Don't Laugh At Dr. Laura, Because You Might Be Next

You have to feel sorry for Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Radio talk-show hosts may court celebrity, but no one wants the kind of celebrity Dr. Laura has been enduring in the past weeks - ever since a large assortment of nude photographs from the advice-giver's past were published on the Internet for the salacious perusal of anyone with a computer, a modem and a phone link to the Web.

Widespread glee has erupted all over many Web sites devoted to the in-depth appraisal of Dr. Laura's various doings; it's apparent that several people out there don't feel sorry for her at all. Some of this glee would seem to be prompted by the scorn Dr. Laura heaps upon those who call her radio show (which airs locally from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on KOMO-AM 1000, one of 450 stations nationwide to broadcast her advice; her column also runs in Friday's Scene section). This is a woman who takes the moral high road in a HumVee, who shouts down her callers as "bums" and "jerks" and "shack-up honeys" for bending the Ten Commandments.

And now it is finally apparent that Dr. Laura herself was a "shack-up honey" in her late 20s, when she left her first husband in New York, moved to the West Coast and began an affair with the source of those nude Internet photos, L.A. radio personality Bill Ballance. Her own statement on this matter explains that she had already filed for divorce before having the affair - an excuse that certainly wouldn't cut any ice with Dr. Laura if proffered by one of her radio callers.

Listeners who have winced as Schlessinger mercilessly cuts her advice-seekers down to size are now able to add an 11th item to the title of her book, "Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives": they have extramarital affairs and pose for nude photographs. They also forget that the greater their future celebrity, the more intense the interest that will be shown in their earlier lives. They forget that those who rail the most violently against sinners often have pasts that don't bear close scrutiny.

So now these graphic photos are out on the Net, downloaded and enlarged and e-mailed hither and thither, ogled by the classmates of the subject's young son. What should alarm all of us considerably more is that when Dr. Laura sued to have the photos removed from the first Internet site to publish them, she lost: A federal judge ruled the pictures had already spread too far, too fast, for any hope of recall.

Those photos were the real article - Dr. Laura has acknowledged that - but what if they hadn't been? What's to stop anyone with reasonable computer skills from doing the sort of cut-and-paste alterations to which all digital images are susceptible? It isn't hard to graft one person's face onto another's body - Lady Margaret Thatcher on the November Playmate of the Month, for instance - and post the results for anybody to see.

Before Dr. Laura's enemies exult too freely in her embarrassment, they might reflect that even the completely blameless can become hit-and-run victims on the Info Interstate.

- Melinda Bargreen Seattle Times staff critic