Intelligencer

The Happiest Gal in the Courtroom

Enron-trial love connection.

By Jesse Oxfeld
Published Jul 24, 2006

Bethany McLean, the Enron-busting Fortune reporter who co-wrote The Smartest Guys in the Room, is dating the man who put Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling away. The fetching, recently divorced McLean, who covered the trial, is now seeing the lead prosecutor in the case, Sean Berkowitz, an assistant U.S. attorney from Chicago. “They started dating after the trial concluded, and after Bethany’s coverage of Enron was complete,” a Time Inc. spokeswoman e-mailed in response to an inquiry to McLean. None of her fellow Enron-trial reporters question McLean’s professionalism, but post-trial, the relationship did seem unusually chummy. One notes that McLean attended Berkowitz’s birthday party in Chicago, held ten days after the verdict, and she was considered to be notably sympathetic to the prosecution’s case. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that: So was the jury.) And McLean gave Berkowitz a post-trial tour of the Fortune offices. Still, the news was a shock to some. “My God!” said a fellow Enron-trial reporter. “That would be kind of crazy.”