"I ... did ... not ... have sex ... with ... that boy."

There’s a wonderful passage in Balzac’s The Black Sheep where the lawyer Desroches counsels his client Philippe as Philippe leaves prison and undertakes his nw life on parole:

…the young attorney gave this horrifying soldier one of those incontrovertible sermons in which lawyers assess everything at its true value, using plain words to assess people's conduct, and analysing and reducing to their simplest form the feelings of clients in whom they are interested enough to lecture them at all.

Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep 257 (paperback ed. 1970)

I thought of Deroches yesterday as I listened to David Roth speak for Mark Foley: “There was absolutely no inappropriate sexual contact with any minor ... and any suggestion that Mark Foley is a pedophile is false."

I’ll leave it for others to parse the meaning of “pedophile.” What I’d love to know is what kind of conversation lay behind “absolutely no inappropriate sexual contact.” A lot of lawyers would not stick their neck out that way—not as a matter of principle, but purely for reasons of tactics. If it turns out to be false (and I can barely imagine the hordes of investigators and reporters that must be crawling all over this one already [Cf. update fn infra)—if it turns out to be false, then he emerges not just as a pedophile, but as a lying pedophile to boot.

Under the circumstances, a lot of good lawyers would have tried not to know anything about Foley’s past. “I just ask them—what is your defense?” an old-time criminal lawyer told me when I was young. It’s primitive and often unsound, but I know what he was driving at.

Roth sounds like a pro. He knows all this. One can only imagine:

Foley: I want you to know that I never…

Roth: Wait a minute, Mark, I am your lawyer and I am bound to keep your confidences, but there are some matters on which, if I am fully informed, I may find I have lost my freedom have motion…

Foley: No, no, I really want you to know. I have never, absolutely never, had actual sex with a boy…

Roth: Fine, Mark, luckily that is not our issue today…

Foley: …and I want you to go out there to that press conference and say so to the whole world. Go on, say it: I have never had sex with a boy.

Roth (sighing, and remembering his Balzac): Mark, you are the client and I am only the lawyer. But have you any idea what you are committing yourself to? I mean, there are a million snoops out there poring over every last detail of your life. If there is ever the slightest hint that you are not telling the truth here…

Foley: And let me tell you about how I was molested when I was 14. ...

Roth: Mark, you already told me you were molested. But the details are not before us. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know whether it was a priest, or a minister, or a rabbi, or an imam.

Foley: Anyway, I was an altar boy…

Roth: Sorry, Mark, time for the press conference.

Might be a good time to review the coverage of “I … did not … have sex … with … that woman.” (For anybody who happened to go through the Clinton years with a paper bag over his head, there’s a refresher here).

Update fn: ABC is skeptical.