MLK (Blackmail)

MLK - Despite being the victims of blackmail, the Kennedy family wasn't above authorizing blackmail as a tactic against their perceived political enemies. Most famously, Robert F. Kennedy, in his role as attorney general, authorized J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to use sexual blackmail against Martin Luther King Jr. to try to force an end to his civil rights activism. Under the pretense of looking for communist associations, Hoover bugged MLK's phone lines and motel rooms, ultimately uncovering evidence of extrammarital affairs, the existence of a love child King had sired with a mistress, and an ugly incident in which King sat by laughing while another pastor in his entourage sexually attacked a young parishioner in their hotel room. On November 21, 1964, a package containing a letter and an audio tape was delivered to King's address. The tape contained an audio recording of King engaging in sexual activity with one of his mistresses, retrieved from a bug in one of King's hotel rooms. The letter was written from the perspective of a disaffected black civil rights activist, accusing King of sexual immorality and implying that the author was preparing to release the audio tape. King, look into your heart. You know you're a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil, and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies. Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. The American public, the church organizations that have been helping, Protestant, Catholic, and Jews will know you for what you are, an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done, king. There's only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You are done. There's but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation. King immediately and correctly surmised that the FBI was behind the blackmail. Some have suggested that the there's only one thing left for you to do lines in the letter were urging King to decline the Nobel Peace Prize he was due to receive or to step down from his leadership role in the civil rights movement. But King himself understood the letter to be urging him to commit suicide. It's hard to see how the FBI could have made good on their threats to disseminate the blackmail material to the public when it was so obviously a product of high-tech FBI style spying. But either way, the tapes were never released and remain classified to this day.