Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given (2010) by Duane Dog Chapman Page B

I used that word? Strangely, Abrams took issue with the word more than the stagehand that day. My best assessment was that the stagehand understood I wasn’t being rude or disrespectful, so he was never made uncomfortable by the exchange. I don’t think Abrams could possibly understand where I was coming from because he has never been in my shoes. He’s a newsman, not a bondsman. He’s not in the field chasing down punks. As far as I know, he’s never done time. It didn’t make either of us right or wrong. It made us individuals with very different backgrounds.
    So when the story hit, I personally didn’t think it was very newsworthy, at least not to me. But I knew it could be damaging. I assured Beth everything would be OK and that she didn’t need to spend one minute worrying about the fallout. Of course, I was being naïve, because the story was growing by the second.
    Now, telling Beth not to worry is like telling a food addict not to touch that platter of homemade cookies. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell that person to back away from the plate, those cookies are goners.
    I had already survived the screaming phony headlines of the tabloids for years: DOG SMOKES CRACK, DOG AND BETH TO DIVORCE, DOG BARESALL ! The tabloids’ sole purpose in life is to devastate and destroy people. Not long after Barbara Katie died, a reporter from the Enquirer called to tell me they had photos of the crash. They were planning on running the graphic pictures along with a story about my dead daughter. I was furious. I threatened the man, saying I’d hunt him down and kill him with my bare hands if they printed those photos. Her lifeless body splattered all over the pages of a tabloid magazine was more than any parent should endure after losing a child. How far will these reporters go before it is too far? As humans, we can only take so much before we reach a breaking point. I have been tested so many times in my life, but this was one time I didn’t feel like I had to turn the other cheek. Up until then, it was never the lies the papers printed that bothered me so much as the people who were telling them. But, then the “N” word story broke and I thought, This time, they just might beat me, because that was definitely my voice they had on tape. There was absolutely no doubt it was me.
    As the day went on, the story grew into something much bigger than I could ever have imagined. I went from thinking it would all blow over to worrying that I was done. I couldn’t believe that, of all people, I was about to go down for something like this. It seemed impossible. I thought I was invulnerable from the enemy, the devil, the guy who robs you of everything if you give in to the temptations of his world. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, but with each passing hour, the story blew up faster than a deer tick on a dog. By mid-morning in Hawaii, a six-hour time difference from New York, it was one of the lead stories on the news—around the world.
    Larry King, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, foreign press, CNN, MSNBC—everyone called Beth wanting a comment from me. By the end of the day my manager called to say life as I’d known it was done—over. He said I was the plague.
    Poof.
    Gone.
    It was all gone.
    An irreversible cyclone began to spiral my life out of control. Eventhough I went back to bed that morning, I never actually fell back to sleep because Beth kept me up with her constant updates of what was happening. I was getting Google alerts on my iPhone about it every fifteen seconds or so. Within hours, Beth was on the phone doing what she does best, dealing with the media and handling the drama. She fielded calls from news organizations, producers, the network, our publicist, lawyers, my manager, friends, family, and everyone else who has a hand in my daily life. “We can help, we can help” was the general message. Everyone had thoughts on how to handle the fallout. My life had gone nuclear, and I never