The 62-year-old activist, who cradled the dying King after an assassin's bullet cut him down in 1968, did not simply sit still for the criticism. He blitzed through appearances on the morning TV talk shows and sat for a session of Donahue, defending his book at every step. "In all honesty, in all fairness, it happened," he insists. Abernathy's damning charge is that King spent the last night of his life enjoying two successive extramarital liaisons, followed by a knockdown motel-room fight with a third woman. The evening began after King delivered his stirring "I've been to the mountaintop" speech at the Masonic Temple in Memphis. Abernathy writes that afterward he, King and a civil-rights colleague, the Reverend Bernard Lee, went for a late-night dinner at the home of a woman friend of King's. When Abernathy awoke from a postprandial nap in a living-room easy chair at around 1 A.M., he says he found Lee asleep on the couch and King emerging from the bedroom with his female friend.
The three men then returned to the Lorraine Motel, writes Abernathy, where they found King's brother, the Reverend A.D. King, and a black woman legislator from Kentucky who had come expressly to see Martin. King did not disappoint her, according to Abernathy. Finally, at 7 or 8 A.M., King reportedly returned to the room he shared with Abernathy to ask him to help calm a third woman who was, King said, "mad at me. She came in this morning and found my bed empty." Abernathy's implication is clear: King, a married man, had been unfaithful even in his unfaithfulness. When the young woman in question arrived, and her argument with King grew increasingly heated, says Abernathy, the venerated civil-rights leader "knocked her across the bed...and for a moment they were in a full-blown fight, with Martin clearly winning."
A Bitter Battle Erupts Over the Last Hours of Martin Luther King : People.com
