Chandra Levy Was A Nerd

July 22, 2008 by Libby  Send to a Friend

The Washington Post’s 12 part investigation into the murder of the 24 year old intern seeks to highlight the ineptitude of the MPD and the media’s frenzied coverage of the saga. While the mistakes made by the guardians of safety and truth are well noted, the series has made one other truth painfully obvious: Chandra Levy was tragic and weird.

Checkout this excerpt from Episode 2: A Young Woman Disappears where they call Chandra Levy a nerd and a wuss:

“At heart, Chandra was a bit of a nerd. In high school, she liked to wear her Modesto police explorer uniform as she strode down the hallways, ignoring the ridicule from the cool kids. She was fiercely independent, stubborn to a fault. She was free-spirited but could be cautious. Once, when her family went camping in Yosemite National Park, Chandra slept in the car, fearing a bear attack.”

What emerges from the juxtaposition of these two anecdotes is not a picture of a defiant young woman, rather Chandra Levy comes off as a clueless girl using her fake-cop uniform to compensate for a lack of strength. Then, to add insult to injury, in Episode 5: A Secret Meeting The Post reprints these horrible photos of Chandra with alternative hairstyles MPD circulated after her disappearance:

It looks like a prank mean girls in high school 2.0 would pull with Photoshop and a blogger account.

Although The Post unintentionally makes Levy seem lame, it is important to understand just how lost Chandra Levy really was. You have to feel bad for this strange young woman with only a modicum of social awareness, and an attraction to authority and power:

• She didn’t take drugs or drink, but compulsively exercised.
• She was a vegetarian
• Her paramour, Gary Condit, said that her wardrobe looked like it came from a Macy’s-type department store, not Nordstrom.
• Her only confidant was her older Aunt.
• She claimed that she was still in school in order to be eligible for her internship but had actually completed her coursework: the internship was at the Bureau of Prisons (She got caught and fired)
• She had super New Age parents.
• Chandra was obsessed with Harrison Ford and thought he resembled Gary Condit.
• Her mother was disappointed when she came face to face with the Congressman as she thought that he looked nothing like the movie star.

• According to friends, Levy had had two or three affairs with married men before she ever met Gary Condit.
• One of these affairs was with a police officer in Modesto.
• She had bad transit planning skills as she would take the Metro from Dupont Circle to the Woodley Park stop, then double over the Calvert Bridge to go Condit’s apartment in Adams Morgan.
• She and Condit never went on dates out in public, instead eating pasta and watching HBO (which sucked in 2001) at his place.
• She thought that she and Condit had a five year plan where he would leave his wife, become a lobbyist, and start a second family.
• She went over to a male acquaintance’s house she hadn’t spoken to in 3 months to vent about her boyfriend until 1 AM. When he told her she was being played for a fool she refused to believe it and continued to talk about Condit until her friend started nodding off and asked her to leave

These things make me realize what an easy target she must have been for Gary Condit and how little respect the man had for her. Levy must have made for really awkward social company making Condit’s behavior much more sleazy. It’s almost like episodes of Law & Order: SVU when the popular dudes scheme on special needs girls.

What’s interesting is that The Post tries to glamourize Chandra Levy, describing her as “vivacious” and “sensual” while showing the most hideous pics ever and explaining that she was a total nerd. The sum total of this equation is a frumpy grad student with odd interests, twisted taste in men, and the ability to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. While The Post tries their best to paint her as a sensuous young vixen, the truth reads through loud and clear. Even after all these years, the media’s coverage of Chandra Levy borders on tabloid journalism: political scandal, a young innocent victim, and sexualized violence.

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