Former Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, one of the state’s most powerful figures before revelations that he had sexually abused a teen, died Wednesday at the age of 83. Goldschmidt’s abuse was hidden for nearly 30 years until it was broken by Nigel Jaquiss at Willamette Week after a long, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. Jaquiss joins us to reflect on that reporting, and on Goldschmidt’s legacy.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Neil Goldschmidt died on Wednesday at the age of 83. At one point, he was arguably the brightest political star in the state, a young Portland mayor, a charismatic cabinet secretary, a confident Oregon governor. But he died in disgrace forever known as a man who sexually abused a teenage girl for years. That truth came to light in large part because my next guest, Nigel Jaquiss, first reported the story in Willamette Week in 2004, almost three decades after the abuse began. He joins us now to talk about that reporting and Neil Goldschmidt’s full legacy. Nigel, welcome back.
Nigel Jaquiss: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: When did you first hear that Neil Goldschmidt had sexually abused a teenage girl?
Jaquiss: It was back in 2004. Goldschmidt was leading the buyout of Portland General Electric, the state’s largest utility. And my editor asked me to go find out what he had been up to since he had left the governor’s office in 1991. A period of 14 years when he was sort of the state’s leading power broker as a private consultant. And so I was sifting through various tips and information when I got a tip that he had a previously undisclosed issue with a young woman and that there might be some public records that would shed some light on it.
Miller: How did you go about piecing the story together?
Jaquiss: Well, I can tell you now because she has stepped forward that State Senator Vicki Walker at the time had gotten a piece of a legal settlement from Washington County, didn’t mention the name of the woman nor of Goldschmidt, but it was a piece of a legal settlement. And so I pursued that. I got those documents first, which gave me the name of the potential victim. Once I had her name, then I began this sort of full on sprint of trying to find anybody who had ever known her, particularly at the time when she was a teenager and a young adult, and for a couple of months really just spent all my time chasing that, chasing any kind of a public record that might establish a tie between Goldschmidt and the victim whom we didn’t name at the time, but named upon her death, Elizabeth Dunham. And it was a very difficult story because she had signed a confidentiality agreement. So when I went to visit her in Las Vegas, she denied that anything had happened, threatened legal action if we continued to pursue the story, and Goldschmidt would not speak to me. So we were on the cusp of publishing a story about the most influential guy in the state in which the victim denied anything happened and the alleged perpetrator wouldn’t talk. And I just give enormous credit to the owners of Willamette Week, Richard Meeker and Mark Zusman, for having the courage to publish that story.
Miller: As you noted, after Goldsmidt’s victim died in 2011 at the age of 49, you made the decision to publish her name. The Oregonian then published a lot of earlier reporting about her by their columnist, Margie Boule. What can you tell us about her life?
Jaquiss: She was a straight-A student at Saint Mary’s, the all-girls private school in Portland. She was beautiful, vivacious, and dropped out of school as a sophomore after Goldschmidt began his years long sexual abuse of her.
And she went from being somebody who had apparently all the promise in the world to a young woman who dealt with episodes of mental illness. She was arrested, I think, nine times in a few-year period. She ended up doing some time in federal prison for cocaine distribution. It’s safe to say that her life and Neil Goldschmidt’s life went in absolutely opposite directions. She was plagued throughout the rest of her short life by those issues ‒ mental illness,
substance abuse, physical ailments ‒ and died tragically before her 50th birthday.
So, I did have a chance to speak to her a few times after the story broke. And, as a reporter, you’d like to think that a story like this might bring the victim some measure of solace or, or perhaps even a feeling of retribution. And I’m not sure that it ever did. I’m not sure that it made Elizabeth Dunham any happier to have this terrible story revealed.
Miller: The word affair was used 11 times in the article in the Oregonian about Goldschmidt’s admission of guilt. Did he himself ever call what he did rape or sexual abuse?
Jaquiss: Well, that’s hard to say. I’m not aware that he did. He was never willing to speak to me on the record about any of this, or off the record. I think the Oregonian has been appropriately chastised for extremely poor presentation. When he found out we were going to publish this story, he went looking for a soft shoulder to cry on and he found one. The Oregonian’s initial coverage was frankly disgraceful, terming what is clearly statutory rape or rape an ‘affair’ was a terrible editorial decision and they’ve subsequently apologized for it. But he made a calculated decision that if the truth was going to come out, he was going to spin it as hard as he could and that involved going to the Oregonian and looking for the most favorable presentation he could get.
Miller: It’s worth pointing out and as you noted that there has been some version of a mea culpa here from the Oregonian, but they have also acknowledged that they got a massive tip about this abuse in December of 2003. That was five months before your article came out. They have also acknowledged that. In 2004, when you broke the story, was there any possibility of criminal charges?
Jaquiss: No. We had explored that question with prosecutors, former prosecutors, legal experts and we were convinced by them that the statute of limitations had long since run out. So no chance that he could then have been prosecuted. Laws have changed since then. So if the same fact pattern were to emerge today, I think there’s a chance that he could have been prosecuted. But at that time, no.
Miller: I want to turn a bit to Goldschmidt’s political history. He became Portland mayor in 1973 at the age of 33. As you and others have noted that he was the youngest big city mayor in the country at the time. What did he focus on in the six years that he served?
Jaquiss: He did a lot of things that have stood the test of time. He oversaw the transition of the Harbor Freeway. There used to be a freeway that runs where Tom McCall Park is. There was a big parking lot where Pioneer Square is. So he oversaw those two physical changes, sort of, I guess, the revitalization of downtown Portland. He spent a great deal of time convincing Nordstroms that they should open a downtown department store, which also contributed heavily to the revitalization of downtown. He focused on the neighborhoods. He importantly was part of a group ‒ and he was not alone, there were many others involved ‒ who made the historical decision to oppose the construction of the Mount Hood Freeway, which would have led from the Markham Bridge to 205 and would have gutted what we now know is some of the most vibrant parts of the east side of Portland. And instead, they convinced the Federal Highway administration to let them use the money to build the city’s first light rail system. It was one of the country’s first light rail systems.
So it was a transformational time when he and other city officials not only thought big thoughts and had big ideas but actually executed them. So it was a time that many people who were active in the community then still look back on as a great era in Portland governance, and that’s, I think, why his evil deeds are so shocking because he was at once a very effective elected official and just capable of devastatingly dark acts.
Miller: I mentioned he was Portland mayor for six years, not eight. That’s because President Jimmy Carter named him Secretary of Transportation in 1978. What did it mean for a Portland mayor to become a cabinet secretary?
Jaquiss: It was an unusual choice. Now, Carter of course was in some political trouble and he was looking to really revitalize his cabinet and make his administration more attractive to voters as they moved toward the 1980 election. But he, I think, saw what other people saw in Goldschmidt and that was somebody who was a dynamic, active, effective convenor of the best and the brightest. And I think Lee Iacocca gave Goldschmidt a lot of credit for staving off disaster for Chrysler. And he was centrally involved in some very big issues and was by all accounts ‒ I wasn’t around at that time ‒ but by all accounts, a very effective Transportation Secretary. So again, while Elizabeth Dunham’s life was headed in a very, very different direction, Goldschmidt’s star was on the ascendant.
Miller: And it kept going. He became Oregon governor after some time as a Nike executive. That was after initially being a legal aid lawyer before his time in city council. What was he known for as governor?
Jaquiss: As governor, he was known for a few things. He succeeded former Governor Vic Atiyeh. This was the first time that Democrats had had the governor’s office for a while and there were a lot of things that were happening. Oregon was transitioning from a resource-based economy where cutting down trees and catching fish provided much of the money to a technical high tech based and, and sportswear based economy. He was, of course, very close to Nike having worked there after he was cabinet secretary and he was very attuned to the idea that attracting high tech businesses both from Japan at that time and from California was going to be an important part of Oregon’s future and he was good at that.
He also oversaw the expansion of Oregon’s prison system, which in the long term, probably a less positive act and something that he wasn’t necessarily thrilled about. But he was not accorded the same superlatives as a governor as he was as mayor, but he was a pretty good governor.
And people were, I’m probably stepping on your next question, but people were absolutely shocked when early 1990 he announced he wouldn’t run for a second term because he was only 49 and people nationally had already identified him as one of the most promising governors in the country and somebody who might be on a presidential ticket at some point. So it was a one term governorship and, and one that ended in a way that I think few people could have foreseen.
Miller: And nobody ‒ I should [say]… maybe not nobody ‒ few people knew the reason that he didn’t seek re-election at the time and Oregonians found out because of your reporting decades later ‒ 15 years later. It had to do with an appeals case in Washington State. Can you briefly tell us that story?
Jaquiss: Sure. So Elizabeth Dunham’s life led her... Goldschmidt arranged for her to get a job in Seattle. She was causing a lot of trouble in Portland for him. She was acting out in various ways that could have led to his being discovered. And so he got her a job in Seattle and unfortunately, her bad luck continued. It wasn’t luck, but she was brutally raped. And in the course of the rape trial, the defense team tried to introduce evidence that would have shown that she had been previously sexually abused as a young teenager for three years by somebody who was described in court documents as a family friend who held a powerful position and was 30 years her senior, or whatever the age difference was. And so it all but identified him by name, this court document, and it was unclear whether the counseling files would be made public or not in the court proceedings in Washington. So here’s you have a sitting governor in Oregon who could be at any day, if the Washington courts decided to, identify by name as a rapist in court files. So his discovery was very, very near to the surface at that time. And I think that’s a big part of why he didn’t run for that second term.
Miller: He was known in the last 20 years as… Before that actually, he was a power broker at the highest levels in Oregon in the public and private sectors. Did that continue behind the scenes in Portland in Oregon? Or was he truly shunned? Was he a pariah?
Jaquiss: Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. I know ‒ and I’m not going to mention names ‒ that he continued to occasionally have meetings, lunch or coffee or dinner, with very powerful people. My sense is that that was more out of a sense of sympathy on their part than a sense of wanting to bring him back. I think from my discussions with some people who did meet with him that he was desperate to find a way back in because he felt he had something to offer, particularly to offer when Oregon or Portland were facing troubles, but I don’t believe that anybody in positions of power, whether elected officials or private executives, really relied on his counsel. I think he wanted to be in, but he wasn’t in.
Miller: What else have you been thinking about since this news broke on Wednesday?
Jaquiss: Well, it’s funny, I’ve still gotten private communications from people since Wednesday who said, in essence, you never should have done this. We never should have published this story. And I think that it’s hard for people 20 years on to understand what a central position Neil Goldschmidt held in this state. Many of the state’s senior elected officials at the time the story came to light ‒ people like Governor Ted Kolongoski, former Portland Mayor Vera Katz, former Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Shrunk ‒ were close allies. And when the story initially broke, I think it was Katz or Shrunk or both who said Neil will be back. He’ll get over this. He was at the center of every important decision that had anything to do with power in this state. And there’s been nobody like him since that has held anything like that kind of position. And I think aside from Glenn Jackson, prior to that, there was nobody like Goldschmidt before.
So, look, I don’t really love the great man theory of history. He was a very evil man. And I think that that wipes out all the good things that he did before his secret came to light. And so, yeah, a tragedy. And I think we should all take a second to remember the victim here was Elizabeth Dunham who died at age 49 having had her life completely and utterly destroyed.
Miller: Nigel, thanks very much.
Jaquiss: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Nigel Jaquiss is a reporter for Willamette Week.
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