The War Of The Herpes At The Trump Plaza
"Gong Show" host Chuck Barris has been enmeshed in a battle with his penthouse neighbor at the Trump Plaza for years now. She's an 85-year-old "inventor" and crazy ol' coot named Dorothea M. Weitzner. Barris, a little cuckoo himself—he claimed he was a CIA assassin while hosting the Gong Show—has been on the receiving end of some seriously wacky invectives by Weitzner. In a letter recently published in the New York Law Journal, Weitzner wrote: "what you need is your head cracked open. I'll get you, just you wait ... I'll get you, you cockroach. You faggot. Your wife's mother's a slut."
Among the other claims Weitzner makes against Barris:
Weitzner frequently accused the Barrises of spying on her apartment, as evidenced — according to Weitzner herself — by their shared use of the same venereal-disease specialist. In a deposition taken in the course of the ejectment proceedings, an attorney for Trump Plaza asked Weitzner if she threatened to slice Mr. Barris' body part.
"I might have said that," she answered. "You know, I'm honest, because I was in a state of paroxysms of hatred for this man who had copied ideas of mine from my telephone conversations. He used my doctor when I had herpes."
"Is that [Dr. Michael] Kalman?"
"You know how many doctors there are? There are about 10,000 doctors. He picked [mine]. It's unbelievable, the guy is very tricky."
Contracting herpes just to spy on your neighbor? That is tricky, also, probably not true.
Sadly for Barris, the lawsuit the co-op board brought to evict Weitzner was recently thrown out on some tenuous legal b.s. Barris, it seems, is doomed to suffer both herpes and harpies a little longer.