"I Am Addicted To Prescription Pain Medication"

Rush Limbaugh has always had far more followers than friends. Bombastic and clowning on air, shy and bumptious off it, Limbaugh could count on 20 million "Dittoheads" and talk-radio fans to tune in five days a week. But it's hard to find many people who really know him. He was a lonely object of mass adulation, socially ill at ease, at least occasionally depressed and, for the past several years, living in a private hell of pain and compulsion.

In the end, he was betrayed by his own housekeeper. Law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK that Limbaugh's exposure as a pain-pill addict began when Wilma Cline, 42, who had worked at Limbaugh's $30 million Florida estate from 1997 to July 2001, showed up at the Palm Beach County state attorney's office late last year eager to sic the cops on her former boss. Her motive remained murky, but her story--how she had met Limbaugh in parking lots to exchange sandwich bags filled with "baby blues" (OxyContin pills) for a cigar box stuffed with cash--was luridly damning. Between July 2001 and June 2002, Cline delivered enough pills to Limbaugh "to kill an elephant," she told the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid that broke (and paid for) Cline's story.

She gave e-mails and ledgers to the cops showing that Limbaugh had purchased more than 30,000 hydrocodone, Lorcet and OxyContin pills, the Enquirer reported. Law-enforcement sources confirmed the basic facts of the Enquirer story to NEWSWEEK. Limbaugh protested that the stories contained "inaccuracies and distortions," but last Friday, his vast listening audience heard that resonant, righteous, morally certain voice admit that he had become an addict and was entering rehab.

Limbaugh clung to the ideology of self-reliance to the last. "I'm not going to portray myself as a victim," he said. Millions of pain sufferers who use powerful medications could sympathize. But the mockery was instantaneous. Liberal mouth Al Franken (author of "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot") hit the airwaves to relish Limbaugh's greatest hits of hypocrisy and his sneers at celebrity dopers like baseball player Darryl Strawberry and rocker Kurt Cobain, and virtually every newspaper dredged up this 1995 quote from Rush: "Too many whites are getting away with drug use. The answer is to... find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them, and send them up the river." The penalty for illegally buying large quantities of prescription painkillers in Florida can be five years in jail, and contrary to some published reports, prosecutors do go after users as well as pushers--especially if they want to make an example of a celebrity.

The fall of a moralist is always a great American spectacle. The Elmer Gantry story--the righteous preacher who turns out to be a letch and a boozer--has a special resonance in a nation that postures as morally superior but enjoys sin. Nothing entertains (or instructs in the essentials of human nature) like hypocrisy on a grand scale. When Bill Bennett, best-selling author of "The Book of Virtues," was outed as a compulsive gambler, and evangelist Jim Bakker was caught embezzling from his Praise the Lord empire, the lamentations of the true believers were drowned out by the snickers of the knowing.

But Limbaugh's story owes more to the "Wizard of Oz" than "The Scarlet Letter." The man behind the curtain is not the God of Family Values but a childless, twice-divorced, thrice-married schlub whose idea of a good time is to lie on his couch and watch football endlessly. When Rush Limbaugh declared to his radio audience that he was "your epitome of morality of virtue, a man you could totally trust with your wife, your daughter, and even your son in a Motel 6 overnight," he was acting. He "regards himself as an entertainer who is very pleased that people pay attention to his political views," says Wall Street editorial writer John Fund, who collaborated with Limbaugh on one of the radio host's books ("The Way Things Ought to Be").