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Ryan drops out of race for Illinois Senate amid damaging sex club allegations
4:44 p.m. June 25, 2004
Associated Press
Excerpt:
Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan drops out of the race amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations that horrified fellow Republicans and caused his once-promising candidacy to implode in four short days.
CHICAGO – Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan dropped out of the race Friday amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations that horrified fellow Republicans and caused his once-promising candidacy to implode in four short days.
"It's clear to me that a vigorous debate on the issues most likely could not take place if I remain in the race," Ryan, 44, said in a statement. "What would take place, rather, is a brutal, scorched-earth campaign – the kind of campaign that has turned off so many voters, the kind of politics I refuse to play."
The campaign began to come apart Monday following the release of embarrassing records from Ryan's divorce. In those records, his ex-wife, "Boston Public" actress Jeri Ryan, said Ryan took her to kinky sex clubs in Paris, New York and New Orleans and tried to get her to perform sex acts with him while others watched.
Ryan disputed the allegations, saying he and his wife went to one "avant-garde" club in Paris and left because they felt uncomfortable.
In quitting the race, Ryan lashed out at the media and said it was "truly outrageous" that the Chicago Tribune got a judge to unseal the records.
"The media has gotten out of control," he said.
*snip*
But the Tribune and Chicago TV station WLS sued for the records' release, and a California judge ordered them unsealed. The couple fought to keep the records sealed, saying the release could harm their 9-year-old son.
"The fact that the Chicago Tribune sues for access to sealed custody documents and then takes unto itself the right to public details of a custody dispute – over the objections of two parents who agree that the re-airing of their arguments will hurt their ability to co-parent their child and hurt their child – is truly outrageous," he said.
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Subsequent to his withdrawal from the U.S. Senate race in Illinois, Jack Ryan has characterized what happened to him as a "new low for politics in America".[13] According to Ryan, it was unprecedented in American politics for a newspaper to sue for access to sealed custody documents.
Ryan opposed unsealing the divorce records of Senator John Kerry during Kerry's race against George W. Bush in 2004, and Kerry's divorce records remained sealed.
Ryan has made this request: "let me be the only person this has happened to. Don’t ask for Ted Kennedy’s. Don’t ask for John McCain’s. Don’t ask for Joe Lieberman’s. Just stop. This is not a good precedent for American society if you really want the best and brightest to run."[13]
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*snip*
In less than two weeks, a Los Angeles judge plans to decide whether to release any of the sealed documents from Republican Senate nominee Jack Ryan's 1999 divorce from Hollywood actress Jeri Ryan.
L.A. Superior Court Judge Robert A. Schnider has tentatively scheduled a "final hearing" on the question for June 18.
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September 17, 2008 - Judge Robert A. Schnider to Retire After 27 Years on Bench
By STEVEN M. ELLIS, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert A. Schnider is retiring after 27 years on the bench.
Schnider, 62, said yesterday that he will officially step down Dec. 15, and that he plans to become a private judge with Alternative Resolution Centers.
*snip*
Schnider first joined the bench in 1981, when he was appointed as a commissioner, and has heard family cases since that time. Then-Gov. Gray Davis appointed Schnider, a Democrat, to the Superior Court in 2002, and the jurist later served as supervising judge of the family law departments from 2005 until the beginning of this year.
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*snip*
Indeed, Chapter 5 of her best-selling "Guilty" reviews how Obama and his political brain David Axelrod used the Chicago Tribune to dig into his opponents' tawdry and embarrassing divorce and child custody records in order to win both of that year's elections.
Coulter gets it right on Republican Jack Ryan, how the Chicago Tribune-contrived "sex-less" scandal and weak-spined Republicans who refused to support him destroyed Illinois' only realistic chance of keeping Obama within the state's borders in 2006.
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Is there any more graphic evidence of how vitally critical the power to nominate/appoint judges is and how seriously necessary it is that we have Pubbies with convictions, spines and fight?