Washington ? Departing Rep. Gary Condit on Monday filed an $11 million defamation lawsuit against Vanity Fair columnist and raconteur Dominick Dunne.

Condit contends Dunne slandered him repeatedly in the past year during public and private discussions about the disappearance of former intern Chandra Levy. In explicit comments as well as suggestive innuendo during radio and television appearances, Dunne raised suspicions about Condit’s role in Levy’s fate.

“This is not derived from a desire to financially benefit,” Condit attorney L. Lin Wood said in an interview Monday. “As a matter of principle, there are some statements that one simply cannot ignore.”

The potentially uphill and possibly unprecedented lawsuit is the first filed by Condit in the wake of extraordinarily extensive media coverage, and it comes as he prepares to join the ranks of the jobless in January. His wife, Carolyn, using different lawyers, is currently suing two tabloid newspapers.

Attorneys for the Florida-based Star tabloid urged U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger on Monday to dismiss one of Carolyn Condit’s cases, an argument that Wanger will now consider.

Police have repeatedly said Condit is not a suspect in the disappearance of Levy, whose body was discovered in May in Washington’s Rock Creek Park.

A former Hollywood producer who has detailed his own past battles with drugs and depression, Dunne now embraces the true-crime genre. He has recounted how he traveled to London to investigate murky suggestions that Levy had stumbled into a sex ring centering on Middle Eastern embassies.

Dunne carried his theorizing onto cable television shows eager to delve into the Levy affair. On one appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” show, Dunne speculated that Levy had “gone off on the motorcycle of one of Condit’s motorcycle friends.”

Dunne subsequently shifted gears. He claimed that an “animal behaviorist who traveled through the Middle East” had contacted him to advise he’d talked to a “procurer of women for Middle Eastern men of high rank.” This alleged procurer supposedly mentioned that Levy had been drugged and kidnapped.