Sex, Lies, and Text Messages

On Thursday morning, Detroit’s Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D) and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty — and all of Detroit, courtesy of the Detroit Free Press — woke up to find the irrefutable evidence of the love affair they had both denied under oath:

Beatty asked the mayor, on Sept. 12, 2002, if she could “come and lay down in your room until you get back?”

The next morning Kilpatrick, referring to his bodyguards, wrote: “They were right outside the door. They had to have heard everything.”

Beatty replied: “So we are officially busted!”

“Damn that,” Kilpatrick responded. “Never busted. Busted is what you see!”

Worse than the humiliation and embarrassment at the very public disclosure of both their affair and the unraveled coverup, is, yes, the real possibility of getting “busted” on a perjury charge, a felony. If charged and convicted, Kilpatrick, a lawyer, could be disbarred, would be removed from office, and could even face up to 15 years of jail time. Beatty, a law student, would have to find a new career.

The other big loser in this tawdry affair is the city of Detroit.

The mayor has cost Detroit taxpayers more than $9 million to date, because he was sued as a public official. Many are calling for the resignation of “a mayor with so much potential squandered on the keyboard,” a “talented” and “charismatic ” politician – “so knowledgeable on policy, so lacking in discipline.”

It all started back in April 2003 when one of the mayor’s bodyguards, Harold Nelthrope, blew the whistle on two of the cops on the mayor’s security detail; they were fraudently padding their expenses, wrecking city cars and drinking and partying while on duty. Nelthrope also passed along rumors about a bash at the mayor’s residence involving a stripper. Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown began to investigate. Two weeks later, he was out of a job.

Three weeks later, Brown and Nelthrope sued the mayor and the city, claiming they were fired in retaliation for investigating the mayor’s security team. Later that year, another bodyguard, Walt Harris, sued the city and the mayor, making the same charges as the other two. He also alleged that the mayor retaliated against him because he reported that the mayor was cheating on his wife with Beatty and several other women.

The mayor steadfastly denied all the allegations against him and refused to settle the case out of court: “I thought that the people of the city of Detroit needed to have an opportunity to hear the truth, they needed to see me sit in the chair,” he said.

He had his day in court when the case finally went to trial last summer. He and Beatty flatly denied having a sexual relationship and firing Brown and Nelthorpe.

The ex-cops’ attorney asked the judge if he could present in evidence the cell phone records he had subpoenaed three years before. The judge had never seen them. Another subpoena was issued, but the jury never saw the records.

Nevertheless, the jury delivered a unanimous verdict. They awarded Brown $3.6 million and Nelthrope $2.9 million. Kilpatrick was “blown away.” He vowed to appeal.

Several city council members have expressed their reluctance to commit any more of the taxpayers’ money to the mayor’s legal expenses. Kilpatrick abruptly settled all three of the whistleblower cases for a total of $9 million last October.

But it all blew up again last week when the Free Press finally got a hold of those text messages and published its exposé, demonstrating that the mayor and his chief of staff had given false testimony. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Friday that she will open an investigation into the text message scandal.

Not only that, but the text messages have opened a whole other line of investigation. Matching city records with the messages, the Detroit Free Press has discovered that Kilpatrick charged his apparently personal travel expenses with his lover and tabs at fancy hotels and restaurants to his city-issued credit card. On at least one occasion, he and Beatty took off for a long weekend in Vail, Colorado. Kilpatrick wrote in his calendar “Hold for Mayor Gone Fishing!!!”

For now, Kilpatrick, who was 31 when he first took office in 2002, is lying low.

“I think we’ve gotten to the point in this country where there’s been so much of this at so many levels of government – hell, going all the way up to the president of the United States – we’ve kind of gotten used to it,” said Detroit Council President Ken Cockrel Jr.