PORTLAND, Ore. — Last month, former Portland mayor and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt died at the age of 83. Once a star of local and state politics, it all came crumbling down when it came out that he had raped and sexually abused a young girl.
Now a Portland filmmaker is preparing to release a documentary about Goldschmidt and the power structure that helped him get away with his crimes for decades. The feature length film to come is titled "The Girl and the Goldschmidt Machine."
“Because this isn't just the story of Neil Goldschmidt the crime he committed and Elizabeth Dunham, this is also about the people who played a hand one way or another,” said Kristen Kingsbury.
Kingsbury is the filmmaker behind the documentary. She and her husband have been working on it for two years through their Pattern Integrity Films. Kingsbury has gathered a lot of material, piecing together a sad and sordid history, brought to life by people like former state senator Vicki Walker.
“People knew about it, and they did nothing. They did nothing,” Walker says in the documentary trailer.
For most of three decades, Goldschmidt got away with what he'd done. Elizabeth Dunham was 14 years old when Goldschmidt first raped her. It was the 1970s, and Goldschmidt was Portland’s mayor at the time. He went on to serve as Oregon governor, after a stint as transportation secretary under the Carter administration.
All the while, the sex abuse of a young teenaged girl was kept secret.
Featured in the documentary is Fred Leonhardt, a speech writer for Goldschmidt when he was governor.
“I helped created an image of him as a child advocate, I feel like I was used to help promote this man who should have been in the state penitentiary,” Leonhardt says in the film trailer.
Leonhardt later became aware of incriminating information about Goldschmidt, and eventually spoke out.
“You know I’d finally told the Oregonian, and they described the detailed information that I gave them as an old cold trail that led nowhere,” he says in the trailer.
Also featured in the film are Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss, who broke the sex scandal story in 2004 with a Pulitzer Prize-winning report, and longtime Oregonian columnist Steve Duin, who has written extensively and critically on Goldschmidt.
Some of the video clips Kingsbury has compiled for the film have not aged well, to say the least, like one in which then-governor Goldschmidt speaks to the Oregon legislature in his State of the State address in 1989, declaring: “My friends, perhaps it is time for you and for me to ask the question, if we know of abused children among us and do nothing to help, then who are we?”
The irony of those words, coming from a powerful man whose repeated sexual abuse of a teenaged girl, many argue, ruined her life.
Elizabeth Dunham died at age 49. Now Goldschmidt is dead, too.
“I think Neil Goldschmidt’s legacy is that he destroyed a young woman's life who was full of promise, and he will always be remembered first and foremost as the man who raped a child,” Kingsbury said.
The filmmaker dives into how it was possible for people to ignore the rumors and how Goldschmidt’s inner circle protected him from the truth for so long — and how this is just one high profile case of power being used for evil, a problem that continues every day.
“It felt like this story could have more of a message to it, which is that child sex abuse is pervasive and the way that we stop it is we talk about it, and we believe victims,” Kingsbury said.
Kingsbury hopes to have the film finished in time for the Portland Film Festival in October. If you'd like to learn more about it, or support the filmmaker’s work, head to Pattern Integrity Films online.