V. Stiviano: “One day, I will become president ... Civil rights"

More wacky stuff from the Los Angeles Times that even Tom Wolfe wouldn't dare make up:

V. Stiviano attorney: Someone leaked Sterling tape 'for money'

Joseph Serna 

April 30, 2014, 4:04 p.m. 

An attorney for V. Stiviano, the woman at the center of the Donald Sterling scandal, said she had permission to record the Clipper's owner and doesn't know who leaked the tape to TMZ. 

Calabasas lawyer Mac Nehoray declined to state the purpose of the recording, but said it was "by mutual agreement." 

"My client is devastated that this got out," he said, adding that he and Stiviano "have an idea" who released it. He declined to identify that person. 

"Someone released it for money," he said. 

Stiviano recorded the rants that led to Sterling's banishment from professional basketball and said through her attorney that she was never his mistress. 

Contrary to some media reports, Stiviano was not in a romantic relationship with Sterling, her attorney said. 

"It's nothing like it's been portrayed," Nehoray said. "She's not the type of person everyone says." 

Stiviano stepped outside her home several times Tuesday and always had her face covered with a tinted visor. ... 

The conversation occurred at her home in September in the presence of another person and Sterling knew he was being recorded, Nehoray added. 

He also said Stiviano and the 80-year-old Clippers owner never had a sexual or romantic relationship and that descriptions of her as his mistress in the media and in a lawsuit filed by Sterling's wife were erroneous.
Rochelle Sterling, who has been married to Donald Sterling for more than 50 years, filed suit against Stiviano in March in an effort to reclaim a $1.8-million apartment, luxury autos and cash he gave her. 

With paparazzi tracking her every move, V. Stiviano roller-skated in her driveway Tuesday and said she wanted to be president. 

“One day, I will become president of the United States of America and I will change the legislation and laws,” Stiviano said in one of several odd encounters with media camped outside her home. “Modern day history. Civil rights movement.”

Every year or two since the end of the 1980s the United States gets engulfed in a media melee that was prophesied in almost all of its aspects in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Judge Richard A. Posner wrote in the mid-1990s:

"When I first read The Bonfire of the Vanities … it just didn't strike me as the sort of book that has anything interesting to say about the law or any other institution…. I now consider that estimate of the book ungenerous and unperceptive. The Bonfire of the Vanities has turned out to be a book that I think about a lot, in part because it describes with such vividness what Wolfe with prophetic insight (the sort of thing we attribute to Kafka) identified as emerging problems of the American legal system… American legal justice today seems often to be found at a bizarre intersection of race, money, and violence, an intersection nowhere better depicted than in The Bonfire of the Vanities even though the book was written before the intersection had come into view."

Isn't it time we admit that the long-searched for Great American Novel has turned out to be Bonfire? Of course, that might suggest maybe we don't have a Great American Country anymore ...