Sex and the Saddle

 “Why don’t you reporters simply tell the truth?” a frustrated public official once asked me.

Whenever I hear a question like that, I think about an incident that happened when I was a young reporter at The Tulsa Tribune in Oklahoma and a woman called and told me that she needed my help.  

 She said  her husband was in prison and that she was being sexually harassed by a high -ranking prison official. She claimed this man had threatened to have her husband beaten unless she did what the official wanted sexually.

I was surprised when we met because this woman was strikingly attractive and articulate and I had assumed that because she was married to a convict, she would be neither. I was twenty-five years old and she was twenty-nine. 

She told me that her husband was doing a ten-year bit for armed robbery and that he had a  couple years left before he could be paroled.  He’d been a model inmate and had recently been rewarded by being made a trustee on the prison farm that operated in those days outside the walls. She had promised to wait for her husband and had been faithful to him, she said.  

One afternoon, she drove to a remote area of the prison farm and met him.  Escape wasn’t on either of their minds.  Sex was. Unfortunately for them, they were caught in the act and her husband was stripped of his trustee status and returned to the main prison. She was told that she could not visit him for several months.

Now this is where the story became interesting. She slid a white envelope across the table and told me that it contained photographs of her nude, sitting on a horse saddle.

 “I had a friend take them of me because my husband wanted them. The ones in the envelope are a few of the rejects,” she explained.

She had given her husband several of the nude photographs before they were caught at the farm and those pictures, she claimed, had found their way into the hands of an assistant warden.  This official, who was married, had called her and demanded that she have sex with him, she told me. Otherwise, he would make life difficult for her husband.

“Please help us,” she pleaded.

Her’s was a serious allegation. This was long before sexual harassment was brought into the national spotlight by the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas episode, but I certainly didn’t believe it was right for a public official to blackmail a woman for sexual favors. If her charges were true, the man needed to be exposed and prosecuted.

I went to the prison and arranged to see the woman’s husband and, not surprisingly,  he told the exact same story. I explained that there was no way for me to verify what they were saying and told him that  I couldn’t write anything about their charges without confronting the assistant warden.

Much to my surprise, the convict told me to go head and confront him.

“If he knows that you are aware of what he did, then he’ll leave my wife alone and be afraid to do anything to me,” he said. “He’ll know you are watching.”

So I talked to the assistant warden, who denied that he had ever harassed  the woman and claimed that the convict and his wife were trying to ruin his reputation because he had taken away the man’s trustee status.

So you tell me, who was telling the truth?

I couldn’t understand what the couple had to gain by making-up their story and there was a record in the prison files  that verified that prisoner had been stripped of his trustee status after he was caught having sex with his wife at the prison farm.

But there was no evidence that the assistant warden had sexually harassed anyone — no taped recorded telephone calls or letters — and I wasn’t going to smear his reputation based only on their unsubstantiated stories. 

My editors and I decided that there was simply no story here. I was told to check periodically on the inmate to see if he was being punished by the assistant warden, but otherwise forget about the entire matter.

This summer, I will celebrate my 37^th year as a journalist/author ,but I still think about that incident every once in a while —  especially when I hear someone suggest that the “truth” is easy to find.

Sometimes, it isn’t.

Oh, what about that envelope with the photos in them? You might be wondering if I looked at the snapshots. Of course, I did. I had to look at the evidence, didn’t I? And to this day, I remember exactly what I said when I put the nude snapshots back into the envelope and handed it back to her.

Remember now, I was only twenty-five and I was trying to act professional.

I said: “Nice saddle.”