New York 1's Dominic Carter Decides To Stop Running

Dominic Carter, the host of New York 1's political show "Inside City Hall," has long interviewed America's most high-profile politicians, newsmakers, and world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela and President Clinton. For the first time, Mr. Carter has put himself on the receiving end of his journalistic scrutiny.

The result is a self-published book to be released in May, "No Momma's Boy," in which Mr. Carter seeks to look unflinchingly at his childhood and his mother, Laverne Carter, a paranoid schizophrenic who sexually abused him at least once.

When his mother died in 2001, Mr. Carter said he was determined to confront the memory of abuse he carried from the Bronx housing projects where he grew up, to the State University of New York at Cortland, where he met his wife and received a bachelor's degree in journalism.

"I've been running my entire life," he told The New York Sun during an interview at NY1's bright headquarters above the Chelsea Market. "I've been running from the ghetto, I've been running from a poor upbringing, I've been running from my mother, and I didn't want to run anymore."

Like a journalist tracking down a story, Mr. Carter filed official requests for his mother's medical and court records in New York and in Georgia, where she used to live. The story broke wide open when Mount Sinai Hospital turned over 620 pages chronicling her psychiatric history.

In those aged pages, Mr. Carter, considered the dean of New York's television political reporters, unearthed his mother's previously undisclosed diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He learned she beat him badly when he was 2, confessing to a doctor that she tried to strangle her son and contemplated pushing him out the window, Mr. Carter said. She said she heard a voice telling her to do it, hospital records show.

"As a child I didn't know what was going on," he said.

There were clues that pointed to her illness. When mother and son would go to the park, Mr. Carter had to lead the way. She walked slowly when on medication and parsed his name into syllables, stretching it like a wad of taffy into "Dom-in-ic."

It was his grandmother, Anna Pearl Carter, and his two aunts who pushed him to go to college. They bought him clothes from Bloomingdale's and Macy's and forced him to dress up, sometimes even to wear a bow tie, when attending class. He dedicates his book to his grandmother, one of his aunts, and to his mother.

"My aunt would tell me consistently, ‘If you don't dress like the ghetto, then you won't be treated like the ghetto,'" he said. "They treated me very different and very special."

The president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City Metro Inc., Charlotte Fischman, said Mr. Carter is courageous to have penned this book.

"There are other people who would be much more guarded to opening the door to their personal lives in that way," she said. On May 12, Mr. Carter is leading the National Alliance's first walk in the city to raise awareness about mental illness.

Mr. Carter said he hid his memory of one incident of sexual abuse by his mother from nearly everyone in his life. He did tell his wife, before they married. After angry outbursts at NY1 landed him before a therapist for several months, Mr. Carter kept his childhood secret private even then, saying he was too embarrassed to tell his counselor he was a victim of sexual abuse as a boy.

Some of his colleagues have read the manuscript, which Mr. Carter stayed up editing until 3 a.m. earlier this week, but many more of his viewers, guests, and friends are likely to pore over previously private details of his childhood in the coming months.

The editorial director of MSNBC, Davidson Goldin, a former co-host of "Inside City Hall," said Mr. Carter in many ways is living the American dream.

"It really is a tremendous success story," Mr. Goldin, a former columnist at The New York Sun, said. "While I was aware that he had some difficulties to overcome from his childhood, I certainly had no idea that these experiences were part of what he had been through."

Mr. Carter said he made only minimal effort to reach out to publishers, after bristling at early suggestions that he change the title. He said he prefers having full control of the project.

An executive producer and political director of NY1, Robert HardtJr., said people are impressed with Mr. Carter's bravery.

"He usually keeps his personal life separate from his work. He'll talk to people and say, ‘Oh, I'm from the Bronx,' or ‘Oh, I'm a product of public schools,'" he said. "But you know, it's different when you bring this kind of story out."