WASHINGTON – If you like oddballs, you’ve hit the jackpot with the Condit-Levy story. Hollywood couldn’t have cast a weirder bunch of characters.
Chandra Levy, rest her soul, was nuts for going nuts – at age 24, when she should have known better – over an obviously married congressman, and for thinking she could make a life with him. Her aunt’s weird for egging her on. Her mother’s even weirder for standing by as her daughter tried to wreck the home of her neighbor, Carolyn Condit.
And, of course, Gary Condit’s downright creepy. Here’s a guy who has kinky flings with women not only half his age, but half as attractive as his own wife, while spending probably as much as his wife on his own hair to attract them.
But Anne Marie Smith, one of his rather ungainly mistresses, and her lawyer, Jim Robinson, are perhaps the biggest weirdoes in this whole sordid tale.
The redhead and her overly attentive attorney have been all over the airwaves blasting Condit on behalf of the tortured Levy family, or so they say, and portraying the congressman as nothing short of a troglodyte.
I’ve never spoken with Smith, just her lawyer, from his Seattle home. But in my phone interviews with Robinson, Smith interrupted him in ways befitting a girlfriend – which made me wonder about their motives.
“Sorry,” Robinson said, after a long pause, “that was Anne bringing me some coffee.”
A few minutes later, he left the line again, returning to explain, “Anne was getting the keys to my SUV.”
Huh? Turns out Smith wasn’t just visiting Robinson. She’s moved in with him.
And neither of them is married.
When I expressed dismay over a lawyer shacking up with his client, Robinson calmly explained that it was “safer” for her to live with him than alone in San Francisco, where she works for United Airlines as a flight attendant (she’s on leave now).
He says Smith feels threatened by Condit and his aides and lawyers, who she claims have twisted her arm to lie, even in a sworn statement, about their affair. She got U.S. Attorney Heidi M. Pasichow to investigate her charges.
In fact, Robinson says he was so concerned for her safety the night before she dropped her Fox News bombshell last month that he had the Seattle police stand guard at his house all night. And then he says he got them to escort her to Fox’s Seattle studio the next day, July 2.
It looked like a “presidential motorcade,” he gushed.
All clients should be so lucky.
Not only does Smith’s attorney open up his house to her and give her the keys to his car, but he also uses his pull with local police to protect her. The urge to protect is more befitting a boyfriend than a lawyer. Lawyers charging $400 an hour don’t give their clients treatment that special.
And Robinson is no high-priced lawyer.
In fact, James Howard Robinson hasn’t even been practicing law for three full years. Only in October 1998 did he pass the bar, according to the Washington State Bar Association League.
But he and Smith have known each other for 12 years.
Could they have more than a legal relationship? Could they have an agenda? Could they be gunning for Gary?
It’s plain that Smith, who had been seeing Condit for a year, could have another motive besides helping the Levys find their missing daughter. She could be getting even. After all, Smith thought she was the other woman – only to find out Condit was cheating on her, too.
And she acts like a scorned woman. She told Larry King she felt “betrayed,” as the other, other woman, and she’s clearly obsessed with the Levy scandal.
Asked what Smith does at his home all day, Robinson replied that she mainly monitors the news about the Levy case.
“She goes on the computer and downloads all these articles, and starts highlighting things,” Robinson said.
Apparently Smith doesn’t like the way she looks on TV, so Robinson got rid of it.
“I actually had the TV cable jerked out of the house because she was driving herself crazy seeing herself on this channel and that channel,” he said. “So there’s no TV in this house until this siege is over.”
Robinson is equally passionate about the case, particularly when it comes to slamming Condit.
He’s called him a “con man” and a “serial predator of women,” who “seeks out women that he can control.”
“Anne is a wonderful person,” Robinson said on Fox News. “But she is the type of person that a man could just start to tell her what to do, and she would do it.”
Is he romantically involved with Smith himself?
“We’re just friends,” snapped Robinson, and anyone who insinuates otherwise is no better than Condit’s flack insinuating that “Chandra’s a slut.”
Hmmm.
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