Adams Controversy -- Cameron Accepts Tupper's Bizarre Story At Face Value

Editor, The Times:

Times Editorial Page Editor Mindy Cameron's column (Dec. 23) on the Kari Tupper-Brock Adams controversy is the most irresponsible journalism I have ever seen in The Times.

Beginning by saying ``None of us will ever know the truth about what happened that night'' and ``Whatever the truth about that night,'' Cameron barges ahead, proving that a lack of truth will never stop her.

She accepts at face value Tupper's claim that she went to Adams' home that night to confront him about two years of sexual harassment. But is it believable that a woman would go to the home of a man who had been harassing her? Unaccompanied by father, brother or friend? And on a night when she knew his wife would not be there? Would any woman in her right mind do such a thing?

Of course not. If Adams really had been harassing Tupper, she would have never put herself in a position to be alone with him.

But Tupper's story gets even more bizarre. She then says she accepted alcoholic drinks from this man including one in which she saw him dissolve some sort of foreign substance in it. So what did she do, head for the door? Not on your life. She says she drank it. Even in the worst Hollywood B-movie, no one would be dumb enough to drink something after watching someone slip a Mickey into it.

For reasons known only to herself, Cameron neglects to mention that on the following morning, Tupper left Adams' home and went immediately to a hospital, claiming to have been drugged and raped. The hospital found she had been neither. But we didn't hear that from Cameron.

Cameron also doesn't tell us that Tupper then went to the prosecutor's office to file charges against Adams. The prosecutor, a fiercely partisan Republican who would have liked nothing better than to bring charges against a Democratic senator, determined that Tupper's claim had ``no credibility whatsoever.'' But you won't find that inconvenient fact in Cameron's column.

Cameron even recycles what she calls ``a revelation by Sylvia Tupper, Kari's mother, that Adams had made passes at her in recent years.'' Apparently Cameron doesn't own a dictionary. If she did, she'd know that there is a big difference between a revelation and an unsubstantiated charge.

But that's but one more sad example of the total irresponsibility of Cameron's column. This is the sort of thing which the supermarket tabloids thrive upon, but The Seattle Times should be far above.

- Brian Templeton, Des Moines