A Case of One Man's Trash, or Hitting Below the Belt?

The Washington Post/April 21, 2004
By Richard Leiby

Astrange court case involving Melvin Sembler, the U.S. ambassador to Italy and a major GOP fundraiser and buddy of the Bush family, is heating up in Florida.

Sembler is suing Richard R. Bradbury, who has spent years rummaging through Sembler's garbage, picketing and raising a stink about Straight, a controversial drug treatment program founded by Sembler and his wife, Betty.

The case focuses on a penile pump that Bradbury lifted from Sembler's garbage, then posted on eBay last year for $300,000. Sembler, 73, underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1990 -- and, according to court papers, was prescribed the device. He calls Bradbury a "sadistic" stalker who tried to extort money from him.

"This is an invasion into the sanctity of our home and our bedroom," the couple state in the legal documents filed last month in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the Semblers obtained a temporary injunction against Bradbury, forcing him to keep away from their home there. They also demand he return the pump as well as other materials. Bradbury says he recovered flight schedules for foreign officials and U.S. lawmakers, along with "Republican party materials and strategy documents, personal campaign contribution documents and correspondence" from the Semblers' trash.

Bradbury, 38, calls himself an advocate for victims who, like him, say they were harmed as adolescents by Straight's practices. According to news reports, Straight closed in 1993, amid lawsuits and a Florida state audit that found "a propensity for abuse or excessive force to be used." Sembler's biography on the State Department's Web site says, "During its 17 years of existence, Straight successfully graduated more than 12,000 young people nationwide from its remarkable program." Sembler and his wife remain active in the Drug Free America Foundation.

"They're very philanthropic, very well-meaning people," the Semblers' attorney, Leonard Englander, told us earlier this week. "Nobody should have to endure this." A judge yesterday refused Bradbury's motion to dismiss the case.

The legal battle has been covered extensively on TheStraights.com, a site run by Wesley Fager, 58, of Oakton. "I was in the cult. My son was in it. He was significantly harmed by it," says Fager, who unsuccessfully sued the group in the early 1990s in Fairfax Circuit Court. "The story is not about a man's penis pump -- it's about child abuse."

Bradbury wouldn't comment, but his attorney, Thomas McGowan, said, "I see this as a First Amendment case. . . . There is no right of privacy in garbage."