RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lucianne would have laughed uproariously at what is happening in San Francisco and at what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. I can hear her say, “It’s over for the coverups.”

The media will still try and   bamboozle us with its version of the Mr. Pelosi incident just as it did for every Dem attack on Trump, but it won’t work now that the richest man in the world who is also a tech genius can and will uncover the truth.

Since Lucianne’s passing at age 87 on Oct, 26th, there have been numerous essays both laudatory and a downright snarky one by the Washington Post. One headline in particular caught my eye – The Indiscreet Charm of Lucianne Goldberg by Andrew Ferguson in Time magazine.

What struck me the most about that headline was the word, ‘indiscreet’ because the Lucianne I knew for the past 27 years was probably the most discreet person in public life. She knew just about everybody in politics and the media. She knew lots of the nitty gritty embarrassing details in the lives of the rich and famous but she never publicized them. She had a bawdy sense of humor and might have been outspoken in private discussions with friends whom she trusted to keep our own counsel, but she was not a malicious gossip. Only the Clintons brought out her knives.

She’d always say, “my loathing for the Clintons requires medication.”  The Clintons tried to destroy her, she told me. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Lucianne was a literary agent whose clientele, including Mark Fuhrman, was persuaded to leave her company because of pressure from the president on the media outlets that Fuhrman and the other authors needed to promote their books.

Many of the essays after her death mention Lucianne in the past years before I met her so I can only relate what I personally knew of this fabulous woman, who remains my favorite celebrity.

I had written a column defending Linda Tripp and she emailed me about posting the column on lucianne.com. We then began a close online relationship bonding on our mutual conservative connection but it wasn’t until years later that we met in person at the New York Sun. I had a sneaky suspicion that Lucianne had not met many Hispanic conservatives because she said I reminded her of Jennifer Lopez. No way, Jose.

I was invited to her inner sanctum on W. 84th Street to be a guest on her talk show which she hosted from home. She actually hated doing the show because she had to intermittently deal with sponsor ads and that wasn’t how Lucianne wanted to reach the public. It was her website, lucianne.com that she cared the most about and I was honored to be part of that legacy for so many years.

After the newspapers that I wrote for stopped publishing, I could still count on Luci posting my online columns in the ‘must reads’ of her website. She then hired me to monitor the site which I did for several years until the pandemic wore me out. While Lucianne was still in fine health, she had strict standards to be held and many, like myself, would put lucianne.com as our home page so we could learn all sides of hot political issues.

The site posters known as ldotters were only allowed to post articles from approved media sources. In the beginning, no blog sites were allowed but as the deterioration of legitimate journalism persisted, she realized that the truth could more often be found on citizen sites. Theconservativetreehouse.com, Gatewaypundit.co, American Thinker, Jewish World Review and others become the truthsayers and readers could compare their revelations to the leftist mantra in the mainstream/lamestream media.

This is what is so compelling about lucianne.com. One can read articles from the NY Times, Washington Post and other major news feeds and then contrast their leftist drivel to the well documented exposes from conservative sources. In addition, the ldotter comments are frequently hilarious.  Only The New York Post remains as a powerful print publication that leans center right.

Lucianne.com’s readers suffered through the Bush derangement syndrome and its eight years of vitriol reportage from ‘journos’ but remained hopeful thanks to articles relying on the truth and nothing but. However, no one was prepared for what happened in 2016 with Donald J. Trump becoming the 45^th president of the United States.  Neither Lucianne nor I originally chose Trump as our preferred candidate. Lucianne went with, “anybody but Hillary” and I liked Gov. Rick Perry but we both voted for Trump on Election Day.

Then an unfortunate thing happened. We both found our loved ones in the family were on a different wave length namely, TDS, Trump derangement syndrome.  My sisters are Democrats and only my brother and I were registered Republicans.

“The Never Trump movement, also called the #nevertrump, Stop Trump, anti-Trump, or Dump Trump movement,^[1] began as an effort on the part of a group of Republicans (known as Never Trump Republicans) and other prominent conservatives to prevent Republican front-runner Donald Trump from obtaining the Republican Party presidential nomination.” -source wikepedia

Ldotters soon learned that Jonah Goldberg, Lucianne’s son, would be part of that group and began posting mean comments on his columns that were posted on her site. That was unacceptable and those of us monitoring the site did our best to curtail the hostility. Yet Lucianne still allowed all the pro Trump columns like mine to get as much attention as possible and she never had anything negative to say about her son whom she loved dearly.

I last saw Jonah Goldberg in 2015 at an apartment where Lucianne was sitting Shiva for her son Joshua, who suffered a fatal fall in her apartment building.  Lucianne invited my friend Joan and I to sit with her and she made us Catholics as comfortable as possible at our first Shiva.  I have always thought it wonderful that she never changed her name allowing bigots to assume she was Jewish like her late husband Sidney Goldberg. He was one of the sweetest and funniest human beings who told me when I first met him,” many lives were saved because I never learned to drive.” No wonder Lucianne loved him so much.

Although, Lucianne told me she had good genes and her family members had lived into their 90’s, the pandemic wore us all down. Luckily, she had the most caring and devoted companion, Drucilla Davida, who was with her for 16 years till the end. Dru kept me apprised of the painful ordeal Luci went through with the medical treatments this past year. When I called Dru after I learned of Luci’s passing, she was still devastated and I could hardly blame her because Lucianne was larger than life and anybody who spent time in her presence had a great story to tell and a memory of side-splitting laughter.

Rest in peace, Luci, and give Sidney and Josh my love.