Metro

I’m sorry I called Kristin Davis a hooker

I apologize for calling gubernatorial candidate Kristin Davis a hooker in a column published in this paper on Tuesday. I offer this apology for calling Kristin Davis a hooker, after receiving an e-mailed press release declaring her intention to sue me for calling her a hooker.

She is not, the press release explains, a hooker. Nor has she ever been a hooker — or at least, according to the press release, “there is no evidence whatsoever” that Davis was a hooker.

In the press release, her lawyer says, “Mr. Podhoretz cannot make irresponsible statements like calling my client a hooker.”

I am sorry if I made an irresponsible statement calling Kristin Davis a hooker. I had wrongly assumed that the hooker business was like any other business in which ambitious go-getters with spunk rose through its ranks from rough-and-tumble frontline work to the more genteel managerial responsibilities that go with the hotly desired executive title of “madam.”

Since I am willing to acknowledge I don’t know enough about what goes into making someone a hooker, I was wrong to call Kristin Davis a hooker.

I was wrong to assume that, just because she (in the words of her own press release) “spent four months on Rikers Island after pleading to one count of promoting prostitution,” Kristin Davis herself could be described as a hooker. No, and no again — Kristin Davis was an employer of hookers, a contractor of hookers.

She interposed herself between clients like Eliot Spitzer and contractors like Ashley Dupre, but in so interposing, she participated only in the sense that she made money off the hooker.

I must confess I don’t entirely understand why Kristin Davis would consider it “reckless, false and defamatory” that I called her a hooker. She describes herself as a libertarian, and is opposed to laws governing financial transactions involving sexual acts. She doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with being a hooker.

I think a mistake like mine, the mistake of calling Kristin Davis a hooker, deserves some explication so that others don’t journey down the same path I did and call Kristin Davis a hooker.

So why did I call Kristin Davis a hooker? To quote the press release again (I would quote from an actual legal document in proffering this apology for calling Kristin Davis a hooker, but one doesn’t, in fact, exist): “Davis acknowledges she ran an escort service which supplied call girls for former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.”

This is what I knew, and that knowledge was the source of my mistaken belief that Kristin Davis had been a hooker, and was the root of my statement to that effect in my column on Tuesday.

So, to sum up: I called Kristin Davis a hooker, and I shouldn’t have called Kristin Davis a hooker. She is, instead, an official candidate for governor of New York, a state that stands on the precipice of self-destruction, in part due to the unseriousness with which its politicians and its people have treated the circumstances that have led us to the precipice.

That unseriousness was reflected in the appalling spectacle of Monday night’s debate, in which Kristin Davis’ standing as the race’s comic relief was trumped by the Republican Party candidate’s decision to dash off to the bathroom before the event was over, and the made-for-viral-Internet mad-hatter performance of Jimmy McMillan, of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

Kristin Davis should’ve appeared with a white beard, a twirly moustache and black gloves — in which case, no one would have called her a hooker. What people are likely to be calling the state of New York in a few years, I can barely hazard a guess.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com