The bumbling Baron: Lawyer stumbles over role in Edwards’ sex scandal

By Matt Pulle | Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Dallas trial attorney Fred Baron can’t get his story straight: What role did he play in defusing the simmering drama of presidential candidate John Edwards’ extramarital affair with a new age filmmaker who wound up pregnant? Admittedly, the tale is complex, with more lurid subplots than a Lifetime movie, but in trying to explain himself Baron has come off as evasive, misleading, and, at times, flat-out unbelievable.

Baron has been down this road before. In 1998, after four reporters for the Dallas Observer began investigating how his firm coached clients to testify in asbestos litigation, the attorney trotted out a colorful series of explanations and defenses for his firm’s conduct-all the while trying to threaten the alt-weekly and those who spoke to it. It didn’t work then-the paper published a series of stories that portrayed the attorney and his firm as domineering and unethical-and now, with the stakes even higher, it looks like Baron’s manner and method of warding off controversy has only nominally improved: At least this time around he’s not haranguing anybody–yet.

“In the two or three weeks before the story came out he’d call me just about daily-a lot of the times he offered ad hominem, pre-emptive attacks on people he presumed were our sources,” says former Observer editor Julie Lyons, who is now a minister at the Body of Christ Assembly in South Dallas. “He’d talk about people’s sexual habits, and what might have happened in the break room. He’d make substance abuse allegations. He just trashed many people he thought were our sources. He went on and on.”

These days Baron’s interviews with reporters, which just recently were marked by witty and charming exchanges, are now vague, clumsy and more than a little sad as the inveterate charmer has suddenly lost his gift of gab.

Check out our analysis of Baron’s truthfulness here.

Supplying the U-Haul … and the high-powered legal help

Perhaps the most lavish patron of Texas Democratic candidates and a key catalyst in the party’s resurgence, Fred Baron recently served as the national finance chair for John Edwards (More on Baron’s political contributions here). It was his second such stint with the former North Carolina senator. When news first broke earlier this month of Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter, a 42-year-old woman with a love of new age teachings, Dallas Morning News political reporter Gromer Jeffers Jr. called up Baron on a Friday night.

Then Baron told Jeffers that last year he paid for Hunter to leave Chapel Hill, N.C., for California because the tabloids were harassing her. He also helped relocate another Edwards’ aide, Andrew Young, who later claimed to be the father of Hunter’s child. Baron again explained that he wanted to help them move on with their lives, and as he made it look it to the Morning News, he merely paid for the U-Haul and a few shipping containers. In fact, there was a lot more to it than that.

A few days after he chatted with the Dallas daily, Baron gave an interview with the New York Times and again downplayed his role in hushing up the simmering scandal. For example, initially he told the Times he didn’t know how Hunter and Young wound up with two high-powered attorneys. He could have at least taken a guess. Young’s lawyer, Pamela Marple, had previously represented Baron in a long-running lawsuit in which a bankrupt asbestos manufacturer launched highly-charged accusations of racketeering against his firm. Meanwhile, Gordon, whose New York firm often worked with Baron’s, was named as a defendant in the case as well.

So it’s highly coincidental, if not flat-out impossible, that Baron didn’t know how Marple and Gordon wound up providing legal counsel to the two starring actors in the Edwards scandal. (Maybe he could have explained it to us, but he didn’t return phone calls from Texas Watchdog. The typically garrulous lawyer also walked away from an ABC News crew when they spotted him on Wednesday at a private luncheon at the Democratic convention in Denver.)

Ski lodges and skating around the facts

A remarkably tough and intelligent attorney, Baron built a career–and a 14,000-square-foot ski lodge in Aspen–by pioneering asbestos litigation. Baron and Budd, the firm he founded in 1977, has filed a library of lawsuits that crippled some of the country’s most notorious producers of asbestos–many of whom realized decades ago that their product caused cancer and other debilitating conditions. But 10 years ago, the Dallas Observer began publishing a series of stories that reported that Baron’s once noble quest had spiraled out of control as his firm began coaching witnesses to add a fine layer of melodrama to their testimony.

In 2001, G-1 Holdings, a New Jersey company that owned stock in the nation’s largest maker of roof shingles, accused Baron’s law firm of recruiting plaintiffs and telling them what to say in court. Baron later characterized the company’s litigation to the Observer as a tit-for-tat legal move in a “very, very difficult war” with the company and its owner.

Pamela Marple, who practices law with Abbe Lowell, one of President Clinton’s attorneys during the impeachment hearings, helped both Baron and Gordon win that “war.” A federal judge recently dismissed the case-and the company’s appeal of the ruling appears to be going nowhere. Still, given how contentious and drawn out the proceedings were, it’s almost impossible to believe that Baron doesn’t remember how the two attorneys who were a part of that litigation wound up representing Hunter and Young.

“I have this recollection of somebody asking me for lawyers in New York, and I remember naming three or four, and he must have been one of them,” he told the Times on how Gordon, his one-time legal ally, turned up as Hunter’s lawyer.

“I remember getting a call from Pam and her telling me that she was representing him,” he again said to the Times on how his defense counsel wound up on Young’s side. “I may have sent him over there, but on the other hand I may not have. I don’t have an accurate recollection.”

Baron: As shocked as Casablanca’s Captain Renault

Since the Edwards’ scandal broke, Baron has acted like an Alzheimer’s patient with an occasional moment of clarity–his memory waxing and waning on a whim. To take one more example, when Dallas Morning News’ Gromer Jeffers first broke the story of his role in the scandal, Baron told him that he was now raising money for Barack Obama.

Nearly two weeks later, he called Jeffers back to say that he has no official role in the campaign. He explained that he was at a gathering of trial lawyers in Colorado, where they discussed how Obama can win the White House. In fact, as Jeffers later reported, there is no record of him hosting a fundraising event for the Democratic nominee.

On other occasions, Baron, who it should be noted once more has enjoyed a landmark career in law, has given statements that seem to portray him as a doddering uncle who can barely remember to put on his shoes.

Here’s how he responded when the New York Times asked him if he loaned Hunter and Young any money:

“I have a brief recollection of giving someone some cash. My assumption is that I loaned some small amount of money to both of them.”

Earlier, in an interview with Texas Lawyer, Baron said that even though he helped relocate Hunter to California, he didn’t know she had an affair with the former presidential candidate until Edwards told him a few weeks earlier.

“I was shocked,” Baron told the publication.

Which is not how Julie Lyons felt when she read about Baron’s involvement in the Edwards scandal.

“Like the old saw, if he told me the sky was blue, I’d go out and check,” says the former Observer editor. “He’s quite the talker-if one rhetorical tactic didn’t work, he’d change gears and try something else. He would just throw mud on the wall and see what stuck. It was like he was arguing in court.”

It remains to be seen whether Baron’s role in the Edwards scandal will hurt the Democratic candidates he has supported. At the very least, he hasn’t helped his own cause in trying to explain what he did and why he did it.

“It would be wise for Fred Baron to take a somewhat lower profile, but the state Democratic party cannot cut him loose,” says Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. “He is the primary funder of the Democratic party.”

Jason Stanford, the president and founder of Stanford Campaigns, a political consulting firm, scoffs at the notion that Baron’s troubles will haunt any Democratic candidates.

“I will eagerly accept contributions from Fred Baron for any of my campaigns anywhere in the country and especially in Texas,” he says. “These things only work when your friends start abandoning you, and that has not been the case in the slightest.”

In fact, a week after the soft launch of a Web site urging candidates to return Baron campaign cash– named, rather nonpoetically, givethemoneyback.com– no one has actually done so. Joe Jaworski, a Democratic challenger aiming to topple State Sen. Mike Jackson in State Senate District 11 in Galveston, initially toyed with rejecting Baron’s political contribution but changed his mind. On this issue, Democrats have to keep a united front: Once a candidate mails Baron back a check, pressure will only mount for the others to do the same.

Jonathan Neerman, the chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, says that the local GOP is making no formal demands that candidates return Baron’s money. A former intern at Baron’s old law firm, Neerman enjoyed working for the prominent Texas Democrat. He says that Baron always treated him kindly and paid him well. Although he thinks Baron’s cameo appearance in the Edwards melodrama could come back to haunt the candidates he has funded, the GOP heavy doesn’t have any harsh words for his former boss.

“I’m glad this is his problem to deal with and not ours.”