Babbling Brooke

Poor Brooke Hundley. She fell for him, you know. Ass over teakettle, as the quaint expression goes.

The "him" she fell for was Steve Phillips, a major league baseball analyst for ESPN, the sports network. We keep getting these stories, as if it's new to have married people having affairs, or falling in love with someone other than their spouse. It's so old a story that we wonder why we keep being reminded of the foibles of others, but in this case, like the case of David Letterman before it, it's about sexual relationships with subordinates from work.

In the case of Phillips and his paramour, Brooke, there was a considerable age difference: he is 46, she 22. At her age she just can't have had the emotional experience to understand what was going on. At his age, old enough to be her father, he knew, but took advantage of her youth and naïvete. Shame on him.

Phillips thought he'd ended the affair but Brooke cyberstalked him. Phillips's wife filed for divorce after reportedly finding Brooke Hundley on her doorstep with a letter detailing the affair. Smart wife. Apparently this isn't the first time for Phillips. He was general manager of the New York Mets and in 1998 had an affair which ended up in a sexual harassment lawsuit.

But back to poor Brooke, who just happened to fall for the oldest line in the book: "I'm trapped in a loveless marriage," but of course he "stayed in the marriage for the sake of the children." Apparently Brooke, not being wise in the ways of middle-aged lotharios, took the guy at his word. Someday she'll look in a mirror at herself and yell, "Fool! Sucker! He said he loved you! It was all about the sex and you fell for it!"

In a letter, now made public, Brooke tells Phillips' wife about the affair in an offhandedly soft porn manner: "We text all day at work and talk via hotel phones on the road. The texts have always been mostly about the sxual side of our relationship and I have some saved if you ever want to see them, basically stuff like when we'll meet up next, what we want to do to each other physically and how we feel about each other."

Ouch. How'd you like to read something like that about your spouse? Then Brooke tells her what her husband has been saying about her: ". . . you married him in Michigan right after college and while he's glad you decided to stay at home, he enjoys being with me because I have more of a passion and drive to really do something with my life. And that you're making him go back to mass and therapy despite the fact that he doesn't believe it will save your marriage, but he doesn't want to lose his kids."

Brooke tries to soften the blow: "I'm not telling you all of this to hurt you in any way, but simply to show you that I am a real person in his life and that I care deeply about his happiness." Down in the paragraph she says, "I may only be 22, but I'm not stupid, and I hope you can understand we never wanted you to find out about us in this way."

Of course not...she wanted the wife to find out about her when her husband went to her for a divorce. Brooke seems to think the woman won't take it at her word that she's having an affair, or maybe she's intuitive enough to know that when cornered, Steve could always tell the wife, "She's delusional! She's lying! I've never slept with her, I promise, honey!" So Brooke ends the note with a physical description: ". . .you can see I'm not lying and to top it off Steve has a big birthmark on his crotch right above his penis and one on his left inner thigh, so you know I'm not being fake."

This cringe-inducing letter is being made public because it's been introduced as part of the divorce action. No wonder Phillips is on leave of absence from his job. If I knew the world was aware of a big birthmark above my penis I'd probably go into seclusion, too.

Poor Brooke, who fell for his bullshit, poor Mrs. Phillips, who had to put up with her cheating husband and his childish mistress coming out, and shame on Steve Phillips who used his gift of gab to get some young stuff into bed and now is paying a big, big price. He's become a distraction to ESPN, and will probably be fired. In today's world there is more of a sensitivity to this sort of thing. In JFK's era bosses and important men could boff all the underlings they wanted and everyone turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the goings-on, but now is a time of sensitivity to such matters. Just ask John Edwards or Mark Sanford, not to mention David Letterman, what happens when an affair is exposed.

Girls, stop being so damn dumb.

Guys, stop using their dumbness to get in their pants.

All of you take cold showers.


His baby, she wrote her a letter. The infamous mistress-to-wife missive: