Who kidnapped Martha Mitchell? Watergate whistleblower was held hostage in California hotel in 1972
Martha Mitchell was the wife of the American politician and former attorney-general John Mitchell. She is famously known as the woman who exposed the Watergate scandal. She is once again in the focus with the limited series, ‘Gaslit’ which is set to premiere on April 24, 2022, on Starz. The political thriller, which is "based on the insane but shockingly true story" of the scandal, will center on Martha Mitchell, played by Julia Roberts.
Watergate was the major US political scandal that involved the administration of US President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 and eventually led to Nixon's resignation. A larger-than-life character, Martha entered the spotlight after trying to leak top-secret details about the Watergate scandal. This led to her brutal kidnapping and her reputation was destroyed by loyalists to the then president, Richard Nixon. So who kidnapped Martha Mitchell? Let’s dig a little deeper to understand what happened.
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The subject of podcasts like ‘Slow Burn: Watergate’ and books like ‘Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell’, show that Martha worked as a Red Cross nurse's aide and a secretary before meeting her second husband, John N. Mitchell, in 1957.
Martha's unquenchable thirst for gossip earned her the nicknames "Martha the Mouth" and "The Mouth of the South." Martha's love of bold statements triggered several controversies. "The Vietnam War stinks!" she told a reporter in 1970. But she is best remembered as the first Watergate whistleblower.
How was Martha kidnapped?
Martha learned key details about Watergate largely from eavesdropping on her husband’s phone calls and meetings and looking through his papers. On June 22, 1972, she made a late-night phone call to Helen Thomas, a journalist, from a hotel in California, to discuss what she knew. Helen was reportedly Martha's favorite reporter. On the call, she expressed her intention to leave her husband until he resigned from the CRP. However, the phone call was abruptly interrupted, and when Helen called the hotel again, the hotel operator told her that Martha was "indisposed" and would not be able to talk.
A few days later, a veteran crime reporter, Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News, tracked Martha to the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. Kramer found, what she described as "a beaten woman" who had "incredible" black and blue marks on her arms. Martha later accused an ex-FBI agent Steve King of assaulting, kidnapping, and sedating her. She tried to escape to the balcony, which resulted in a physical altercation. During their struggle, her hand smashed a window and required stitches. Five men held her down on a bed while a doctor injected her with a tranquilizer. She was held hostage in the California hotel for 4 days. This made her unable to relay the crucial details about the impending scandal.
When Mitchell returned to Washington, the media gave her no support, and Nixon loyalists, desperate to conceal the White House’s role in the break-in, treated her like trash. She was labeled as an alcoholic and therefore unreliable witness.
“She was kidnapped, sedated, drugged,” said Kate Clarke Lemay, a historian at Washington’s Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which features a Time magazine cover image of Mitchell in its 'Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue' exhibition. “People denied that this happened to her. In today’s phrase, they gaslit her, they called her crazy, they used that age-old reference for women as hysterical … She was the whistleblower and we respect her today.”
Starz's political thriller, ‘Gaslit’ looks at her extraordinary life and tragic fall from grace. Starring A-listers Julia Roberts and Sean Penn, the political thriller series is based on the critically acclaimed podcast by Leon Neyfakh called 'Slow Burn'.