Buying silence for Arnold

The L.A. Times has a story saying that American Media, the tabloid publisher that backed off Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was running for governor and signed him to a rich contract, bought the silence of occasional Arnold trystee Gigi Goyette. Two days after Schwarzenegger announced on Jay Leno that he was running, Goyette signed a $20,000 deal promising never to talk to anyone but American Media about her episodes of "outercourse" with the bodybuilder-actor-Republican standard bearer. The thing is, the National Enquirer and other American Media tabloids never came asking for her info. Instead, as Ann Louise Bardach has reported in detail in Los Angeles Magazine, the tabs suddenly ended years of writing about alleged Schwarzenegger infidelities and their owner inked a big contract with the governor-to-be. Turns out, the Times reports, that a Goyette friend also got $1,000 from the tabloids to shut up about Schwarzenegger. The gov's spokespeople tell the Times that he wasn't part of any payoffs.

Other shoe: The story appears in tandem with a Steve Lopez column on the subject.