Roy Exum
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it 1,000 times. In times of crisis, keep your mouth shut. The Miranda is right – “anything you say can … and will … be used against you.” In the last week, as we have witnessed the predictable but still spectacular fall of Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, the unlikely hero in the scornful ouster has been Heather Hannah, whose family has been friends of mine for years. When her name first surfaced, Heather has refused to talk to reporters and has steadfastly had “no comment.” Good for her.
But when Monday came and it was inevitable “The Luv Guv” would resign by sunset of that very day, her urge to set the record straight, to still protect and loyally safeguard divorced First Lady Dianne Bentley, pressed hard.
She agreed to be interviewed and, as she would boldly tell the whirling NBC cameras, “This is not about me," she said flatly. “I wanted to tell the truth, and I wanted everybody to know what really happened, but mainly because I wanted Ms. Bentley to have a voice in all of this."
That right there, that devotion, should have assured us that a Southern lady blessed with generations of poise, grace and demure would present herself in the way her very mother would have hoped. She was unflappable when a governor she believed in turned on her, paranoid and vicious. He had slandered her, tried to have her arrested, and we suspect more. She was rock steady on a Judicial Committee witness stand with the tension so tight you’d need a knife just to leave the room.
Yet she is still absolutely unshaken as she now journeys into a bright future, every bit as confident and cool as she was that dreadful morning when she cleaned hateful obscenities off her car window and, in her own words, “moved on.” Oh, to be such a polished heroine at such a young age of 28 … what a Steel Magnolia the entire state of Alabama now calls its daughter.
It was only a couple of years after she graduated from Alabama – where her dad David and his brothers John and Charley were All-American football players – when she got involved in the Bentley campaign. “He was this wonderful dermatologist from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who asked me to join his campaign. We started the campaign working around his kitchen table. His wife, Dianne, would make us dinner every night, and that's how I knew him.”
Once the doctor was elected, his wife asked Hannah to come to Montgomery and work as Dianne’s Chief of Staff. “She wanted me to help protect her in Montgomery and she wanted me to help her make decisions along the way ... so when we discovered Governor Bentley was having an affair and Mrs. Bentley felt like she needed to prove to herself that something was going on, and felt like recordings were the best way to do it, it was my job and my duty to her. My loyalty will always lie with First Lady Dianne Bentley."
Loyalty? It still matters in Alabama.
Heather said during the television interview she had sensed something was going on between Dr. Bentley (then age 71) and a close aide, Rebekah Mason, who once competed in the 1990 Miss Alabama contest. As tension and distrust began to fill the Governor’s mansion, Heather clearly remembered one "gut-wrenching" moment.
"The first thing I saw was the governor refusing to hold Mrs. Bentley's hand when they were walking out of the capitol for the National Day of Prayer," Hannah said, "because they stood very united as a couple and on their faith, and Mrs. Bentley reached to grab his hand on the way out the door and he shook his hand free of hers … and I knew for her, she had to want to cry, yet she went and stood on those steps beside him as a faithful and loyal wife would.”
As the marriage unraveled, Heather became the First Lady’s confidante and, as was revealed last Friday, she testified she was the one who helped Dianne get the damning, sexually-charged tapes that eventually sent the Governor packing on a one-way street to oblivion. He was at his beach house with his wife, secretly talking to his Bathsheba (he thought) but Dianne and Hannah had synched the Governor’s cell phone to his wife’s state-owned iPad by using a “cloud.”
“The tapes were never meant to go public,” Heather insisted. “We hoped that presenting him with that evidence would make him repent and turn away and come back to the family that he'd once stood so strongly for," she explained. “When the tapes went public, Dianne was absolutely mortified her grandchildren might hear them.”
Instead, the governor directly blamed Heather for the tapes, not the voice on them. The Judicial committee heard Heather testify the governor told her “You’ll never work in the state of Alabama again (if you tell anybody about this)” and, at another point, Bentley warned her to “watch herself,” that she “did not know what she was getting into,” and that because he was the governor, people “bow to his throne.”
Amazingly, Hannah said she wasn’t intimidated. “When Dr. Bentley threatened me, I knew it was out of fear because he knew he was damaging his family and his relationships, and honestly, they (the entire Bentley family) felt like family to me, so I just wanted to protect my family."
Asked about Mrs. Bentley, Heather told the reporters, "I guess she's doing as well as can be expected," Hannah said, "For a lady who was married for 50 years to have to kind of relive this sad story over and over and over, it's very difficult and I feel bad for her and her family..." she said, knowing that day after day revelations in the media, this lasting for months, was devastating to all involved.
What about the obscenities scrawled on your car and the rock through the window? “That rock was a little unnerving,” she admitted since she was in her house alone that night. Her reaction at the time? “I cleaned up the glass.”
“It kind of put a pit in my stomach," she spoke of the vulgarities on her car, "but you clean your car windows off and bounce right back … the rock was kind of the awakening point for me,” she said, “But I've never felt like my person was going to be harmed during any point of this."
The judicial committee investigation showed Governor Bentley had a paranoia and a rage over Heather in particular. Part of the 131-page report read, “The first evidence of this obsession occurred in the Spring of 2014 and involved Heather Hannah. At the time the recordings were made, Hannah was just a few months shy of her departure from Ms. Bentley’s staff, which occurred after the Republican Primary in June.
“As Hannah describes it, Governor Bentley blamed Hannah for the existence of the tapes because he believed there was no possible way Ms. Bentley could have made them without her help. As the existence of the recordings became known, Hannah began to hear through other staff members and officials that Governor Bentley perceived her as problematic due to the existence of the recordings.”
Yet Heather said she was never fired; she left on the own accord when the Bentleys were obviously getting divorced. "The only reason I left wasn't because I was afraid, wasn't because I was threatened ... It was purely because I knew Mrs. Bentley would be exiting, too, and I knew that I wanted my time with the Bentley administration to be left with my time with Mrs. Bentley."
So, what are Heather’s feelings about Dr. Bentley, who could still face criminal charges? “I'm not the one to judge," she smiled with dignity and poise and, yes, an audible measure of kindness. “We hope he repents and asks for forgiveness, and returns to the man that we all believed he was to start with."
She admitted to the cameras she's personally forgiven Bentley and said, "I know Mrs. Bentley has forgiven him, and we're very sad for him..."
“It is all so sad … I hope ... I hope people will remember the high points of the Bentley administration. Mrs. Bentley did some great things too….”
Years from now, all of the Hannah grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear marvelous and wonderful and very true tales about all three of the Hannah brothers, about the prowess and championships and the NFL rings and all Halls of Fame. “Mr. Herb” started it, playing back before there were face masks, but John, Charley and David (Hannah’s dad) were the Goliaths that made the Hannah clan become Alabama’s First Family of Football.
Starting now, before any night is through, the mood changes. All those same children will beg to be retold about the family’s Steel Magnolia, the young woman who a despiteful governor could not conquer in any way, shape or form. They’ll want to hear the example that Heather set for every female from Valley Head to Mobile bay. Stand your ground. Be true to yourself. Believe in all that’s good. Stay in the game. Keep the faith.
Because of Heather Hannah’s untenable courage and her fierce loyalty to a jilted First Lady, she brought down a governor and it’s precisely like newspaperman John Archibald famously penned over the weekend… “Because Heather Hannah did not bend. She planted her feet like her uncle did for so many years at the New England Patriots, and she knocked that trash-talking imbecile on his ass.”
Yes she did, and as she did it, she remained full of poise, integrity and grace. She is, indeed, Alabama’s most-adored Steel Magnolia right now. What a bloodline. Great mercy alive.
royexum@aol.com