williamlobdell.com

The New York Post had an interview yesterday with a woman who claimed to have had an affair with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s long-time pastor.

Elizabeth Payne

*** Upated ***

The story’s top:

He almost wrecked Barack Obama’s presidential dreams, and now firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright has helped destroy a Dallas church worker’s marriage - and her job, The Post has learned.

Elizabeth Payne, 37, said she had a steamy sexual affair with the controversial, racially divisive man of the cloth while she was an executive assistant at a church headed by a popular Wright protégé.

When word of the unholy alliance got out, Payne’s husband dumped her, and she was canned from the plum job at Friendship-West Baptist Church, she told The Post.

When I worked the religion beat, I never went wanting for these kind of stories. In fact, one summer, we had an intern who worked at the cubicle next to me. Before she went back to school, she turned to me and said, “I never thought I’d hear so many interviews about sex conducted by the paper’s religion writer.”

Update from Lobdell: After years of blogging, I should be able to anticipate the echo effect of the Internet by now. The following paragraph I wrote in a throw-away fashion — it’s a juicy tidbit from my reporting days that’s always stuck with me, and I thought it would give readers an insight into some of the craziness I dealt with while covering religion in America. But I should have predicted it might gain some attention. I just got a call from a journalist who asked about the name of the pastor. Ah, he won’t get that from me. I didn’t give a name or identifying details — there are thousands of “semi-famous evangelical pastors” in United States — on purpose. Charges were never made — perhaps for a great reason, such as his guilt couldn’t be proven or he was innocent. Plus, the investigation happened some time ago, and my information then wasn’t solid enough to even publish that an investigation had begun. I’ve edited the graph below, using strikethrus and bold type, to reflect a more carefully written version. Lesson learned.

Probably my best story was one that was never published. I had gotten a tip that a semi-famous evangelical pastor was being investigated for allegedly putting out a contract on his alleged former sex male lover, who reportedly had taken up with another man. The former lover was murdered, but Police and prosecutors Authorities could never quite make an air-tight case against the preacher (despite, someone familiar with the case told me, some strong evidence).