(The next day, my husband would refer to my still-stinking laundry as my “Charlie LeDuff clothes.”) He lights a cigarette it occurs to me it has been decades since I’ve been in a workspace where people smoked. He plops down on the ledge of a bay window behind his desk and, per usual, places a 2-foot mic stand between his hanging legs as if he’s straddling it. His producers are reminding LeDuff the show is about to begin. (Full disclosure: She turned me down for Newsweek, too.) And, as a Whitmer aide told me later, they certainly weren’t going to risk her talking to LeDuff.

Whitmer, sitting on a big polling lead, gave precious few interviews in the final months of the campaign. That’s the gall of all gall.” Then, back in native LeDuff, he admits: “That’s really what I was doing.” Suddenly, in an almost British, intentionally theatrical accent, he pretends to be speaking to her: “I resent, madam, that you think you can take that, but for four years, you’re so afraid of me you can’t sit down and answer a question. He’s been after her for years to answer questions about her handling of elderly COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and the veracity or absence of the data on it. And after a few more rhetorical pingpongs, LeDuff levels with me: He just wanted to grab some headlines and shame Whitmer into coming on his show. Team Whitmer used the clip to support an argument that Dixon was too radical to be elected. “There was nothing transformative about what they did with it. “It’s not settled case law,” he tells me.

Yet even now, when it doesn’t matter anymore, he’ll still argue about it. He knows nothing illegal or unusual transpired. He’s a 57-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York Times correspondent with a journalism master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. On a local radio show in August 2022, he claimed that video of this extremely relevant remark by a gubernatorial contender did not qualify as “fair use.” In his Detroit News column, LeDuff called the footage “purloined.”īut Charlie LeDuff knows better. LeDuff demanded Whitmer and her PACs take the ads down. That clip, with LeDuff’s mustache, the bifocals propped on his forehead, his pinstripes-and-vest outfit - all of it became the indelible image and a pivotal moment of the 2022 campaign.

Gretchen Whitmer to run campaign ads built around a clip of Republican nominee Tudor Dixon enthusiastically telling LeDuff she’d force a raped teen to bear her uncle’s baby.

The topic at hand: whether it was legal and appropriate for political action committees supporting Gov. And a few moments later, he gives away the game. I decide to keep pushing, to ignore the awkwardness of the moment, to badger my witness.

Detroit by charlie leduff