Apparently, the fallout from the scandal surrounding former CIA Director David Petraeus hasn’t yet reached the nadir of its weirdness. Paula Broadwell, the author of a biography of the former four-star general and Petraeus’ alleged mistress, is shacked up in Mount Pleasant.
Tonight, the neighborhood known for its community pot-lucks and do-it-yourself aesthetes is also a magnet for peering reporters and television cameras. Broadwell is apparently staying in a home on the 1800 block of Park Road NW, not too far from Rock Creek Park, where earlier today a jogger found Broadwell’s driver’s license.
Broadwell, née Kranz, is reputedly staying at the home of her brother. The house currently being watched by all these journalists is titled to Stephen P. Kranz.
After hearing about the brewing stakeout from a friend who lives on nearby Monroe Street, a colleague and I ventured down the winding alleyway between Park and Monroe. About halfway down, we encountered a pair of television cameramen, each employed by a major broadcast network, and a reporter from the New York Post. Over a fence was the back of the roughly 4,000-square-foot house with the ground- and third-floor lights dimmed. Occasionally we’d see a body pass through the kitchen.
One of the cameramen told us that Broadwell and her family ate dinner downstairs earlier in the evening. But most of the time we were in the alley, the cameras were off. The most commotion came from some creature—probably a raccoon—rustling in the leaves behind the fence. No one expected Broadwell to come out and make a statement; one cameraman joked he was thinking of getting a quote from the raccoon.
There was a brief bit of action when a slender woman walked through the kitchen. Broadwell? Perhaps, though the lights remained off. It was getting cold, and my friend and I decided to bail. The network cameramen, however, were there for a while. One gets off at midnight, the other is there overnight. “At this point, it’s more about tracking her movements,” one of them told me.
Back on Park Road, we found a few more camera operators, including one from WUSA9, who said the stakeout began two or three days ago. The local cameraman and another from ABC News shared with us their caution to not get too invasive on tracking Broadwell. Finally, we saw a genuine Mount Pleasant sight: A man, wearing a polar fleece sweater, walking his dog in the frosty evening. He told me the whole scene is pretty funny.
But the passerby also clued us in on a neat fact about the house. Inane as this whole Petraeus-Broadwell-Gen. John Allen-Jill Kelley-jealous FBI agent affair is, this house being swarmed by camera crews is also home to a bit of D.C. history.
In 1950, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down neighborhood covenants restricting home ownership on the basis of race, the house was purchased by Dr. Robert Deane, who was black. Some residents in then-all-white Mount Pleasant sued to block the sale, but their complaint was thrown out. The sale went through, and Deane lived there until his death in 2001.
