VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 243Kappa. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, and his JD from Harvard Law
School. After this, he worked for Goldman Sachs as an investment banker and eventual partner,
first in New York City, and then in the Chicago branch. Ryan married actress Jeri Ryan in
1991; together they have a son, Alex Ryan. They divorced in 1999 in California, and the
records of the divorce were sealed at their mutual request. Five years later, when Ryan’s Senate
campaign began, the Chicago Tribune newspaper and WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate, sought
to have the records released. Both Ryan and his wife agreed to make their divorce records
public, but not make the custody records public, claiming that the custody records could be
harmful to their son if released. On June 22, 2004, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert
Schnider agreed to release the custody files. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had
taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public. The decision to
release these files generated much controversy because it went against both parents’ direct
request and because it reversed the earlier decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the
child.^101
This time around, Obama assumed a stance of Pecksniffian hypocrisy, deploring that such
scabrous and salacious material was coming up in a political campaign. ‘“I don’t think it’s an
appropriate topic for debate,” Obama said. Obama has consistently said that his campaign would
not focus on Ryan’s 1999 divorce from TV actress Jeri Ryan.’ (Chicago Sun-Times, April 3, 2004)
OBAMA AND THE ART OF PORNOGRAPHIC CAMPAIGNING
The usual suspects from among Axelrod’s pals at the Chicago Tribune intervened actively on
Obama’s behalf to dig up as much dirt as they could about Jack Ryan. Since divorce is now so
prevalent, it is perhaps not a big surprise that Obama’s journalistic myrmidons chose the tactic of
attempting to open up court papers from Ryan’s ugly divorce from the famous Star Trek actress Jeri
Ryan:
As the campaign progressed, a lawsuit brought by the Chicago Tribune and ABC-owned station
WLS-TV led to a California court’s opening of child custody files from Ryan’s divorce with
actress Jeri Ryan. In those files, she alleged that he had taken her to sex clubs in several cities,
intending for them to have sex in public. Although the sensational nature made the revelations
fodder for tabloid and television programs specializing in such stories, the files were also
newsworthy because Ryan had insisted to Republican leaders that there was nothing damaging
in them. As a result, many Republicans questioned Ryan’s integrity following the release, and
he dropped out of the race on June 25, 2004, leaving Obama without an opponent. (Wikipedia
on Jack Ryan)^102
The stunning blow for Jack Ryan came on June 22, 2004 when, contrary to most legal precedent,
the divorce papers were opened and published before a candid world. An account from the gotcha
website The Smoking Gun describes the impact of these revelations on Ryan, who had tried to
portray himself as a family values conservative against the cosmopolitan and Bohemian Obama:
In what may prove a crippling blow to his U.S. Senate campaign, divorce records reveal that
Illinois Republican Jack Ryan was accused by his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, of pressuring
her to have sex at swinger’s clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans while other patrons
watched. The bombshell allegation is contained amidst nearly 400 pages of records ordered
released yesterday by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who ruled on media requests to
unseal documents from the Ryan case. The salacious charge leveled at the politician was made
by Jeri Ryan, who has starred in TV’s “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Boston Public,” in a court