by David Walsh
It should have been one of the better weeks of my working life.
L.A. Confidentiel was the product of two years’ work; of finding sources, earning their trust, reassuring them, and then convincing them to allow their stories into the light. With our book in draft form, I had sent emails to Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel asking questions that gave them the opportunity to address many of the allegations contained in our book. I sent eleven questions to Bruyneel; eight to Lance.
Question to Bruyneel:
According to several sources, some US Postal riders are known to use doping products. What can you say about this?
Did you ever transport doping products? Did you ever ask any US Postal staff member to do so?
The questions for Lance weren’t any less explicit:
I have heard you once admitted using performance-enhancing drugs to your cancer doctors?
Witnesses claim they saw needle marks high up on your arm. What do you say about this?
These questions were sent in late May 2004, about three weeks before printing presses would begin churning out copies of L.A. Confidentiel. We had enough time to include responses from Armstrong and Bruyneel in the book but not enough to allow them to launch some form of legal offensive that could have delayed publication. The emails deliberately did not mention whether I was writing a newspaper article or a book, merely that I had been researching the team and needed some answers. An alarm was triggered inside Lance’s world, caused no doubt by the aggressiveness of the questions.
His response was delivered through the London law firm Schillings in a letter addressed to me and faxed to the Sunday Times on Tuesday 8 June. They guessed we were planning to run a piece in the newspaper about Armstrong and now it was over to Schillings, representing the team’s owner Tailwind Sports llc, Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel. Schillings’ first letter was short, just to say they anticipated sending a fuller response the following day. ‘In the meantime, please note our interest in this matter.’
On that same day, a meeting was taking place in the sports department of the newspaper attended by sports editor Alex Butler, Alan English, the Sunday Times lawyer Alastair Brett and myself. They wanted to know the most convincing evidence in the book. I went through it:
Emma O’Reilly: former head soigneur at US Postal and Armstrong’s masseuse in 1998 and ’99, who had given me an explosively frank account of her five years in the team. She dumped Lance’s used syringes, went on a ‘drug run’ to Spain, applied some women’s concealer to hide the needle marks on his arm, witnessed the cover-up of his positive test at the Tour de France, and picked up testosterone for another Postal rider. I had done a taped interview with Emma.
Stephen Swart: former teammate of Armstrong at Motorola in 1994 and ’95. He says the team decided to use EPO in 1995 and that Armstrong was a strong advocate for the team resorting to banned products. Swart admits he used the drug for ’95 Tour de France and did so because it was a team decision.
Betsy Andreu: she told me she heard Armstrong tell his doctors at Indiana hospital in October 1996 that he used performance-enhancing drugs before his cancer. Another witness in that room, Stephanie McIlvain, confirmed that she too had heard this. Because Betsy’s husband worked in cycling and Stephanie worked for Armstrong’s sponsor, Oakley, they didn’t want to openly say they heard it but they would testify under oath to having heard it if there was a need.
Greg LeMond: LeMond and his wife Kathy had told me about an incriminating conversation between Greg and Lance after the 2001 Tour de France when, according to Greg, Lance said he could get ten witnesses to say he, LeMond, had used EPO and that ‘everyone used EPO’.
Since I had first raised questions about Armstrong, the challenge had been to get people who knew things on the record. Alex was cautiously excited by the possibilities, Alan was very excited, while Alastair was nervous but appreciative of the fact that much new evidence against Armstrong had been uncovered. I was asked to go away and put together a long extract that could be broken into ten or twelve different stories, as the plan was to run four pages of Armstrong/US Postal material in the Sunday Times.
The material ran to 11,000 words and, for me, this was the moment to say, ‘This is our case against Lance Armstrong; how do you feel about him in the light of this evidence?’ I was proud of the book but frustrated that it would be printed only in French. All of my sources for the book were from the English-speaking world and I saw the four-page report in the Sunday Times as the right platform for their stories.
On the Thursday, three days before publication, I turned up with my 11,000-word extract from L.A. Confidentiel, feeling the nervous excitement journalists feel when there’s a potentially explosive story sitting inside their laptops. Before me, a courier had arrived at the security office of the Sunday Times on Pennington Street in Wapping. His letter, marked ‘Private and Confidential’, was addressed to me and from my friends at Schillings. This was their ‘response’ to the expectation that we were planning to run a piece about their clients, Armstrong and Bruyneel, on Sunday.
Their clients had passed on the questions I had emailed to them. According to Schillings, the allegations implicit in the emails were false, highly defamatory and extremely damaging. They concluded from the emails that I believed Armstrong and US Postal had achieved their success through cheating, in particular by the use of performance-enhancing drugs. They wanted me to understand that it would be highly improper to publish false and very serious allegations concerning their clients.
And if the allegations were published, ‘our clients’ would have no alternative than to resort to law.
In other words, print and be sued.
One of the consequences of being consumed by a story like this is that it detaches you from mainstream society and takes you into a smaller world where only your sources and your desire to expose the wrongdoers matter. I saw Schillings as the legal wing of an operation well versed in intimidation. For the previous five years I’d experienced, firsthand, the many ways the Armstrong machine tried to discourage accusers and doubters. This threatening letter was just the latest example.
Alastair, the company lawyer, didn’t see it quite like this.
We discussed the story and what could be done to firm it up. Alastair wanted me to get emails from Betsy and Stephanie McIlvain confirming they would stand over the hospital-room confession in the likelihood of a lawsuit. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll call them.’
Stephanie McIlvain’s situation was extremely difficult. She and Lance went way back, and though their friendship ebbed and flowed, her job with Oakley depended upon her having a good relationship with him, which she managed to do most of the time. Her husband, Pat, was a vice-president of global marketing for Oakley, and, between them, the McIlvains had much to lose if ever they fell out with Lance.
After Stephanie met Betsy in the Indiana hospital room in 1996, they became friends. Through Betsy, I got to know Stephanie. During the early months of 2004, I began calling her and we spoke many times. She was a keen runner and we would talk about how far she’d run and her pace and, of course, we spoke about Lance. In the beginning, before the ‘Inc’ would be tagged onto the end of his name, she and Lance were close and she recalled how he had consulted with her about his choice of agent. There were some big players pitching for the business but she suggested he go with the Austin-based lawyer Bill Stapleton, and she was pleased he did.
We spoke too about the hospital-room admission and she told me she had heard it but, given her position and her husband’s position with Oakley, she couldn’t publicly say that. She and Betsy spoke all the time and both were in that position of not wanting to lie about it and not being able to tell the truth. For the purpose of telling about the hospital-room admission in L.A. Confidentiel, we agreed a compromise that would make it clear Lance did admit to using banned drugs without the two women having to say he did.
So, in the book, the hospital-room scene was described, the visitors li
sted, and I then question Betsy about it:
‘Were you there when Lance admitted to his doctors that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs?’
‘I’ve nothing to say on that. It’s a question more for Lance than me.’
‘But did you hear him say he used performance-enhancing drugs?’
‘I’ve told you. I’ve nothing to say on that subject.’
‘If you never heard him say this, just say so.’
‘I’ve got no comment.’
This routine was repeated with Stephanie:
‘Were you in the room that day?’
‘Yes, I was there.’
‘Did you hear him tell his doctors he used performance-enhancing drugs?’
‘I am sorry, I have nothing to say on this subject. It is a question for Lance. I have nothing to say.’
‘But listen, just say yes or no. Did he say he used performance-enhancing drugs?’
‘Sorry, no comment. If you have any questions that need to be answered, you must put them to Lance.’
Betsy, Stephanie and I believed that no one could miss the significance of these conversations. They admit they were in the room and all they’ve got to say is, ‘I never heard him say that,’ but they refuse, leaving readers to believe they did hear it but were afraid to admit it. Both women reassured me they would not lie under oath about the admission. Betsy also said that her husband Frankie, who was also present, would not lie under oath about it.
Alastair was still nervous about running anything on the hospital room without written assurances from Betsy and Stephanie, and so I left Alex’s office where we were discussing it and set up a conference call with my two sources. I explained to them what I needed. Betsy was willing to write the email but Stephanie was unsure, fearing the consequences of Lance finding out about her complicity in the story.
‘Stephanie, you’ve got to do the right thing,’ Betsy said.
It was a fraught phone call. Stephanie was afraid and upset. Betsy was certain and unwavering. Eventually they agreed to send emails confirming they would stand over what they heard in the hospital room. I was so impressed by both women’s willingness to tell the truth about this incident because they had so much to lose. Without Lance’s goodwill, Stephanie wouldn’t have had a job, while Betsy’s forthright views on Lance had hurt her husband’s career.
I returned to Alex’s office, convinced I’d done enough to make sure we could get the hospital-room incident into our story; but with more time to reflect and no doubt to think more about Schillings’ letter, Alastair had grown more cautious.
‘They will write emails,’ I said.
‘I think we need affidavits from them,’ he said.
‘That’s ridiculous. Now we’re just looking for ways to keep this story out of the paper. These women are being incredibly brave and we’re trying to make it impossible for them.’
‘We’re just trying to protect ourselves,’ Alastair said. ‘We’ve had that letter from Schillings and we pretty much know they are going to sue, so we’ve got to do everything we can.’
Knowing how difficult it had been to get Stephanie to agree to the email, I couldn’t just go back to her now and say we need an affidavit. Instead I turned the flame-thrower on Alastair.
‘Alastair, three weeks ago I was in Paris when we had a meeting to sign off on all the legal issues arising out of all this stuff and we worked with a lawyer there, Thibault de Montbrial, who, from the first moment of the meeting, convinced Pierre Ballester and me that he was on our side. He wanted our story in the public domain and wanted every detail in there. Then he showed us how we could do it. He was inspiring to work with. This is fucking depressing.’
Alastair was upset by my withering put-down and had every right to be. It was grossly unfair because it did not take into account the significant differences between French and English libel law. The French allow journalists who are honestly seeking the truth to do their jobs, but this is not the case in England. Here we had five witnesses – O’Reilly, Swart, Andreu, McIlvain and LeMond – who were all offering direct evidence that linked Armstrong to doping, but somehow it wasn’t enough.
Whatever I brought to this discussion, it wasn’t objectivity. My loyalty was to the people who had gone out on a limb for me, risked much so that Pierre and I could get more of the story out there. In all of the debate that Thursday afternoon and into the early evening, I didn’t get the significance of the Schillings’ letters and how difficult it would be for us to defend a case against a multiple Tour de France winner and cancer icon.
My understanding of the threat wasn’t helped by some simplistic thinking. The previous day the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf repeated comments made by Armstrong about me: ‘Walsh is the worst journalist I know,’ he had said in an earlier interview. ‘There are journalists who are willing to lie, to threaten people and to steal in order to catch me out. All this for a sensational story. Ethics, standards, values, accuracy – these are of no interest to people like Walsh.’
‘So,’ I raged at Alastair, Alex and Alan, ‘he can say that about me and we can’t run the interviews we have done with people who worked with him and rode with him and give a completely different picture of him to the one fed to the public? Where’s the fairness in that? Is there any chance that the Sunday Times might support its journalist?’
Over the years I have discovered that anger hasn’t helped me to convince those on the other side of an argument. I didn’t consider that Dutch libel laws are very different to England’s, and Armstrong’s comments about me in De Telegraaf were probably not libellous and, anyway, I wasn’t going to sue. Alastair knew Armstrong would sue us regardless of what we printed about him. There was nothing veiled about Schillings’ threat.
I went out and called Betsy and discussed the possibility of getting an affidavit from her, but what was the point? Stephanie wasn’t going to be able to do this. Betsy, of course, was more than willing: ‘I ain’t lying for Lance. I told Frankie that.’ The more Alastair thought about it, the more he felt the 11,000-word piece was unusable without affidavits from both of them. If I had been able to stand back and assess things dispassionately, it would have been obvious to me that the dice were just loaded against us in England.40
Deep in the back of my mind, I knew Alastair was right.
Emma O’Reilly’s recall of all that happened at the US Postal team during her five years was detailed and wholly convincing. You listened to her story and knew she was telling the truth. But Armstrong would say she was lying and he could probably have produced five witnesses from within the team who would claim everything Emma said was a lie. What then?41
When I went back in to Alex’s office, Alastair said he had to recommend not running the Armstrong story because of the certainty we would be sued and the likelihood we would lose. Alex couldn’t overrule the lawyer, especially when it was clear to everyone but me that the lawyer was right. They hadn’t any doubts about my evidence and they, too, were certain Armstrong was doping, but their responsibility to the newspaper meant they couldn’t dive headlong into a legal battle they felt we would lose.
I understand that now, but didn’t understand it then. Demoralised, I made the decision to resign.
The morning after you’ve resigned from a job you didn’t want to leave isn’t going to be the brightest of your life.
Alan English thought it wrong that I should leave the newspaper this way and wanted to find some way to undo it. He reckoned the position I’d taken meant it would be difficult for me to come back, even if the newspaper wanted me, if nothing about Armstrong appeared in that week’s paper. He spoke to Alex and asked if he could look at the 11,000-word piece I’d originally submitted to see if he could take it and distil a piece that Alastair would pass.
Alex told him to go ahead and then sent me an email saying that the newspaper was seeing if there was a way out of this and to hold off in relation to the resignation. Though still feeling incredibly low, I was happy to do th
at. I didn’t want to work for any other newspaper.
Paul Kimmage had joined the Sunday Times two years before and that weekend he was in Florida on a golf story. When told I had resigned, he felt he too would resign because he knew how much I’d put into the Armstrong story and he was almost as keen as I was to see it in the newspaper. It wouldn’t come to this, as Alan wrote a story that contained many of the allegations in the book and made a strong case for the need to ask questions of Armstrong. Alan’s piece had the balance that my piece lacked, although it didn’t have a few of the most serious charges against Armstrong.
Mindful of how Britain’s libel laws work, Alan quoted Lord Justice Brooke’s recently expressed view that the media are the general public’s eyes and ears. ‘In a free society,’ he said, ‘fearless reporting has often exposed information which it has been in the public interest to expose.’ It definitely was in the public’s interest to know there were good reasons for suspecting Lance Armstrong was not who he said he was.
In his piece, Alan also argued that with lawyers charging a £400 hourly rate, newspapers could be held to ransom by those with the financial wherewithal to do so. The Sunday Times knew Armstrong had the means to commit to this battle and that the further it progressed, the more our libel laws would serve his interests.
In the piece Alan refuted the suggestion, made by Schillings in their letter, that I had a vendetta against their client. He insisted my opposition was to the cancer of drugs in sport and that was true. I had written about doping in athletics, doping at the Olympics, Ben Johnson, Linford Christie, Michelle Smith and Stephen Roche, and he reminded readers that young cyclists were dying because of doping.
In a two-month period at the turn of the year, the ’98 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani had died, so too his contemporary the great Spanish climber José Maria Jiménez, and also the 21-year-old Belgian Johan Sermon. Here, Alan was attempting to reflect my concern for cycling’s deep-rooted culture of doping, and he was pleased the piece was passed with few changes by Alastair, Alex and the editor John Witherow.
