Eric Massa's Secret

Long before the Eric Massa scandal broke, the congressman carried the lonely burden of another secret that, if revealed, would turn his world upside down. An extraordinary look inside the mind of a man in the crisis of his lifetime.

Let this be the final word on former Rep. Eric Massa. the New York Democrat who stepped down amid allegations of sexual harassment of his young aides: Esquire reports that Massa secretly approached its editors and told a tale of a coup d'etat planned by Dick Cheney, in which Gen. David Petraeus would run for president—a "constitutional crisis" and "treason," he said, because Petraeus would have to fail in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to win the election. The magazine chronicles the former congressman's grappling with a swift fall from grace. Massa also rails against Democrats he says are trying to destroy him. He says that he twice considered suicide and that he once wandered to the Washington Monument in an Ambien haze and had to call aides to pick him up. He also gets a little flirty, telling the young-looking reporter, "You better watch yourself around gay bars, my friend. It could get interesting."

Read it at Esquire