Column: How the FBI and the Los Angeles Times destroyed a young actress' life 50 years ago (via latimesopinion)
Fifty years ago, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times came into possession of a dangerous piece of gossip, leaked to the paper by the FBI. The Times printed it without fact-checking it, and the life of a famous young actress was destroyed.
In the spring of 1970, the FBI was at the height of its war against radical movements in the United States. The bureau’s unscrupulous director, J. Edgar Hoover, had for years been working to undermine the antiwar movement, civil rights leaders and black militant organizations. Among the latter was the Black Panther Party, a group of self-styled revolutionaries challenging police brutality and white authority through “armed self-defense.
The information was malicious, manipulative and most likely untrue. Certainly the FBI didn’t know if it was accurate and neither did the Times. Seberg and her family always denied it.But in an era when a relationship between a married white woman and a radical African American lover would have been frowned upon in many circles, the assertion was devastatingly effective. The result, as Jon Wiener and Mike Davis put it in their new book, “Set the Night on Fire,” about L.A.
Of all the agency’s Nixon-era excesses, those undertaken as part of Hoover’s counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, seem particularly villainous. In the Seberg case and many others, COINTELPRO operatives went beyond gathering intelligence or arresting lawbreakers to actively spreading false and derogatory information to discredit, divide and disrupt politically disfavored groups.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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