Of Matt Drudge’s three abortive attempts to smear John Kerry earlier this year (the first two were the fake Botox and Jane Fonda stories), the most famed was the charge that Kerry had had an affair with an “intern” named Alexandra Polier. The story was false, of course, but that didn’t stop Drudge, a boatload of conservative pundits and a wave of tabloid reporters from sinking their teeth into it and acting like it was real.

Now it’s time for Polier to have her say. In a six-page story in the New York Metro, Polier gives an exhaustive account of the story, from her first meeting with Kerry to the genesis of the rumor and finally, an interview with Matt Drudge. The story, told in a light that makes neither side of the political spectrum appear very attractive, gives a personal account of how she weathered the story, and then how she went about investigating its origins.

She describes how she met Kerry in Switzerland, then attended a fundraiser where she met Kerry’s finance director whom she later dated. But her relationship to Kerry was nothing more than a few public encounters, never alone with him. And then the rumor struck.

Though my name wasn’t mentioned in the initial Drudge “exclusive,” it made its first appearance in the British tabloid The Sun on Friday, February 13. The article, by one Brian Flynn, referred to Kerry as a SLEAZEBALL in the headline and said I was 24 (didn’t I wish). It purported to quote my father at home in Pennsylvania discussing the senator, saying, “I think he’s a sleazeball.” The article also claimed to quote my mother as saying Kerry had once chased after me to be on his campaign. My mother was not even home when Flynn called, and Flynn didn’t tell my father—who at this stage was unaware of the Drudge allegations—that he was interviewing him. Instead, he presented himself as a friend trying to get hold of me to talk about John Kerry. My father, a Republican, who believed Kerry had flip-flopped on various issues, said, ‘Oh, that sleazeball.’ ” Here’s how it reappeared in Flynn’s piece: “There is no evidence the pair had an affair, but her father, Terry, 56, said: ‘I think he’s a sleazeball.’ ” Drudge quickly linked to The Sun’s interview.

By that time, Polier had already moved to Nairobi to be with her new fiancé. There, she was mostly trapped in her fiancé’s home as swarms of reporters amassed outside, desperate for some kind of story, offering anyone who had a photo of her massive amounts of money.

When she finally issued an official denial, the story began to die down, and eventually, Polier decided to start investigating the story behind the story. Interestingly, she found one of the earliest reports to have been on a blog, some guy who had posted a vague rumor which was then picked up by reporters. One reporter, who like the others has spent weeks looking into it and found nothing, told her, “We shook the tree. A bunch of names fell out, and yours had the most flesh to it.” Furthermore, Polier reports on the genesis of the infamous Clark comment that Drudge reported:

Drudge claimed Clark himself had told reporters on his campaign bus that Kerry was going to “implode” over a scandal, but when I called Wesley Clark Jr., a screenwriter in L.A., who had helped out on his father’s campaign, he told me Drudge had ignored the context of his father’s quote. “He was reacting to the latest issue of The National Enquirer, which had just run a front-page story about Kerry and possible scandals, when he said that.”

In other words, Clark was reportedly only commenting on the rumor itself, not providing any personal knowledge of the matter–a fact ignored by Drudge.

The story quickly gained steam, however, as Bush was under attack for his National Guard record, and conservatives were hungry for any scandal to throw in the opposite direction. “Rush Limbaugh spent the first hour of his program discussing Kerry’s ‘affair’ with his 10 million listeners. Dozens of conservative commentators followed suit.”

Polier tracked down the reporter from The Sun, and tried to pin him to the wall for fabricating a quote from her mother and taking out of context a remark by her father, “evidence” which seemed to give the story weight when it in fact had none.

“Why did you quote my mother when she wasn’t even home?” I persisted.

“I really can’t talk about this right now, Alex,” he said.

When I finally tracked him down the following week, he was brusque and told me to go through The Sun’s PR office. I asked him about my mother again, but he kept saying, “Sorry, Alex, proper channels.”

Of course, she never got through to him. But she did get through to Drudge, who told her, “In retrospect, I should have had a sentence saying, ‘There is no evidence to tie Alex to John Kerry.’ I should have put that,” and then blamed the Wesley Clark quote for pushing him forward.

All in all, a very informative article, one which outlines the serpentine and often messy path a rumor takes from the mists of obscurity to the front pages of the world press.