Email rebounds on writer who lost wife to Turner

The Independent - UK

August 3, 2007

by David Usborne in New York



Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is careful to warn recipients of an email dispatched on Tuesday to take a deep breath before proceeding.

"Put down your cup of coffee or you might spill it," he advises with gentle consideration. It is, after all, about his wife dumping him for Ted Turner.

That would be just a few cups of coffee held by graduate students and friends on the campus of Florida State University, where Butler, 62, teaches, for whom the missive was intended. It never occurred to him that within hours almost the entire nation would be savouring its tragicomic contents.

Driven by some urge to explain, after completing a divorce from his wife of 12 years and fellow author, Elizabeth Dewberry, he gets straight to the point. "Elizabeth is leaving me for Ted Turner," Butler writes, referring to the 68-year-old former media mogul famous for serial romantic conquests.

That would have been enough to excite the interest of red-top tabloid editors and gossip websites. But there is more. Like why Butler believes his former wife was drawn to Turner in the first place. Could it be his money or his rakish looks? Or did he echo for Ms Dewberry abuse she suffered as a child?

"She has spoken openly in her work and in her public life of the fact that she was molested by her grandfather from an early age, a molestation that was known and tacitly condoned by her radically Evangelical Christian parents," he offers. "It is very common for a woman to be drawn to men who remind them of their childhood abusers. Ted is such a man, though fortunately, he is far from being abusive."

Butler, who won the Pulitzer in 1993 for his book A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, does not play the part of an enraged jilted husband but rather shows concern for his ex-wife and the life she will have with Turner. By his reckoning, it will be a part-time affair.

"She will not be Ted's only girlfriend. Ted is permanently and avowedly non-monogamous," Butler writes. "But although he has several girlfriends, it is a very small number, and he does not take them up lightly and he gives them his absolute support."

Today, he is angry, specifically with Gawker.com, a gossip website that posted the letter in full, labelling it the "Insanest Email Ever".

The missive, he insisted to Gawker's unrepentant editors, was "intended strictly for those who personally know Elizabeth and me... What a creepy little circle-jerk of self-righteousness you're running." Some might say he should have saved his writing skills for his next novel.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2831118.ece