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Trial by Tabloid
Yesterday’s sentencing of former Metropolitan Museum trustee Anthony Marshall to one to three years in prison (which I am told will likely mean eight months with time off for good behavior) for plundering his mother Brooke Astor’s estate is likely still not the end of the saga; there will be an appeal and Marshall may not go to jail until it’s been decided. But today’s tabloids had their predictable fun and the New York Times belatedly ran a story allowing that there was another side to the whole saga–the way Astor treated her son, a subject few have dared broach in public before. One of those few is David Patrick Columbia, whose singularly brave and lonely coverage of the affair has stood out from the beginning, and still does in his latest New York Social Diary entry today. Today’s piece was heralded by an email quoting an anonymous letter Columbia received earlier today. It said: “Try caring for a dementia victim and doing anything right in his/her eyes! Sure the looky-loos on the sidelines will criticise: THEY are not doing the heavy lifting. And this is all besides all those insults of a lifetime of being her son. He felt she owed him, and so do I. How much? none of our beeswax. He was tried and convicted in the press. Is he a danger to society? No. Did he do everything right? No. But jail is ridiculous.” So, too, most of the coverage of this altogether tragic affair.
January 12th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
[...] predicted here, Anthony Marshall, the ailing 85-year-old only child of Brooke Astor, recently convicted of [...]