the coMeBAcK 243
waters. About the only thing lacking in this campaign until September
finally came through was a sex scandal.
It was revealed that Kari Tupper, 24 at the time of the alleged assault,
had told police in March of 1987 that Senator Adams slipped a drug in her
drink and raped her. Lacking physical evidence, the district attorney in
D.C. found the complaint “totally meritless.” The incident lay dormant
and undetected for months until Adams feared it was about to surface in
a D.C. magazine. He called a preemptive news conference to proclaim his
outraged innocence. “My family and I have been harassed by this woman
for over a year,” he declared. In retrospect, the phrase “this woman”
sounds eerily Clintonesque. Many said Tupper’s statements had the ring
of authenticity. Her parents and Adams had been friends since their days
together at the University of Washington. The senator had helped Tupper
land a job as a congressional staffer. She told police he began pressuring
her for sex when she was a college student in Seattle, perhaps out of un-
requited lust for her mother, whom he had dated 40 years earlier. Rebecca
Boren of The Weekly wrote presciently that the next phase of the news
coverage would be “the search for another woman claiming to be an
Adams victim.”^29
Mike McGavick and Slade during a lighter moment on the campaign trail
in 1988. Thomas Donoghue for the Gorton Campaign