Lawyer: Madam’s records to bare more secrets
The Washington Post Migration
Lawyer: Madam's records to bare more secrets
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The Denver Post
Washington – For months, alleged “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey has promised that her voluminous phone records – all 46 pounds of them – contained some powerful secrets. Within hours of their public release, a senator acknowledged Monday night that his telephone number was on the list.

Now, groups such as one calling itself Citizens for Legitimate Government, which runs a liberal website, are poring over the records, hoping to translate the raw numbers into more revelations. Montgomery Blair Sibley, Palfrey’s civil attorney, said the records were given to 50 interested individuals or groups who “wanted to remain anonymous,” after a federal judge’s release of the records last week.

The records, covering the years 1993 through 2006, contain mostly outgoing calls from Palfrey’s former business, Pamela Martin and Associates. They also were posted Monday on the website for Palfrey’s legal defense fund for anyone to look at, Sibley said. It was Palfrey’s practice at Pamela Martin to telephone a client back to confirm details of an appointment, thus making outgoing calls significant.

“Once more analysis is done, more names will come out,” Sibley said Tuesday.

In a world where phone numbers change constantly, where it is as easy to dial a wrong number as a right one, the public posting of the alleged D.C. Madam’s phone records has created a new commotion in a case that always aspired to be the next Washington sex scandal. It has raised the specter of wives searching frantically through records for their husbands’ numbers, of grudge-bearers buckling down to unearth dirt on their enemies, of political groups aiming arrows at their opponents.

Lori Price, who manages the Citizens for Legitimate Government website and writes its daily newsletter, said she is prepared to devote the time the project needs.

“I’ve got the air conditioning on and my coffee cup beside me, and we’ll be plodding through the list,” Price said.

In a statement Monday night, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said his telephone number was included in Palfrey’s records dating from before he ran for the Senate in 2004. He did not say whether he used the escort service, referring only to a “very serious sin in my past.” His statement also said he had “asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling.”

Vitter released the statement after being contacted by Hustler magazine, which is targeting what it calls “moral hypocrites,” according to the sex magazine’s chief investigator.

Palfrey originally released some of the records with the expectation that former clients would say they got legal sexual and erotic services – bolstering her defense, she said, that she was not in the business of promoting prostitution.