"I am Addicted to Prescription Pain Medication": True Confessions: Limbaugh built an army of admirers with his hard-right rants. But off-air, he was a lonely man who may have broken the law to feed his addiction. The real Rush.

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 20-OCT-03

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Byline: Evan Thomas

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...

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