David Copperfield is an illusionist, not a magician.  But he used to be a real person.  I knew him when we were kids, way back when.  He wasn’t called David Copperfield then, but Dave Kotkin.  We went to the Mildred B. Moss Elementary School (named Washington School until Principal Moss retired) in Metuchen, New Jersey, where we played in a dustbowl-like playground.  His two front teeth were chipped, and he got the nickname “Fang”.  It was a pretty cool nickname.

Dave was a remarkably ordinary kid.  Smart and geeky.  Not too smart, but still geeky.  To suggest that he would someday become a sex symbol would have been laughable.  Talk about an extreme makeover.  But he took an interest in magic, and developed an act for children’s birthday parties.  I remember when he announced that he was going to take the stage name “David Copperfield.”  I thought it was stupid.  What did I know?  The other option was something like “The Great Davido,” which sounded much more magician-like to me.

David Copperfield has had a fantastic career.  He reached the pinnacle of the illusionist world, with his name immediately recognizable world-wide.  He has accumulated great wealth.  He’s become the sex symbol, despite all rumors to the contrary.  He had something to do with Claudia Schiffer, thought it was never clear to me what that was.

And after all that, David Copperfield finds himself the object of suspicion and accusation.  With two barrels blazing, the FBI raided his Las Vegas warehouse and made known to the world that he has been accused of rape.  The FBI couldn’t bear the initial sparsity of information, and so some nameless source chatted up the  Seattle Times to spill the secret grand jury news.  Like  Talkleft, it bothers me that grand jury secrecy is a one way street. 

The magic of an accusation of rape is that once made, it is nearly impossible to make disappear.  Even for David Copperfield.

It wasn’t bad enough that, after the raid on his warehouse, they made sure the media found out that they found $2 Mil in cash.  For a guy who makes as much as Dave, he’s allowed to keep as much cash as he pleases.  It’s not like he’s running some side-biz that he’s trying to hide from the IRS.  After the first $50 Million a year, the taxes don’t really matter all that much.  But the hint is that something nefarious is going on with David Copperfield, since neither your nor I keep that much cash lying around.  Then again, my income was a little shy of David’s last year.  Let’s just say we aren’t in the same bracket.

As the story slowly trickles out of the Seattle Field Office, my concern for Dave grows.  There is no accusation that is so morally impugning as rape.  Once tagged, it remains a stain that cannot be easily cleansed.  Will anyone look at Kobe the same again?  For an ordinary person, he only becomes a pariah within the smaller community that knows and cares.  For a person with celebrity like Dave’s, the impact is different.

So far, he has handled it with dignity.  His attorney, David Chesnoff, is doing his best to keep it down to a dull roar, knowing too well that his efforts to quell the accusations not only limit what he will be able to do when the full story comes out, but the more he says the louder the story becomes.  By giving the boring attorney answers, he hopes the media will find nothing worthy to print, and go away.  At least for now.  It’s the best he can do.

David Copperfield is no kid anymore.  If he wants women, my bet is he can get them.  At the very least, anybody with his own island in the Bahamas is a very good looking guy.  I learned that from a short, dumpy but very successful lawyer who informed me that he was 6 feet tall when he stood atop his money.  That would make David Copperfield a giant.

It would be impossible to comment about what happened in the Bahamas as yet, because the information is spotty and one-sided.  It strikes me as hard to imagine that David Copperfield would commit rape; that he would have any reason to go to such horrific extremes.  I have a hard time understanding why David Copperfield would bother to fly a 21 year old girl to his island to begin with.  She was beautiful?  There are a lot of beautiful women.  

According to the FBI story, she claims to have been approached by David’s entourage the moment she stepped into an auditorium.  This makes sense if the entourage looks for an attractive audience member to use during the show, seating her in a special place so David can call her onstage when needed.  But how does it go from a stage in Seattle to an island in the Bahamas?  Both the need and desire element seem quite fuzzy to me.

I also have difficulty with the idea that Dave Kotkin would do such a thing.  Granted, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since I last saw him.  Would he remember who I was?  I haven’t a clue.  I forget people all the time, and I assume he does too.  He probably meets more people than I do. 

But this was no kid who dreamed of world hegemony when I knew him.  He wasn’t on a power trip.  Dave was good, regular guy.  It’s not that the allegations are impossible.  Very little is impossible.  But I’m not inclined to buy into any of this without a whole lot more.  It would be a horrible shame if Dave Kotkin, a good kid from Metuchen who succeeded on his own merits, was impugned by backdoor whispers out of Seattle.  At the moment, the allegations against David Copperfield are only an illusion.  Don’t forget that.