It’s not a pretty scene of Martha Mitchell being held, locked up, drugged and left incommunicado. In the series gas lit Julia Roberts plays the fun-loving, self-assured, and always a bit fussy wife of Richard Nixon-appointed Attorney General John Mitchell, the man behind the notorious Break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel stuck. Martha Mitchell knew too much about it, so her husband had her arrested and made sure the newspapers portrayed her as a lunatic, but couldn’t prevent him eventually going to court and being convicted of conspiracy. He also had his Martha to thank for that.
The angry wife’s only revenge is often a call to the tax office and the subtle hint that the office, which the unfaithful husband writes off every year, actually serves as an apartment for the bed rabbit. Martha Mitchell combined her revenge with true enlightenment. She was known in Washington as a gossip, but the screenwriters knew about her gas lit nothing yet of a scene in the background, which now Carl Bernstein, who uncovered the Watergate affair with Bob Woodward, the Washington Post has betrayed: After her husband moved out of their New York apartment, the abused wife called Bernstein and invited him to look at her husband’s papers.
“Get on with it boys! Convict him! Hope you get the pig.”
Such a whistleblower is every reporter’s dream. The research stalled, the men around Nixon stonewalled, the President himself intervened and fired prosecutors so that the judiciary could not investigate their machinations any further. Bernstein and Woodward flew from Washington to New York immediately after the call. Martha Mitchell was waiting for her at the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment. It must have been the completed scene from the film: she was very friendly, Bernstein recalls after almost half a century, but at the same time she was also determined to have ice-cold revenge. With a drink in hand, she pointed to her husband’s study: “Get on with it, boys! Convict him! Hope you get the pig.”
For four hours, the two fled all the documents Mitchell had left behind when he rushed out, found documents on his defense strategy and a letter in which a supporter of the president promised $100,000 for illegal businesses like the Watergate burglary. There is still justice, because “without Martha Mitchell,” Nixon sighed after his Watergate-forced resignation, “Watergate would not have existed.”