Eliot Spitzer: Wall Street's fallen angel

"THE GUARDIAN

The downfall of ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008 was spectacular. But while the "Luv Guv" became a laughing stock, have we lost the one man with the experience and tenacity to take on the financial giants?

Eliot Spitzer still looks like a man who has everything. He wears a sharp suit and munches hungrily on coffee and croissants in a plush Fifth Avenue office just a few blocks from Manhattan's Central Park. And why not? Here is a 51-year-old man with huge wealth and a loving family. He is worth millions through his work for his father's real-estate empire yet also co-hosts a high-profile chat show on CNN, where he dissects the day's news. No wonder Spitzer appears happy as he chats about morning jogs, dinners at the Four Seasons and weekends away upstate.

But looks can be deceiving. For Americans don't judge Eliot Spitzer by what he now has, but by what he once was and – most importantly of all – what he might have been. Spitzer is the archetypal fallen angel: a once great hope of American liberalism laid low by the tawdriest of sex scandals.

Long before there was Barack Obama there was Spitzer. While Obama toiled unknown in Illinois, the Bronx-born Spitzer won himself a national reputation as the "Sheriff of Wall Street". He was New York's tough-talking attorney-general, who fought banking corruption, enforced environment law and won rights for low-paid workers. He used that fame to enter politics and in 2006 became governor of New York: a perfect springboard for the White House. Before America fell in love with its first black president, people wondered if it was willing to embrace its first Jewish one. Spitzer could have made history.

Instead he left office in disgrace three years ago amid a flood of tabloid headlines that recounted salacious details from his repeated use of a high-end escort service. Spitzer was dubbed the "Luv Guv" and forced into a political wilderness. Rarely in American politics was a fall from grace so spectacular, so complete and so clearly down to a self-inflicted human flaw. Spitzer's current position has to be measured against that sordid history.

Except that might not be the complete picture. A compelling new documentary re-examines exactly what happened to Spitzer. Filmed by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, who shot Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and is now making a film about Julian Assange, the movie puts the Spitzer saga under a microscopic glare. But the picture that emerges is not the same one that was reported so gleefully by the press with its tales of $4,300-a-night assignations, sex with socks on and the painful evisceration of a carefully constructed public image. Instead, it weaves the story of Spitzer's personal failings into a much greater and more important narrative, one ignored by much of the media at the time.

Gibney's Client 9 – named after the moniker given to Spitzer in the police investigation of the Emperors Club VIP prostitution ring – investigates the powerful financial, business and political interests who benefitted from his fall. It exposes the plotting and subterfuge behind the scenes by those that Spitzer had targeted: the big banks and insurance companies engaged in fraud, the corrupt Republicans, the dubious political dirty-tricks operatives."

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Also see:

Client 9 The Movie