Neil Goldschmidt's sex-abuse victim tells of the  Helpless child went to Oregon Lawyers begging for help as Oregon Bar
 

Member Goldschmidt serial raped her.  Now she's dead and he feels "badly."

She was emaciated and looked far older than her 42 years. Her hair was thin, her eyes sunken. Her hands shook; occasionally, her whole body shook. 

But she appeared intelligent, well-spoken and quick-witted. She seemed kind. 

I was at my desk at The Oregonian, where I was working as a columnist in 2004... After several visits she decided she trusted me. She wanted to go public, she said, because the former governor had lied and misled the public about what had happened. 

She told me she was 13 years old when the child rapes by Oregon Bar Member Goldschmidt began, not 14, not 15. In his statement Monday, Goldschmidt said, "As I read the obituary last week that gave her date of birth, I now know she was 15 when the first sexual encounter happened. It occurred after the November 1976 elections and ended some months later into the following year." 

But she said she was quite sure when the first incident occurred, "because it was my mother's birthday." 

There was a party that afternoon at her home in Northeast Portland. It wasn't unusual to see the mayor of Portland in her kitchen. Her parents were active supporters of Neil Goldschmidt's political career. Their home was just blocks from the Goldschmidts' house; campaign involvement had evolved into friendship. 

After she entered eighth grade, she said, Neil Goldschmidt, then in his mid-30s, began to recommend books to her and engage her in private conversations. She had shed her baby fat. Her long, dark hair was thick. Photographs of her at 13 show a beautiful adolescent. 

Then came January of her eighth-grade year, and her mother's birthday party. There was a crowd of adults, including Goldschmidt, at the house. "He asked if I wanted to play pingpong," she said. "We went down (to the basement) and then he said, 'Oh, do you want to come give me a hug?' " 

It turned into much more than a hug. It turned into oral sex. She was afraid. She was a virgin, she says. "I'd never even kissed a boy. Far from it." 

That day, in those secretive, terrifying, confusing moments in her own basement, a door opened in her childhood. Her awful future rushed in, and the woman she might have become left forever. 
 

To To a 13-year-old girl, it was terrible and wonderful, confusing and thrilling. 

They had sex frequently, she told me. Sometimes the mayor would call the eighth-grader after she got home from school, when her parents were at work. Other times, she said, they'd use secret signals to arrange their meetings. 

She would watch from an upstairs window for when his car went by. "Because if the lights blinked," she said, "it meant he was coming in. If they didn't, he was just going home." 

She remembered feeling torn. "The attention was flattering. ... Among our social group, he was idolized. He was a golden boy who could do no wrong. ... And he was incredibly charming. He was also very earthy and sweet and cruel. He was lots of different things." 

In some ways, he was becoming a mentor. He gave her a book: "Cry, the Beloved Country." He gave her reading lists. He explained city policy issues to her. But the mentoring went further. 

He told her how to dress, she said. "He didn't like the way I looked." She began to diet. She loved Neil Goldschmidt, she thought. She wanted to please him. 

"But there was always a malevolent underlying current, it seemed," she said. What they did together in private felt secret and dirty. "I'd get these feelings in the pit of my stomach." 

She was a child, with a childlike desire for attention. She didn't like the sex very much, she says. But she liked the closeness to this man everyone admired. 

And, in a childlike way, she believed him. He told her, she said, that someday he'd divorce his then-wife, Margie, and marry her. 

"I was so totally naive ... so stupid," she said. "I may have been a little intellectually precocious, but relationship-wise I was as naive as you get." 

She began her freshman year of high school at St. Mary's Academy in downtown Portland. 

It was clear she didn't fit in with the other 14-year-olds. But then, she wasn't at school much. 

"He'd pick me up by the fountain," a block from the school, "in the black car," she said. "He always had a driver." (by his policeman guard)

After her freshman year, she dropped out of high school. It's painful for her to think what her life might have been like, had she not dropped out. "I had so much potential," she said. "I was so bright. I loved to read, I loved to learn." 

Her adolescence should have been an unfolding. Instead she was afraid. She was lonely. And she was getting angry. 

"I started feeling like I was being used," she said. She already was using alcohol and drugs. At 15, she said, she attempted suicide. 

She took Valium and drank from a bottle of Grand Marnier, but it didn't work. "I woke up. I was really groggy." 

Nobody found out, she said. She eventually passed her high school equivalency test and enrolled at the University of Oregon Honors College when she was 18. 

"I did it to a certain extent to get away from him," she said. "But his parents lived in Eugene, and he came to visit me." They were always surprise visits. One time she returned to her room and he was there, she said. 

Of course, by then she was no longer a minor. By then Neil Goldschmidt would not have been committing a crime every time he was intimate with the 18-year-old. 

"It was consensual, he would say," she said. But it didn't feel like she had a choice, she said: "I felt I was under his control." 

When she moved to New York City in the early 1980s to take summer acting classes, she remembered, he showed up in her apartment, unannounced. "He always seemed to know where I was," she said. 

Neil Goldschmidt has told reporters the relationship lasted varying periods of time. At first, in his interview with The Oregonian, he said nine months. Later, in the same interview, he said "two calendar years." Other news organizations reported it ended after three years. 

She said, though, the sex with Neil Goldschmidt continued throughout his tenure as mayor, his years in Washington, D.C., as U.S. secretary of transportation, the years he worked at Nike and even into his term as Oregon's governor. 

"It lasted until I was 27," she told me.  

By the time she was in her mid-20s, she was scrambling -- for rent money, for a good job, for love, for escape from the pain. She used drugs and alcohol more heavily. It was when people thought cocaine was cool, she said. "Before people started dying. We didn't think it was addictive." 

Her life was on a downward spiral. She had sexual relationships with rock stars, married men, cocaine-snorting attorneys. 

And she started sharing the secret. She told her lovers that Neil Goldschmidt had seduced her when she was 13. Or she'd sit at a bar in the Dakota Cafe or the Virginia Cafe and tell strangers. 

"I was a blabbermouth," she said,"because I had started to feel he owed me something." 

The contrast between the life of the respected statesman and the life of the sometimes-unemployed cocktail waitress was stark and painful to her, a former straight-A student who, as a little girl, had once dreamed of becoming a Supreme Court justice. 

She attempted suicide several times. She spent time in psychiatric wards in local hospitals, under suicide watch. When she got out, she'd return to work in bars, and to drink in bars. And she'd tell her story to more people. 

 

Michael Lloyd/The OregonianTed Kulongoski and Neil Goldschmidt in 1987 at the announcement that Kulongoski would be the Oregon insurance commissioner.