Rainbow Nation News

RAINBOW NATION NEWS

"GOODWIN IS SCARED TO DEATH OF RAINBOWS"

(Editor's note: The following is an edited transcript of a long conversation between the Liberated Guardian and Leslie Bacon.

Leslie, who was held without bail for over two months as a material witness in the Seattle Grand Jury investigation of the Capitol bombing, has recently been indicted by a New York grand jury. She is charged with conspiring to firebomb a New York City bank on December 4. Leslie is now free on $10,000 bail )

LNS: Leslie Bacon is a myth and a symbol to this country rather than a person. Maybe you could start by talking about your life and how all this business with the Grand Jury and the media has affected it.

LESLIE: The whole thing started in a period of about ten minutes. I got up one morning and I was hanging around the house a little bit asleep. Suddenly someone came running up the stairs and said, "Leslie, get out of here, the FBI is here again. " And then suddenly this whole thing was put on me. It was weird because suddenly I was totally cut off from reality.

I had no communication with anyone except lawyers and my parents. It was total culture shock. I was put in a plastic American hotel with color TV. No music, no grass - they wouldn't even let me sit on the floor. There was no one I could talk to except pigs.

For awhile the Feds decided that we would go out to dinner when the news came on, which was my only contact with the outside world. Mayday was happening and I could see all my friends on TV -- watch them all get busted. Later on, when I went to jail, it was like going home -- going back to the people -- people I could communicate with. When I walked in, all these women crowded around me and asked me if I was Leslie Bacon. They'd read about me in the papers and they wanted to know why I wasn't in that hotel room anymore. I explained all that and then there was this silence. And then somebody said, "Tell us about the revolution."

The thing that's so strange about it is that we don't know the grand juries are investigating anything until they start subpoenaing people without ever saying why. When you won't answer their questions, they can throw you in jail. It's a great way to put people in jail without a trial. I spent a month in custody and a month in jail and yet I have not been convicted of a criminal offense.

LNS: How did the marshalls treat you? You actually lived with them for an entire month! It must have been weird. . .

LESLIE: At first they kind of stood at a distance, and I was constantly screaming at them, and lecturing them: "You're only following orders. Eichmann was only following orders." Then I calmed down because I realized that I had to have a sense of humor about the whole thing or I would go crazy.

They discovered that I didn't have fangs, I didn't breathe fire -- that I was a person -- and then they started doing a parental thing on me. The way I spoke and the experiences I had had were similar to a lot of things their kids did.

LNS: What were the people on the grand jury like?

LESLIE: They looked like the United States bowling team. Most of them were in their 40's and really straight. There was one black man who came just a few of the days, and he always smiled at me when I looked at him . . . There were a few that were younger, but they had silver hair and were wearing stretch pants. Mostly they were really bored. They'd look out the windows and read newspapers.

LNS: What was Guy Goodwin's approach. (Note: Goodwin is the special Justice Department flunkie who's in charge of the grand jury prosecutions.)

LESLIE: He's a very slick, slimy questioner. He'll ask you a very vague question and then he'll shoot a very specific one at you. Or he'd ask a question that has a long long answer and in the middle of it he'd throw out something incredible like "Did you go to the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in November, 1970 as a representative of the Yippies or the Weathermen?" And I'd go, "Wait a minute, where's that coming from."

LNS: What do you think were the worst mistakes that you and your lawyers made?

LESLIE: The first day when I went before the grand jury and they asked me the first question -- my name -- I probably should have taken the fifth amendment, because by that time every newspaper in the country had said that I had blown up the Capitol. I could have gone in there, taken the fifth, maybe be given immunity. I would have gone to jail for contempt and then would have been bailed out without having ever said anything. The point is that you just don 't talk to the Feds. . . it legitimized everything they knew and it gave them a chance to subpoena people. They probably would have been subpoenaed anyway, but the government would have had to go through a whole different trip to do it.

Goodwin spent about an hour and a half on rainbows. He is scared to death of rainbows. He'd say, "Miss Bacon, did this paper have a rainbow on it. I want you to tell me now, and remember that you're under oath, did you ever belong to the Rainbow Tribe, and the rainbow this and the rainbow that."

-from LNS