Well, isn’t this rich? As expected, Robert “Joe” Halderman showed up in a Manhattan courtroom this morning with his press-hungry attorney Gerald Shargel and asked the judge to dismiss the extortion charges that were filed against him. As his lawyer explains it, Halderman’s early morning rendezvous with David Letterman’s limo driver on the morning of September 9 — a meeting in which he dropped off a screenplay reportedly based on the sexually charged environment behind the scenes of the Late Show — was “a pure commercial transaction.” In other words, he was simply presenting Letterman with an exclusive first look at his totally awesome, sure-to-be-a-blockbuster script! Sounds totally natural and perfectly reasonable to us, not to mention exactly how these things usually work. Case dismissed!
But wait, there’s more. In addition to Shargel filing a motion to dismiss the charges against his not-at-all-creepy client, Shargel also made sure to get in a few potshots at David Letterman before he left the courtroom. We’re not entirely sure how this is germane to the case at hand, but Shargel asserted that Halderman had evidence that Letterman had “created and fostered an environment of workplace sexual misconduct that under any definition, amounted to actionable sexual harassment.” Oh, and he also said that he had evidence that the relationship between “hiking” buddies Dave Letterman and Stephanie Birkitt was still on as recently as this summer. Wow, we have all of our fingers and toes crossed that Halderman raises enough money for this thing to go to trial.
