Sarah definitely cannot ever claim that she has not seen the NOTW video. Shortly after the scandal broke, Sarah appeared on Oprah's show where they both sat down and watched it together. Most of us here will remember her watching it and referring to herself in the third person even.
Walking out of this 60 minute interview to me puts Sarah in the spotlight as a petulant child who takes her toys and goes home when things aren't exactly to her liking. Just because Andrew has "forgiven" her for her screw up, it doesn't mean that she's totally in the clear and the rest of the world has done the same.
Walking out on this interview is the worse move she could have possibly made. It totally destroys her credibility.
Osipi, I think you've really pointed out the heart of the matter; Sarah has now completely lost any "plausible deniability" she had left, (which wasn't much in any case).
A fifty-one year old woman who refuses to acknowledge fault and fails to publicly try and correct gross public errors is bound to lose any claim on the public's affection and respect. That this same woman had (and to some extent, still has) access to the enormous privileges of life as a member of the BRF just magnifies the seeming arrogance of her public "it's not my fault" stance. It has the same ring as President Clinton's famous denial of anything improper in his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Even a man as charismatic and popular as Bill Clinton had to admit to his wrongdoing and make apologies before he was restored to the esteem in which he was held previously. (Too bad Sarah hasn't learned from his experience; having taken responsibility of his actions in public, the Lewinsky incident is now almost completely forgotten and Bill Clinton is loved the world over to this day.) This is not a comment on anything political, but rather on their shared experience of a large public error of judgement and what follows said error.
IMHO, the whole Oprah show now reveals its greatest damage to Sarah. As she has already been filmed going through all sorts of therapy and trying to rebirth her public image on reality television, she now has very little room to manoeuvre herself to try and repair the damage she caused herself in this interview. Given the chance to atone publicly during six episodes of her show, she failed to grasp responsibility for the NOTW betrayal and after being seen consulting with some of the media's high priests and priestesses of therapy, her behaviour didn't change. I hardly imagine she can take that route again, as it would make her open to charges of cynicism.
I don't know what steps Sarah could possibly take to re-establish herself in the public eye now. All her media-centric makeovers have harmed her rather than helped. I'd be curious to know what a PR person of the calibre of Marc Bolland, for example, would advise Sarah to do now. Personally, if I were Sarah, I would "disappear" to Argentina and lose myself in
very low profile charity work, similar to what John Profumo did in London after the Keeler revelations, though I do not think Profumo was insincere or manipulative in his attempts to "atone".
Hopefully, the DM and other media outlets will soon feature some of these PR experts and we can gain some insight to what hope (if any) there is for Sarah to relaunch her public persona and what steps they would advise her to take in the perilous situation her media relations and her personal choices have left her. At this point, her experiences would qualify for a "how not to use the media and reality television" mini-seminar.
