Clinton-Gershon Gossip Affects Small Town, Political Parties

Gina Gershon is livid and Bill Clinton is ranting and raving. Hilary, true to form, admits nothing. Deny all you want, Bilary, rumors have spread faster than Monica's....never mind. Todd Purdum's recent Vanity Fair article alleges impropriety between the actress and former President and has everyone scrambling. Gina Gershon has demanded a retraction. Bill Clinton called the journalist "sleazy" and "dishonest."

Hilary's campaign apologized for the crude language use by her husband. But that hasn't stopped the insinuations: type "Gina Gershon Bill Clinton Vanity Fair" in the Google search engine and you get more than 15,000 hits. Internet bloggers are running with the story as fast as their little fingers will type. Whether or not the rumor has any basis in truth is not the point. One vehemently denied cigar story too many and the public will assume the worst...even of the best.

No matter where you work, be it the White House, Hollywood, or a neighborhood bar, rumormongers will always jump to conclusions if even the slightest hint of a scandal rears its ugly head. Even an innocent change or exchange can give rise to malicious rumors.

Five years ago I moved from a small town in Iowa to a slightly larger town in Kansas. After approximately three months at my new job, I traveled back to Iowa to visit friends. Before leaving, I went to personnel and had them copy my new Social Security card, updated to return to my maiden name. All the information was changed over the weekend, including my last name on the phone list. When I walked back into the office Monday morning, the receptionist greeted me with "Congratulations!" I assumed she had mistaken me for someone else. I'd done nothing to deserve congratulations unless you counted seven hours in a car with three cranky children in which I didn't once commit any sort of mayhem. Three more people congratulating me and wishing me well, however, convinced me something was, indeed, up. I finally asked the fifth person to explain the acclaim and discovered the office staff was under the assumption I'd gotten married over the weekend because my name had changed.

Not all gossip, however, is quite as harmless. Fast forward about three years. I still worked at the same office but also worked about twenty hours a week at a local convenience store. Another single parent started working the same day I did. She, too, was five foot nothing and had light brown hair. Marital status, height, and hair color was where our similarities ended, however. I was a homebody and preferred to rent a movie with my kids and watch it at home. The other young woman, however, was a party girl, always looking for the next best thing, and often seen in the company of men of dubious morals. In this particular case, she was dating one of those infamous and nefarious characters: Married But Looking.

One night while I was helping another customer, a woman entered the store. She seemed agitated, but waited almost patiently while I sold lottery tickets and cigarettes and sent the customer on his way. She watched as he exited the store, got in his pickup, and began to back out of the parking spot before she turned to me, her face transformed. Gone was the agitation; in its place was sorrow and rage. She began to scream at me, her sentences garbled and nearly unintelligible. I managed to discern a few words, though: husband, my, and whore. And a name, not mine. Just as she lurched across the counter and grabbed my hair in one hand and jabbed at my eyes with the impressively long nails on the other hand, I managed to blurt out that I was not, in point of fact, Jessica. She paused in her attempted assault and battery and asked me to repeat what I had said.

Twenty minutes later, she left. She wasn't happy, but at least she was no longer attempting to remove my eyeball with her forty dollar acrylic nails. Several of her friends had spotted her husband around town with "that short new girl who works at the convenience store" and informed her of his liasons without bothering to learn the name of the home-wrecker. I was new and short and fit the bill and nearly got my butt kicked to prove it.

But that's not the worst of it. I got to work at the office the next day to discover the "news" had spread to my co-workers....and the rest of the company. By the time my supervisor called me into her office, the story had expanded to include graphic lurid details, including the wife catching me with her errant husband en flagrante delecto. None of which happened. But gossip and rumors don't generally rely on fact and often gain momentum and believed credibility in direct proportion to the size of the mouths of the rumormongers.

And when you're in the public eye, as Gina Gershon and Bill Clinton are, and have a less than pristine reputation, the stories are spread not just by the mouths of gossips, but by news stories and press coverage and internet bloggers and are most often believed, based on past insinuations. After all, if it looks like a cigar and tastes like a....never mind...it probably belongs to Monica.