The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online Page A

Dillingham, the largely Native town in western Alaska where Todd grew up.
    Elayne Ingram was married three times. In a 2001 interview with the Center for Alaska Native Health Research, she said, “I got married at age nineteen and had my first daughter at age twenty … I still don’t feel like I was an alcoholic at that point in time, but I was definitely a battered wife. The beatings were so bad that I weighed ninety-six pounds, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, my mind was racing. We finally divorced after three kids.”
    Then she married Jim Palin. “He could provide better financially and I was looking for security. And I found it. Then I worked on the pipeline. When I became financially secure, I left him. By then, it was alcoholic drinking for both me and him.” It was during her alcoholic marriage to Jim Palin that Elayne gave birth to Todd’s half sister, Diana.
    Jim later married Todd’s mother, Blanche. He divorced her and married Faye, who was not a Native. Blanche wound up in court after accidentally serving a child a lye-based detergent that she said she thought was fruit juice. Meanwhile, Todd’s full brother, J.D., was involved in a hit-and-run accident after a drinking binge.
    “Crazy thing is,” Diana Palin wrote on MySpace, “the more you go through—the better it gets.”
    And Todd and Sarah are worried about having
me
for a neighbor?

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
     
    THERE’S A POUNDING at my door. I sit up in bed. Seven thirty AM . The pounding continues. I walk through the living room, into the kitchen. I see somebody filming through my window with a television camera. It’s ABC News. I tell them to leave or I’ll call the police.
    I check my e-mail and the Internet. The world has gone mad. Sarah called Glenn Beck’s radio show at 6:00 AM Alaska time.
    “He’s stalking you,” Beck says.
    “He’s an odd character, yeah, if you look at his history and the things that he’s written and the things that he’s been engaged in.”
    Beck asks why the owner of the house rented it to me. “Todd was trying to get ahold of her all winter long,” Sarah says, “because the house was vacant and we were going to rent it and even ask if we could purchase it, for fear of something like this happening, and couldn’t get ahold of the neighbor, and next thing you know there are new tenants in it—a new tenant.”
    “Shame on Random House,” says Beck. “Do you feel, as a woman, do you feel violated?”
    “I feel more protective than ever in terms of my kids. Any mom would. Just wantin’ to bring your family even closer and wrap your arms around ’em and not let the infringement on their rights and privacy be so overwhelming as to make us not enjoy our life up here.”
    In a warning tone, she adds, as if speaking to me, “You better leave my kids alone.”
    Beck is starting to choke on his outrage. “Here’s a guy doing a book on your family who is now able to look into Piper’s bedroom! He’s a voyeur! The only reason why he moved there is to be either a Peeping Tom and watch your family over the fence or (b) watch the comings and goings of your family. This is harassment! This is stalking and harassment! Leave my family, leave people’s families alone!”
    “A very classless thing that Random House is doing,” Palin says, “and if I find out that Random House is the one actually renting this place for their author to be able to sit here over our shoulder for the next five or six months, that would be pretty disturbing, too.
    “Let me tell you something practical that happens in Alaska. We don’t have air-conditioning, so you leave your windows open all summer long, it’s the only way to keep cool under the midnight sun,because the sun essentially doesn’t set for many of the days in the summer. Leaving the windows wide open—well, now that’s gotta change, because the guy’s sittin’ right there; we’re not going to let him overhear our children’s conversation or