Features

The Resurrection of Don Imus

Les Moonves

(Photo: Nicholas Roberts/AFP/Getty Images)

Don Imus, it turns out, isn’t cooked. Far from it. Hiring Lenny Bruce’s lawyer—the veteran First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus—was the first step in what appears to be an increasingly likely if improbable comeback. Officially, Imus is still laying low in New Mexico, overseeing his camp for kids with cancer and getting back to the land. But behind the scenes, Imus has been methodically engineering the resumption of his career.

Now, just four months after he spoke the fateful words that all but buried him, Imus is said to be on the verge of announcing that he will be back on the air, perhaps as soon as January. People with knowledge of Imus’s situation say he’s been approached by as many as three major media companies. There’s a chance that the Garbus lawsuit, among other factors, could even bring Imus back to his old broadcast studio at WFAN, working for his old boss, Moonves. So how did a man who said something deemed so awful by so many find a way to come back so quickly?

The floor of Martin Garbus’s office is covered with piles of hardcover books—most of them thick tomes of history, journalism, and law. There are a handful of titles by Garbus himself, whose first star client, Lenny Bruce, branded both men as noble defenders of free speech. But on the stack closest to his desk, toward the top, is something Garbus picked up and read only recently: God’s Other Son, a comic novel published in 1994 by Don Imus.

Imus met Garbus for the first time when he walked into the lawyer’s office in late April. “He seemed very, very bright,” Garbus says. “Happy, satisfied with his life, good marriage, respects his wife. He’s very funny.” (According to one friend of Imus’s, it was Imus who approached Garbus.) Days later, Garbus went on a media tour announcing he was planning to file a $120 million wrongful-termination lawsuit on behalf of Imus against CBS.

Garbus announced that Imus’s contract not only allowed the shock jock to be risqué but demanded it, that his bosses at WFAN and CBS Radio were required to warn him at least once about his behavior before firing him, and that nothing Imus said on the air—not the hos quote or anything else—even came close to violating the standards of legal speech set by the FCC. The draft of the $120 million lawsuit demands that CBS honor Imus’s contract and pay him the $40 million owed to him under his brand-new five-year deal. The other $80 million in the proposed lawsuit is to pay for lost income for the charities Imus endorsed on the program.

Even without actually filing the suit (a step he still hasn’t taken), Garbus scored several points. First, he repositioned Imus as a victim, not a villain (Imus wasn’t the bad guy here; the suits who fired him without cause were). He also staked out the legal high ground in the CBS contract dispute, should the matter ever come before a court. The nappy-headed-hos comment, Garbus says, was clearly a joke, not a slur, and in no way falls into the category of prohibited speech. Firing Imus for the remark, he argues, didn’t just violate the terms of his contract—it was unconstitutional. Essentially, Garbus is deploying the Lenny Bruce defense. “Bruce had a joke where a couple of guys are sitting around playing poker,” Garbus remembers. “One guy said, ‘What do you have?’ and the other says, ‘I got two kikes, a wop, and a chink,’ and the other guy says, ‘Oh, I have three niggers, a dago, and a so-and-so.’ And he kept throwing out the words. He said, ‘If I use it in this context, you understand it’s a joke.’ He said that words don’t have any meaning. It’s the meanings that you impart to them.”

And what was the meaning of Imus’s comments? Before he was fired, Garbus says, Imus was saying ho on the air a lot, actually; not just about the Rutgers women but about his wife, Deirdre, a committed environmentalist he dubbed “the Green Ho.” It was like Lenny saying nigger, Garbus argues, because he was making it clear that there are people out there who use that word all the time, unironically—in Lenny’s case white racists, and in Imus’s case the hip-hop crowd. According to Garbus, when Imus said “nappy-headed hos,” he was being ironic—goofing on the pleasure white society gets from co-opting the lexicon of the black world. It’s a highbrow variation of how Imus’s producer-sidekick, Bernie McGuirk, who said hos right before Imus did on the air that April morning, explained the whole thing on Hannity & Colmes: “You know, we’re trying to be—or I was trying to be—cool.”

That argument, of course, doesn’t wash with everyone. In our discussion, Garbus brings up the book Nigger, by Randall Kennedy, the Harvard law professor, that explicates the different connotations of the word, depending on the context. He calls it a wonderful book. Unfortunately for Garbus, during the Imus controversy in April, Kennedy told Reuters that he found Imus’s comments “terrible and reprehensible … ‘Nappy-headed’ could be used in a variety of ways, it can be said lovingly or in a complimentary way, but Don Imus said it to express casual contempt.”

Garbus clearly doesn’t see it that way. “Nappy-headed hos is not nigger,” he says. “As I said, it depends on the context in which you say it. And that was Bruce’s point: It depends on how you say it and when you say it.”

And that’s your point in this lawsuit, I ask—context is everything?

“Context is a great deal of it,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s everything.”