monday, april 19, 2010
WOLF TRAP SEASON
Starry
nights
From Aretha Franklin to Tony Bennett: the summer lineup for Wolf Trap. C3
BOOK WORLD
A fictional
mine disaster
From a former coal-country reporter, a powerful novel of the dark world underground. C2
Style
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ABCDE
C
S
3LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Media Backtalk with Howard Kurtz Noon
AT CROSS- PURPOSES
“In any given year, [boxer Joe Louis] likely
experienced five or six operas’
worth of cliffhangers.”
— Robert Battey in his review of “Shadowboxer: An Opera Based on the Life of Joe Louis” C3
THEATER REVIEW
‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Harvey Fierstein is Tevye in the National Theater show. C3
JEFFREY LENA:
Sole practitioner in California is the voice of the Vatican in U.S. courts
by Jason Horowitz
fending Pope Benedict XVI from a deposition mo- tion in a case involving child abuse by clergy. In a suit pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Lena is arguing that the Vatican cannot be tried for trans- ferring a predatory priest from Ireland to Oregon. In Mississippi, he is defending the Vatican against ac- cusations that it participated in a money-laundering scheme. In New York, Lena is defending the Holy See in a commercial-licensing dispute about the use of images belonging to the Vatican Museums. Wherever it is in the United States that the Vati- can stands accused, Lena is there to protect it. “I am counsel for the Holy See,” Lena said. As an international clerical sex abuse scandal has
T
rocked the Roman Catholic Church and raised ques- tions about the meaning of sin and crime, penance and punishment, church and state, Lena, a sole practitioner who works out of a small office in Northern California where his wife has kept the books, has taken the lead in defending the Vatican in the courts of law and public opinion. That means that the mild-mannered and reclusive comparative law specialist is swamped. And he looks it.
lena continued on C9
JEFF ANDERSON:
Career fighting for the underdog led to taking on the church
by Peter Slevin
50, he got his start in the law by representing in- digent clients. He is now a fitness fanatic who lights his ornate office here with Tiffany reproductions and drives a Lexus. He gets his balance from Zen Buddhism, his per- sistence from the reporters who felled Richard Nix- on and his inspiration from the sexually abused cli- ents who trust him to make the Roman Catholic Church pay for the sins of its fathers. Jeff Anderson, who draws headlines and epithets
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and rarely sleeps more than four hours a night, is us- ing his manic energy to challenge one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the world, a 2,000-year-old church with hundreds of millions of devoted followers. “All the roads lead to Rome,” Anderson, 62, said during a recent 20-hour day that included a round trip to Chicago on a chartered jet to meet a man abused by a priest. “What we’re doing is getting us closer every single day.” Closer, he thinks, to learning how the Vatican re-
anderson continued on C8
L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO / VATICAN POOL/GETTY IMAGES
TV PREVIEW
Nonprofit’s news gathering pays off
HOWARD KURTZ
Media Notes
heri Fink had a medical degree, a doctorate and a nose for news, along with a tendency to rush off to disaster zones from Kosovo to Iraq. What she didn’t have was a steady paycheck to support her journalism. Once Fink was hired by the nonprofit
S
newsroom ProPublica, she spent a year investigating a New Orleans hospital where 45 patients died during Hurricane Katrina. And last week the New York Times Magazine shared a Pulitzer Prize for running her powerful, 13,000-word piece. This is a glimpse of an unexpected future: a battered newspaper business, an idealistic start-up with a deep-pocketed liberal backer, and dogged reporters who otherwise might
be out of work. If the Times was piggy- backing on ProPublica — which covered about half the $400,000 cost of the investigation — the paper has plenty of company. “That’s what we’re here for,” says Paul
Steiger, the former Wall Street Journal managing editor who founded ProPublica and makes its stories available to interested outlets. “The goal is not about getting credit. The goal is getting the story before the eyes of the people who can most benefit from it.” Herbert Sandler, a 78-year-old former bank owner who is giving the venture roughly $10million a year, says
media notes continued on C8
‘McVeigh’: A chilling portrait of seething hate
by Hank Stuever
Fifteen years ago today, Timothy
McVeigh parked a Ryder truck filled with explosives and ammonium ni- trate fertilizer in front of the Okla- homa City federal building and det- onated a bomb so strong it sheared off half the building and killed 168 people. History is still puzzling through the event’s lingering effects. McVeigh is dead (he was executed in
2001) and yet very much with us, in an eerie vibe that rolls around every April 19. At least he is for MSNBC talk-show host Rachel Maddow, who has been having 1990s flashbacks with the anti-
MSNBC
COLD-BLOODED: To victims’ families, Timothy McVeigh said, “Get over it.”
government vitriol that most recently accompanied the health-care reform debate.
“Nine years after his execution, we
are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh’s voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti- government extremism,” Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Ter-
rorist.” She’s talking, of course, about the
latest news about militias, weapons stockpiling, “tea party” anger and the perception of rising unrest in those who seek to reclaim an America sup- posedly lost to federal control: “On this date, which holds great meaning for the anti-government movement,” Mad-
tv preview continued on C4
he Vatican’s chief American pursuer once flunked out of law school and sold shoes for a living. A father at 19, an alcoholic until nearly
his is a bad time for Jeffrey Lena to have quit caffeine. In Kentucky, the 51-year-old attorney is de-
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