When asked by KSDK St. Louis why she continued her affair with Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens if she felt coerced in her first kinky encounter, “KS” said, “I just wanted to feel better. I felt so awful about myself. I wanted to forget whatever happened. I didn’t want to believe that actually happened, and so, if he really likes me then, ‘Yeah, yeah, it didn’t happen like that.'”
In her first media interview, KS wanted to make the case that she told the truth in her testimony before the house. She insisted she received no money from anyone and would rather not have been involved in the public unraveling at all.
“I have no ill intentions other than not being made to be a liar. I’m not lying,” KS said. “This is hard, it was hard at that time and it’s hard to talk about now. I’m not lying. That’s it. I want to move on. I want to heal.”
As to whether she might have dreamed up the initial encounter, at least in part, KS claimed her “dream” comments were taken out of context. That said, her account of seeing Greitens take a photo of her is so sketchy as to be valueless.
Said KS, “This memory of seeing a phone was so separate so I was trying to say, ‘No, I haven’t testified to seeing a phone,’ and what I was trying to say is the memory I have of seeing the phone isn’t strong enough to testify to.”
Now, that Jackson County’s Jean Peters Baker has been appointed “special prosecutor” on the invasion of privacy charge against Greitens, it is hard to see what kind of case she can put together.
The “invasion of privacy” statute is typically enforced only in cases of peeping toms and the like. Greitens will not testify. KS’s acknowledgment that she entered the affair willingly and continued it after the initial incident will not play well with a jury. She cannot testify for certain that a photo was taken of her. There is no photo in evidence, not even a cyber trace of one. Other than to improve Democratic chances in the midterm elections, it is hard to see why Baker would take this case to trial.
In pounding Greitens, the media have been pushing a narrative much like the one attorney Al Watkins pushed in a statement to KSDK, “KS deserves the support and respect of all who abhor the victimization of the vulnerable by men of power and influence.”
At the time of the affair, however, Greitens was not the governor of Missouri, not a man of “power and influence,” and was as vulnerable as KS was. Unlike Watkins and others, she does not deny her own agency, her own free will. In the interview, she even apologized to Greitens’ wife, “I shouldn’t have been involved with him. I should not have gone into her home. I know that.”
The only people who victimized KS were her ex-husband and people like Watkins who took money to push KS’s story into the news. As KS admitted, “I have no clue with this money thing. I don’t know who it was and what they wanted to accomplish. But they used me. They used me.”
The “they” does not include Greitens.