ExtortionPlot

Here's a late breaking surprise ripped from the headlines: Robert Halderman, the '48 Hours' producer accused of blackmailing David Letterman, has admitted to his guilt.

He took a plea deal with prosecutors in federal court that nets him six months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service, plus four and a half years of probation. For the unfamiliar, Halderman was busted in an undercover sting in which he tried to extort more than $2 million from Letterman. If Letterman didn't pay, Halderman would go public about Letterman's secret relationships with female members of his staff.

News of the plea came as quite a surprise since he and his attorneys have waged a loud campaign to expose and humiliate Letterman in open court. Halderman has since made a public statement, as seen in the video below, apologizing to Letterman and 'Late Show' staffer Stephanie Birkett and their families.



[via Comedy News]

In the wayback days of my entertainment journalism career (2004, to be precise), I had written a few poorly-executed but fun articles for a wonderful little site called Knot Magazine (not to be confused with The Knot, a website which I'm unfortunately all too familiar with these days). After publishing a couple of my missives, the editor had an idea for me: why not interview that spunky assistant Dave Letterman has on his show?

Sounded like a cool idea. It's not like Stephane Birkitt hadn't been interviewed before; she had spoken to a couple of papers from her alma mater and her hometown, and seemed approachable. And it would have been a fun story to try to figure out how she went from anonymous assistant to the girl who talked about her weekend on the phone to the on-stage presence Dave often called "Vicki." How hard could it be to get an interview?

Almost impossible, I found out.

So just who had the unbelievably huge Mammoth balls to extort late night legend David Letterman? You're looking at him, not his balls thankfully.

Robert "Joe" Halderman, pictured at the right sitting in his unholy beach chair of evil, is the man the Manhattan District Attorney's Office brought extortion charges against for trying to score more than $2 million from Letterman as part of a blackmail plot.

Letterman admitted on the air that he had a sexual encounter or encounters with members of his staff, and that Halderman used the info he had on those encounters as leverage to extort money from him. I've got three to one odds that the "Fire David Letterman" club awards Halderman their "Humanitarian of the Year Award."

According to New York City's Department of Correction records, Halderman received a felony count of attempted grand larceny. He entered a not-guilty plea at his arraignment.

I had a really hard time finding an image to include with this article. I went through every newspaper article that had "The Jay Leno Show" in the body of its text. I did searches on Google Images until Google got sick of me clogging their bandwidth. Even my editor Jane Boursaw couldn't use her super press connection powers to find one stinking shot of Jay blowing his nose in between sets from Friday's show.

Perhaps that's because Friday's late night appetizer on NBC wasn't really all that eventful. Don't take that to mean that it was totally dull, drab or boring, just a typical show for Jay and company.

And given some of the past episodes that sucked out loud, there's nothing wrong with being typical. Compared to the Pee Wee Herman debacle, it's a Devil's Tower sized step up.