And on the twenty-first day of Roger Clemens’ second federal perjury trial, we heard about the “booty shot.”
As Stewart M. Powell and Regina Garcia Cano of the Houston Chronicle reported, that’s the phrase former Clemens associate Brian McNamee used in response to federal prosecutor Daniel Butler’s questions.
More damningly, McNamee added that Clemens, who at the time played for the Toronto Blue Jays, laid out all the necessary tools—ampule, syringe, alcohol and cotton swab—in the bathroom of his Toronto apartment. As Powell and Garcio Cano wrote:
“Roger pulled down his pants, exposed his right buttock cheek to me,” McNamee recounted. Clemens flexed his muscles and then relaxed, he said.
“I’m ready,” Clemens said, according to McNamee’s testimony.
Clemens double checked with McNamee to make sure there were no air bubbles in the syringe.
“I injected him — I plunged the fluid into his buttock,” McNamee recalled.
McNamee, who claims the drugs were provided by Clemens, said his own attitude towards the whole thing was “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
As Garcia Cano reminded in another story from the trial, “Clemens has said he always believed the injections he received from McNamee contained Vitamin B-12 and lidocaine.”
The New York Daily News’ Teri Thompson, Christian Red, and Nathaniel Vinton couldn’t help but play off of McNamee’s wording and the furtive nature of the Clemens-McNamee relationship, writing that “it was a booty call Brian McNamee will never forget.”
And even the Washington Post‘s version of the Associated Press’ story said the relationship “had the hallmarks of an illicit affair — except their secret was steroids.”
“Roger would ask me, ‘What are you doing? Are you available tonight?’ I knew exactly what he was talking about,” McNamee is quoted as saying in that account.
McNamee will be back on the stand tomorrow, when, as the Daily News team noted, “Butler is expected to ask him about medical waste McNamee turned over to investigators in 2008, claiming he saved it after injecting Clemens in 2001.”
Earlier on Monday, Clemens’s defense attorney Rusty Hardin said, in regards to that material, “we have always contended that Brian McNamee intended to blackmail Roger Clemens.” But Judge Reggie Walton rejected that as speculation.
And in news that was overshadowed by McNamee’s headline-making, Walton also ruled that Andy Pettite’s “50-50” testimony from May 2 would remain admissible.
Reporters covering the trial, including Lester Munson of ESPN, believed Walton to be sympathetic to the defense’s attempt to get Pettite’s testimony tossed. But as Munson wrote, prosecutors filed a fifteen-page brief on the issue that was ultimately persuasive.
