DENVER- And it’s a strange lot of penises she covets: there’s Bob Guccione, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton and… Ward Churchill. In a private email in the midst of the CU firestorm over Churchill’s 9/11 essay, Wesson compared the “thoroughly unpleasant” Churchill to a pornographer, wife-batterer-killer, pedophile and cheat –as attorney David Lane reminded us in his closing arguments today. But it wasn’t the email that tipped me off, nor her fiction-writer persona promotional photo on the motorcycle. It was something which Marianne “My friends call me Mimi” did on her first day of testimony, early in the trial. When she left the witness stand, Wesson did not return to her seat, nor to the chairs located by the defense table for CU-aligned witnesses. During her break, Churchill-slayer Mimi Wesson chose the chair directly behind Ward Churchill.

Did anyone else remark on this? Even though Wesson stubbornly tried to project an adult impartiality about the case, as would befit the chairperson of a committee deciding another faculty member’s fate, off the stand Wesson couldn’t resist the urge which it appears drove her to solicit the committee chair position in the first place: to face “male celebrity wrongdoers” and take them down.

In the courtroom Wesson denied agreeing to the committee appointment only with the proviso that she be in charge, but her earlier videotaped deposition recorded otherwise. By her own account, Wesson had asked to be chairperson of the board selected to investigate Churchill. When Wesson blamed a possible stenographer’s error for the inconsistency, Attorney Lane pointed out that the courtroom had just heard her deposition with its own ears.

As a pup fiction writer, and a frequent law commentator on mainstream news programs, it’s clear Wesson welcomes the public eye. During the “All Churchill, all the time” mayhem, maybe she saw an opportunity to pretend to have incited the Churchill lynch mob.

I hope Wesson will be remembered for her testimony in this trial, in which the law professor demonstrated she was crafty enough to avoid admitting her prejudice, but couldn’t distance herself from the incriminating grandstanding she’d already done.

The “Wesson Committee” was shown in this trial to have been a hatchet team of academic hacks. Whose foray into Native America Ethnic Studies, purportedly to debunk Ward Churchill’s scolarship, resembled a visit of Ugly Americans to an Indian reservation. With Mimi the Emasculator wanting both to drive and ride shotgun.