Judge orders release of Detroit Mayor texts

From USA Today
By JimShaeffer 

DETROIT — A judge on Tuesday ordered the release of a key document, with damaging text messages between Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then-chief of staff, which last fall prompted the mayor to approve a secret $8.4 million settlement in a police whistle-blower lawsuit. The legal brief, which leveraged the deal to keep Kilpatrick's text messages secret, contains extensive excerpts of messages between Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty over four months in 2002 and 2003, including never-before-published inflammatory and sexually explicit comments from the pair.

City Council President Ken Cockrel Jr. said that the new document and messages increased the possibility that council may act to remove the mayor from office. The council voted 7-1 in March to ask the mayor to resign.

City attorney Bill Goodman is expected to complete a report to council this week on the scandal. Cockrel said that if the report concludes that the mayor violated the city charter when he failed to disclose a deal to settle the whistle-blower case in exchange for the text messages remaining secret, then the council would need to consider removing the mayor.

"Much of this still has yet to play out," he said.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: African-American | Detroit Free Press | N-Word | Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick | Christine Beatty | Bill Goodman | Mike Stefani | Carlita Kilpatrick
The new messages released include:

• Messages in which Kilpatrick and Beatty refer to each other in a playful manner using derivatives of a racial slur — a slur that the mayor had publicly called on to be "buried" during a highly publicized speech last year.

• Sexually graphic conversations between Kilpatrick and Beatty that reveal an extramarital affair that both of them denied last summer under oath during the whistle-blower trial.

• A message from Beatty's then-husband, Lou Beatty, in which he expresses frustration about his wife's closeness to Kilpatrick.

• Christine Beatty writing about her jealousy of the mayor's wife, Carlita Kilpatrick.

• Discussions of the firing of then-Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown. Kilpatrick and Beatty gave misleading testimony about Brown's ouster during the trial.

While apparently meant to be pet names, the terms are offensive to many people, and there has been a renewed effort among civil-rights groups to extinguish such terms, even when used within the African-American community.

Kilpatrick acknowledged that in 2007 when, during the NAACP's national convention in Detroit, he spoke at a mock burial held to promote ending the use of the N-word.

"So good riddance. Die, N-word. We don't want to see you 'round here no more," Kilpatrick said during the ceremony.

The Detroit Free Press, which earlier obtained copies of nearly 14,000 text messages from Beatty's paging device and published a report about them in January, previously decided to not publish some of the messages released Tuesday that the newspaper deemed unduly embarrassing to family members and others not involved in the case.

But Wayne Circuit Judge Robert Colombo Jr.'s order made the messages public. They were contained in a legal brief crafted by Mike Stefani, the attorney for three former cops, including Brown, who sued Kilpatrick under the Whistle-blower Protection Act. They sued after they were forced out of their jobs after asking questions that could have exposed the extramarital affair between Kilpatrick and Beatty.

City Council lawyer Bill Goodman recovered the previously missing brief on Monday after hiring a forensic computer technician to retrieve it from Stefani's computer. Stefani had deleted the document as part of the secret deal, but cooperated with a subpoena from Goodman to retrieve the document.

The brief was crucial to Kilpatrick's decision not to appeal a jury verdict awarding two of the former cops $6.5 million last fall. The mayor initially had vowed to appeal, but changed his mind after Stefani turned over an envelope containing the brief to the mayor's lawyers.

Because lawyers for the mayor and the city decided to settle the case, the brief was never filed in court.

Stefani has said he included the salacious messages in the brief, not to blackmail the mayor's legal team, but to justify his entitlement to higher legal fees from the defense because of the extra work he performed going through the text messages to document perjury by the mayor and Beatty.

The total cost to taxpayers of settling the lawsuits by the three cops was $9 million.

Kilpatrick and Beatty currently face perjury and other felony charges arising from the Detroit Free Press' publication of the text messages. They each pleaded not guilty to the felony charges and are free on bail.

Beatty resigned in late January. Kilpatrick has refused to resign.