KEY POINTS:
Gawd help us, Joe Karam's found his appetite for women again, according to the latest Listener magazine.
What a funny man is he. Across six pages in the magazine, he talks about his goodness, and his loneliness caused by fighting to free convicted murderer David Bain.
"None of
my friends have stuck by me. None," Karam alleges.
Oh really? Perhaps Karam's memory is clouded from poring over the masses of accumulated files. Many of his comments I simply cannot let pass.
I do this with caution. Karam has already sued for defamation. He pulled no punches in his book, David and Goliath, but he's very sensitive when it comes to taking criticism. (Interesting that he complains that his book wasn't nominated for a Montana Award even though, he says, it's one of New Zealand's best-selling books. Er, I think it's more about writing ability than sales, Joe, otherwise my Paedophile & Sex Offender Index would have scooped the pool.)
I know for a fact that one person who stuck by Karam for years, inviting him to dinner and parties when his other friends openly asked why, is Sir Robert Jones. Several times I've been at the grand house on the hill - seated around the dining table or drinking and laughing in the library - when Karam has also been enjoying Jones' generosity.
I don't know if Sir Robert shares my view, but in my opinion, Joe, some people don't ask you to share their social occasions because you're boring. And that's got nothing to do with the Bain case, it's because anyone who talks about themselves all the time tends to make other people's eyes glaze over. Sorry Joe, if this hurts, but sometimes you need to lighten up.
Journalists who once wooed him (the Listener says he did a thousand media interviews without so much as a personal assistant to manage his calls) have now lost interest, according to the magazine.
Well, we have not lost interest in the Bain case, but some of us have lost interest in you. You acknowledge yourself, in the Listener article, that some people think you "stop at nothing to try to get my belief believed by other people". Yet you say this is not the case and that there has been another battle to fight every step of the way. But the Listener article proves you have nothing new to say.
When did the David Bain case become the Joe Karam case? Other trenchant battlers for justice, for example Pat Booth for Arthur Thomas, and Donna Chisholm for David Dougherty, have kept themselves out of the limelight. Not for them the celebrity circuit, maybe because both are journalists. Even Karam, who according to the article revels in his own uniqueness, would hardly call himself a journalist. Booth and Chisholm, on the other hand, have done their share of chasing fire engines, death knocks, going into houses for interviews and taking the precaution of leaving their car engine running with the driver door open.
Paul Holmes comes in for singular criticism. Karam reckons Holmes once wrote, "I love my friend, Joe Karam", but now he never calls. Have you called Holmes, Joe? It's not hard to pick up the phone and if you're the uber-sleuth, you'd find his number. I did, after I'd watched his interview with Dame Stella Rimmington, former head of MI5, and felt the compulsion to say, "well done, mate".
But it was Karam's dissing of All Blacks that particularly incensed me. The rugby fraternity, he reckons, regard him with "a great deal of suspicion. If they look at what I'm doing too closely, all it would do is force them to examine their conscience... who are the All Blacks who have become such great leaders?" By implication, Karam himself is one.
John Kirwan, according to Karam, is "not putting his life out to help others". If Karam asked those who suffer from depression, he might get an angry reaction to that put-down. Even I can reel off some All Blacks who've gone on to "put their lives out to help others". There's John Graham, former All Black captain and headmaster of Auckland Grammar, the man who co-founded Academic Colleges Group, became Chancellor of Auckland University, inspiration for generations of students, now involved with Parenting with Confidence.
Then there's Sir Wilson Whineray, David Kirk, Sir Brian Lochore, Colin Meads, not to mention Tana Umaga and Jonah Lomu.
Do these people deserve to be referred to by Karam with the words: "It's bloody dreadful that All Blacks don't individually do more"?
A grovelling apology to these All Blacks would be in order, but I doubt it will be forthcoming. Sorry's one of the hardest words for many of us to say.
