EXTREME EXPOSURE: The story opens with Kara drunk at the Rio. Having polished off three margaritas — at the Rio Grande in Boulder that’s the equivalent of nine shots of tequila — she embarrasses the heck out of herself by asking a state senator all sorts of obscene questions.

REALITY: That scene is almost word-for-word from my own life. Yep, my friends, that’s what happens when I have too much to drink. The poor guy who was subjected to my drunken mouth was a member of the Colorado House of Representatives at the time. I can only imagine what he was thinking ... particularly when I called his sister a bimbo.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: The Denver Independent’s I-Team, or Investigative Team, heads up tough investigations, kicking butt left and right.

REALITY: The Denver Independent is a fictional paper — mostly. Some friends and I filed incorporation papers with that name in 2001, but we never got the investors together to start the paper. All we needed was a cool million ...

Though the name I-Team is fictional, the team is a tribute to the staff of investigative reporters I worked with from 1998 to 2001. We became best friends, war buddies, comrades in hard times, enduring anything and everything together. Even thinking of them chokes me up, because there was nothing we couldn’t do when we worked together. Together we were gassed, clubbed, threatened, harassed, stalked, arrested, put on trial, cross-examined, sued, and we came out on top. Our hard work culminated in numerous state awards and seven national awards, including the 2000 National Journalism Award for Public Service. For my work leading the team, I was given a special First Amendment Award by the Colorado Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the biggest honors I’ve ever received. Those years were Camelot for us — a bright and shining moment that can never be repeated. We’re scattered all over the globe now, but my love for them is the love that goes into this book.

Pamela accepting the National Journalism Award
at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The award was a result of a five-and-a-half-month-long investigation of a university president that ultimately led to his resignation. It was one of the most brutal investigations I’ve ever participated in, with the university going on the offensive against us and publicly accusing us of lying, of being drug users, etc. We won five national awards for that investigation, but it’s hardly the only investigation we worked on together. Whereas most of the I-Team members in EE are women, in truth, I was the only woman on the team. It’s relatively rare to find women in hard-core investigative journalism, perhaps because it’s so confrontational.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Open records requests. Documents, documents, documents.

REALITY: That’s my job — getting nosy with public documents. I tried very hard not to overwhelm people with the technical aspects of being a reporter. But perhaps one of the most important things we do is to dig like termites through government documents that are by law open to the public. Many journalists neglect this part of their job; as a result, government gets away with a lot of things it shouldn’t. Being a journalist means having to digest lots of tedious details and become an expert on some topic or another every day. One day you’re reporting on a court case. Another day you’re reporting on some kind of disease. Another day you’re trying to explain to your readers the complexities of cleaning up nuclear waste. For the investigation that won us the National Journalism Award, we had to catalog and read more than 7,500 individual documents. Ugh.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: One night Kara gets a call from a man who says, "Listen, little girl. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. Hurt us, and we will destroy you."

REALITY: That’s from real life. It was probably the scariest death threat I’ve gotten. It came from a man who was former CIA with ties to Iran-Contra. I was investigating him and some of his buddies. It’s the only story I’ve ever dropped, because he meant what he said. Stupidly, I thought they’d beat me up in an alley or shoot me, which was fine. No guts, no glory. But they went after my kids. That’s all I’ll say about that.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: "These guys aren’t going to write you a letter to the editor. They’re going to beat the shit out of you with baseball bats."

REALITY: Word for word, this is a warning I got in 2003 from a state employee, who was afraid for my safety. I don’t want to discuss the investigation, because he’s still a source and the investigation is ongoing ...

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara’s editor and the police fail to take the death threats against her seriously.

REALITY: The culture of the newsroom encourages you to believe that people who threaten you are only loonies and that you have nothing to worry about. I used to keep death threats in a manila folder, just in case. But my editor didn’t take them very seriously and left it up to me whether I wanted to involve the police.

In one case, there was a man who literally hid in the bushes in front of the paper, waiting for me. When I came out, he jumped out, asked me if I were me, and then proceeded to tell me that: 1) God wanted me dead. 2) He wanted me dead. 3) God was going to make certain I died. 4) He had an AK-47 at home he could go get. I reported this to the police, and they told me to call if and when he showed up with the AK-47. At that point, I quit contacting them at all. Obviously, when someone shows up with an assault rifle, dialing 911 isn’t going to help that much. In this case, the guy began following me and sending me letters detailing what I said and what I did. The newspaper’s publisher got our attorney involved and we banned him from coming anywhere near me. However, when I switched to a new paper in 2001, he sent a letter to that paper saying how delighted he was that he would be able to "go back to [his] primary pastime of making [my] life hell."

In another case, I got a call from the FBI one day. It seems some guy was sending threats to a Pamela White (my real name) at her home address. The guy had been sending the same threats to the paper, and I had been filing them in my little folder, but I hadn’t contacted the cops. Of course, when it was a private citizen who called the police, they took it seriously and got the FBI involved. The FBI realized I was the target, not this other woman. They came to the office, and I dug through my folder and found that this guy’s handwriting matched a bunch of hate mail I’d received that was signed. They were able to go confront him, and the threats stopped. But in the meantime, I ran an article on the front page of the paper saying, "You have the wrong person, you idiot!"

EXTREME EXPOSURE: In the story, Kara drives her car behind the razor wire at a factory to investigate alleged environmental crimes. This is trespassing, and she knows it could land her in jail.

REALITY: Hmmm, how to answer ... Yes, reporters do this sort of thing. I went so far once as to drive my car into a working strip mine, just so I could jump out and take photos of the inside of the mine. Gets the adrenalin pumping each and every time. Some journalists are adrenalin junkies, but I will admit that I am getting over that particular addiction. There is something to be said for peace and quiet. Maybe I’m getting old.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara goes to interview TexaMent’s neighbors only to have one of the people she wants to interview hold a rifle on her.

REALITY: I was up in the mountains interviewing people about vandalism at a pioneer cemetery at the ghost town of Caribou (now vanished) and found myself staring down the barrel of a rifle, which was aimed point-blank at my stomach. It got my heart pounding, but I didn’t think the guy meant it. So I introduced myself and reached down the barrel of the his weapon to shake his hand. I think that surprised him, and it helped to defuse the situation. Like the character in EE, he said, "You never can be too careful up here. We get a lot of weirdos." Yeah, dude. Look in the mirror!

EXTREME EXPOSURE: A man with a gun breaks into Kara’s home, beats her up and tries to rape her. He is stopped because she pushed a panic button and police arrived just in time.

REALITY: My home was broken into by two men with switchblades, who tried to rape me but were stopped because I got a call off to the cops, who arrived just in time. I was injured, though not nearly as badly as Kara. The attack wasn’t related to journalistic work, but was a random attack by two would-be rapists, who had cased the place out and knew I was home alone with my son. My firstborn was only nine months old at the time, and I was terrified they would hurt him. I forced myself to stand still and face them, rather than running to the back of the house because I didn’t want them to know he was there. It was the single-most terrifying experience of my life, and I spent five years afterwards dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder — nightmares, anxiety, and depression. This event is what sparked me to crusade against rape as a journalist. Writing about an attack like this enabled me to dig into that terror a bit and get it out of me and onto paper. When I reread the pages I had written, however, I felt the words didn’t reflect at all how truly terrifying it was to have two men shatter the glass window in my kitchen in the middle of the night and enter my home excited about the idea of hurting me.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara’s mother is a New Age silly goose.

REALITY: That’s Boulder for you. I set the story in Denver to give myself some distance, but I live in Boulder, where just about everyone you meet is into some aspect of New Age spirituality. Get your charkas realigned. Probe your past lives. Get your natal chart and tarot done. Be a Buddhist or a Wiccan. Have an altar in your home that combines a rosary, a Buddha statue, Hindu icons, the Virgin Mary, sage and an eagle feather. Cover all your bases just in case some other religion is right ... I had so much fun with her character.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara struggles to juggle single motherhood with her job.

REALITY: Story of my life.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara has sex on all fours in the snow near Rocky Mountain National Park.

REALITY: It was in Rocky Mountain National Park, thank you very much. And it was damned cold. Let me just add that all kinds of liquids freeze at below-zero temps.

EXTREME EXPOSURE: Kara works with a whistleblower, who gives her documents and video tapes. Later he has to leave the state for his safety.

REALITY: This happened. I’ve worked with many whistleblowers, at times meeting in really crazy places. Some people are very afraid and get very cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. Usually the people who are risking their lives most are the ones who are calmest, whereas the people who are only risking their jobs, for example, are the ones who are the most freaked out. I enjoy working with whistleblowers in part because of the challenge of handling their stress. Why do I enjoy this? I have no bloody idea.

That’s about all I think I can safely discuss. I hope this was fun or at least interesting. As always, I appreciate you all so much.

Hugs,
~Pamela~





RBL Romantica would like to thank Pamela Clare for this very special and EXCLUSIVE feature. We appreciate that she has shared the "reality" of this incredible story in order to make it all the more exciting and "real" to us as readers.

Thank you, Pamela - you did a BANG-UP job, both with the book and with this feature you so generously shared with us. We're SO PROUD to call you a "ReBeL" sister.

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