Wife contradicts Clemens’ accuser
WASHINGTON — Debbie Clemens testified Friday that her husband was not present when she received a shot of human growth hormone from Roger Clemens’ strength coach — testimony that contradicts the former pitcher’s chief accuser in the perjury trial.
But on cross-examination by the prosecution, she said of her husband’s view of HGH, “I don’t think he thought it was bad.” She added, “It wasn’t like doing heroin.”
When a prosecutor asked if Roger Clemens was mad when she told him about the injection, she testified that his attitude was more that she wasn’t “old enough yet” and didn’t need it. She was in her late 30s at the time.
“I didn’t think this was a bad thing,” Debbie Clemens said. “And I still don’t.”
Debbie Clemens said she got the idea to take HGH from a front-page USA Today story in 2000 headlined, “Boomers believe they’ve found a fountain of youth in a syringe.”
“A lot of people in Hollywood were doing it, and it was a youth drug,” she said under questioning from Rusty Hardin, a lawyer for both Roger and Debbie Clemens. She said the newspaper story described it as a “youth drug, healthy and good.” But the story also said that injecting HGH “is a practice that many doctors consider highly risky.”
She said she mentioned the topic to the strength coach, Brian McNamee, who has emerged years later as the only person to give first-hand testimony that Roger Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career.
McNamee “talked about this being a good thing,” she said, and gave her a shot a few days later — without her husband’s knowledge. She called it a spontaneous event.
McNamee, the government’s key witness against Roger Clemens, testified last month that not only was the former baseball pitcher there, he had summoned McNamee to the couple’s master bathroom in Houston to give Debbie Clemens the drug.
Clemens is charged with lying to Congress when he denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Among the false statements he’s alleged to have made are that he never used HGH and that McNamee injected his wife without Roger Clemens’ prior knowledge or approval.