Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story
Tabloid pays woman over bogus Ted Kennedy 'baby daddy' stories
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Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story
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Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story -
Enquirer Booted This Love Child Story
AUGUST 11--As the National Enquirer was breaking the John Edwards mistress story, the tabloid was paying a Massachusetts woman to settle a lawsuit brought over erroneous stories reporting that she had a 'secret love child' with Senator Edward Kennedy and participated in a decades-long cover-up of the powerful Democrat's supposed paternity.
The Enquirer's payment to Caroline Bilodeau-Allen came after her lawyers provided 1985 DNA test results showing that Kennedy was not the father of Christopher Bilodeau, who was born in 1984 (Bilodeau-Allen, 46, has acknowledged having had a sexual relationship with Kennedy while the politician was separated from his first wife).
Copies of the DNA test results, in which the alias 'John Thomson' is used for Kennedy, can be found here.
The settlement of Bilodeau-Allen's lawsuit against the Enquirer was disclosed in an August 1 order filed in U.S. District Court in Boston. While the document does not detail terms of the confidential settlement, TSG has learned that the deal--struck just eight months after the complaint was filed--included a significant payment to Bilodeau-Allen, who charged that the Enquirer defamed her and Christopher in a pair of stories published in early-2006 (the first piece about Bilodeau-Allen was written by Alan Butterfield, an Enquirer veteran who last month confronted Edwards at a Los Angeles hotel after he met privately with former mistress Rielle Hunter).
A follow-up story claimed that Bilodeau-Allen's apartment had been 'ransacked' and stripped of evidence of her relationship with Kennedy, and that she 'feared for her life and warned that she could end up like Mary Jo Kopechne.' The Enquirer's reports about Bilodeau-Allen were based on information provided by two individuals, both of whom signed a 'source agreement' in return for cash ($15,000 and $5,000 respectively). Copies of those agreements, which were redacted by the Enquirer before being provided to Bilodeau-Allen's lawyers, can be found here.
Included in other discovery material turned over by the Enquirer were assorted e-mails showing how tabloid employees (and its public relations firm) sought to place the Kennedy 'love child' story with other media outlets, including MSNBC, Fox News, the Drudge Report, and Wonkette.com.
The PR effort proved so successful that the Enquirer's initial bogus Kennedy story turned up in the monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman on the same night, as was reported in a January 20, 2006 e-mail from Paul Field, then the Enquirer's editor-in-chief. (13 pages)
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