He remains the only man alive to have won a Hollywood Oscar and a Nobel peace prize in the same year, yet glory is deserting Al Gore, and in its place have come wicked gossip and dirty jokes. It is proving an annus horriblis for the Tennessee giant who almost became America’s president. First his marriage unravelled; then, last week, he was labelled a “crazed sex poodle”.
At 62, Gore remains a powerful Democratic voice and a key influence in the global debate over climate change. He will forever be remembered as the Democratic candidate who lost the White House to George W Bush after a disputed recount of spoilt ballots in the Florida fiasco that marred the 2000 presidential race.
Yet he is now in danger of also being known as “Mr Stone”, the disguised celebrity who sought a massage in an Oregon hotel room in October 2006. Whatever the truth of the strange and depressing encounter outlined in police documents last week, Gore’s mystique as a moral beacon in a worried world has suffered a wounding blow.
Gore had no direct comment on allegations that he assaulted a 6ft, red-haired masseuse who was called to his suite at the Hotel Lucia, in Portland, where he had earlier finished a lecture promoting An Inconvenient Truth, the film on global warming that won an Oscar for best documentary.
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While sources close to Gore have acknowledged that he received a massage that night, they insist that nothing untoward happened and note the case was closed after a police investigation found insufficient evidence to proceed.
Yet the emergence, almost four years later, of the police files — and evidence that the unnamed woman involved is attempting to sell her story — has assured the former vice-president of a torrid bout of tabloid scrutiny that seems certain to leave a permanent stain.
It all started with what is becoming an American tradition to rank with Fourth of July fireworks: someone telephoned the National Enquirer and tipped them off to a scandal.
In the case of John Edwards, Gore’s Democratic colleague and subsequent presidential contender, the Enquirer’s reporters devoted months of investigative legwork to exposing the mistress and illegitimate child who ultimately ended his political career.
With Mr Stone — the pseudonym used by Gore to book his Portland suite — the story was quickly obtained from the detailed statements the woman gave later to police and sexual-assault specialists.
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The account is full of lurid descriptions of wandering hands, fondled buttocks, attempted kissing with tongue and Gore supposedly pleading for “release of his second chakra”. There is no suggestion of rape or serious physical violence, and by the woman’s own account she continued to give the massage despite frequent interruptions.
At one point, she told police, she tried to distract her amorous client by offering him a box of Moonstruck chocolates; Stone allegedly responded by jumping on her, at which point she yelled: “Get off me, you big lummox.”
The woman, now 54, first filed a complaint of “unwanted sexual contact” with police about two months after the incident.
She said she had not come forward earlier because she feared she would not be believed and that hotels would no longer employ her.
The police appear to have concluded immediately that it was a “he said, she said” case that could never be independently corroborated, and when the woman failed to appear for follow-up interviews, the file was closed.
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During the next couple of years, a local paper got wind of the story and obtained the initial police report, but decided not to publish it when the woman refused to speak on the record and said she was not pressing charges.
Yet in January 2009, for reasons that have not yet been explained, she reactivated her complaint and gave a more detailed statement to police, describing Gore as a “crazed sex poodle”. Again, police concluded there was no additional evidence “that would change what they saw in 2006”.
The case has upset Oregon feminists, who accuse the police of failing to treat allegations of sexual assault seriously — notably by failing to interview Gore. With the woman now reportedly considering a civil lawsuit and the Enquirer claiming to be on the trail of further allegations of sexual misbehaviour, Gore may be facing months of innuendo and internet ribaldry.
“Somewhere Bill Clinton is smiling,” one blogger noted last week. It was a pointed reference to the strained relations between the former Democratic running mates in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
To the Clintons’ undisguised disgust, Gore kept his distance from his disgraced former boss as he campaigned against Bush as vice-president in 2000.
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Some Democrats now believe it was a fatal mistake to keep a campaigner as brilliant as Clinton on the sidelines; yet in the wake of Lewinsky’s stained blue dress and other sordid revelations, the Gore camp was determined to promote Al and his bubbly blonde wife, Tipper, as the squeaky-clean embodiment of marital values — they even exchanged a long public kiss to prove it.
A decade later, how things have changed. Al and Tipper announced earlier this month their “mutual and mutually supportive decision” to break up a 40-year marriage that had been the envy of the American political world. Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary remain intractably in harness, one of the great power couples of history. And it is Gore who is now obliged to grapple with allegations of DNA-stained clothing.
That is not quite the debate that Gore hoped to be inspiring as his battle to save the planet continues.