told editor at large Peter Elkind, all but confirming the rumors that he’s looking to move forward with his political career. (Fortune is published by Time Inc., the parent company of TIME and TIME.com.)

Still, we may soon be seeing more of New York’s “Luv Gov” than even he bargained for. This week, a new book, Rough Justice, as well as a new documentary take a fresh look at Spitzer’s rise and fall, offering new revelations about the sordid dalliances with prostitutes that helped end his governorship in 2008.

(See the top 10 political sex scandals.)

The book, also written by Elkind, and movie, directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), are a collaborative effort between the two men, who previously partnered on the 2005 film exposé Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Their combined works paint Spitzer as a powerful, increasingly arrogant governor, an aggressive escort-service client and, ultimately, a humbled husband. What’s more, they attempt to show the former attorney general who once battled Wall Street excess as a frustrated financial watchdog who was relegated to the sidelines while the biggest economic crisis of our time unfolded on his home turf.

Several of Elkind’s more salacious details have been publicized by New York media outlets well in advance of the book’s release, scheduled for Tuesday. Among its claims: Spitzer ordered three prostitutes in a single day from the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. escort service, he flew a girl to Puerto Rico while he was attending a conference there, and over the course of two years, he spent more than $100,000 on call girls.

But there’s still more to the story. TIME has seen extended clips from Gibney’s still untitled documentary — a rough cut of which will screen at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24 — that contain an array of new details that deviate from the way the scandal was presented in 2008.

For one thing, Gibney establishes that Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the singer and sometime escort who gained instant fame after her encounter with the governor in a Washington hotel became public, only slept with Spitzer once; another girl, whose name and identity are withheld, saw him repeatedly. In Gibney’s film, this escort (known only as Angelina) recounts her rushed transactions with Spitzer, whom she quickly recognized as the governor. After a couple of dates, she says, she went so far as to read a Spitzer biography as a way of getting to know “Client 9” better.

At another point in the documentary, Spitzer compares his arrogance and flawed decisions to the tale of Icarus and notes that he was far from unaware of the possible consequences of his joining the client list of the Emperor’s Club. Spitzer had railed against prostitution rings as attorney general, and Gibney’s interviews with former Emperor’s Club CEO Cecil Suwal portray Spitzer’s initial interactions with the company as tentative and paranoid. Suwal says Spitzer used the pseudonym George Fox and whispered throughout his first phone call to the club. He later garnered a reputation among Emperor’s Club girls for booking short, rushed dates and disliking conversation. The governor would also often pay for extra hours, to ensure that his dates were not affected if he was running late.

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The film, for which the governor sat down with Gibney for four separate interviews, also hints darkly at a possible conspiracy that may have helped foster his undoing. It briefly glimpses Spitzer’s two most prominent enemies: AIG’s former CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and billionaire investment banker Ken Langone — who each found themselves at the business end of Spitzer’s zealous crackdown on executive pay and alleged securities fraud. Gibney alleges that at one point, Langone hired an investigator to dig up political dirt on Spitzer during the gubernatorial campaign; Langone denies that the private eye ever looked into the governor’s sex life. Both Gibney and Elkind also relate the story of Roger Stone, a political consultant and self-described “GOP hit man” who claims he dug up information on Spitzer’s patronizing of prostitutes and then passed it along to the feds. (Stone denies any suggestion that he was ever bankrolled by Greenberg or Langone.) “We raise an important question,” Gibney tells TIME in his Manhattan studio. “Did private individuals hire people to tail Spitzer and then pass that information along to the government?”

Gibney also questions the timing of the scandal, which broke in March 2008 — months before Wall Street’s ill-advised deals precipitated a major financial collapse. “Strictly speaking, your job [at the Justice Department] isn’t to bring a case against a small-time prostitution ring, which federal prosecutors never do, in order to be able to use the prosecution of the case to leak all sorts of salacious details so that the press picks it up, outs him, and then he resigns as governor,” he says. “It is more than interesting that [Spitzer] goes down just as everything else is going down.”

Yet Spitzer admits that he has no one to blame but himself. In the film, he is asked about the rumors that there were people on Wall Street who were gunning for him. Sitting on a sofa, mulling his answer for several seconds without expression, Spitzer brushes aside the theory, saying, “I did what I did. And shame on me.”

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