Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nigel Jaquiss wowed and humored his audience as he told the story of how he exposed the Neil Goldschmidt sex scandal during a presentation Wednesday at noon in the Visual Arts Theater.

For those who haven’t heard the news, or read The Oregonian, Jaquiss wrote a cover story in May 2004 for Willamette Week which told how former governor Goldschmidt had sexually exploited his 14-year-old babysitter in 1978 and continued to do so over the course of three years. It exposed Goldschmidt’s colleagues and the girl’s friends and relatives who took part in a massive cover-up to hide it all.

During his presentation Wednesday, he explained the events that led to his story and the obstacles he ran into while uncovering the truth.

Jaquiss’ first interview with a source was with a man he described as being skittish and having Attention Deficit Disorder. Jaquiss took the interviewee out to coffee and started asking questions and got equivocal answers and distracted reactions. “Finally,” said Jaquiss, “I said, ‘Look, I think that your friend had sexual relations with a prominent man in this community. I’m going to write his initials down on a pad and I’ll push it across the table. If I’m right, you can wink at me or you can circle the initials.’”

His interviewee was skeptical and decided to leave his response up to chance. He told Jaquiss that if he threw a wad of paper across the room into a trash can, he would tell Jaquiss what he wanted to know.

“At this point, I just want some identification,” said Jaquiss. “So he wads it up, throws it—remarkably accurate — rims it around, it falls on the floor and he goes, ‘No, I can’t help you.’”

Against such stubborn odds, Jaquiss credits much of his success to luck. “A lot of other people could have gotten the story and I’m not sure why I was lucky enough to get it,” he said.

He said The Oregonian drop ping the ball also helped his great scoop. “The Oregonian had to be completely derelict in its duties for me to get this,” he said.

“My story appeared in May of ’04. In the first week of December of 2003, a Goldschmidt insider went into The Oregonian’s office and gave them everything. He gave the name of the victim, when it happened, when the legal settlement took place, who else knew (people including the current governor and the chair for Multnomah County). He gave them the whole ball of wax—stuff that I didn’t find out until a couple of months ago. He gave them everything they could have ever wanted to take the power structure of this state down in one shot. And they didn’t do anything.”

Near the end of the investigation, Goldschmidt got wind of Jaquiss’ intentions in writing about the truth and decided to resign from the various positions he held before anything got out. But Jaquiss already had enough information from various documents and

interviews to implicate Goldschmidt and published an article on wweek.com. Since then, Goldschmidt has laid low in the public eye, trying to avoid any other scandals.

Despite Goldschmidt’s fall from power, Jaquiss says he has no sympathy for Goldschmidt and says such acts are a “tragic waste of talent.”

“Here was a guy who was a brilliantly successful lawyer, 35-year-old father of two young children, mayor of the biggest city in this state, who was having sex – sometimes in his office – with a 14-year-old girl,” said Jaquiss. “I feel very sorry for her. I don’t feel sorry for him. He destroyed himself. I just wrote a story.”