CommentsHYPOCRISY POLITICS--The best way to understand LA City Council shenanigans is to watch its meetings as I sometimes do -- hanging upside down on my Teeter inversion table. It clarifies the revisionist, upside-down declarations of politicians living in a bubble.
Earlier this month, I wrote about how Councilmembers honored the “well-respected” alums of a local high school that included a felon awaiting sentencing who used to run the LA Sheriff’s department; a late LAPD chief whose abuse of the poor and minorities led to a deadly riot; an innately dishonest former city attorney; and a compulsive gambling sexist. #Charming
It was as if the city’s fifteen lawmakers were reassuring themselves that their malfeasance of today will be blurred and distorted by future Councilmembers.
Last week, their latest delusion surrounded a presentation to declare it Denim Day in Los Angeles, which raises awareness of the horrors of rape. But oh how the Councilmembers scattered when the public reminded the viewers of City Council’s own record regarding sexual harassment charges.
In language that is utterly constitutional, but too colorful to share here, gadfly and former teacher John Walsh correctly cited City Council’s endless rubber stamping of liquor licenses “for convenience,” especially in poor communities, that contribute to crime -- including, but hardly limited to, rape.
Also cited was the city’s incessant licensing of, and failure to close down unlicensed businesses marketing in human sex trafficking in which the victims are, if not raped in a stranger-on-stranger sense, are coercively raped by fear of pimp violence or economic harm.
Councilmember Paul Krekorian, an attorney whose children includes a young daughter, who regularly attempts to throw public commenters off their timing by suggesting that aired concerns are “off-topic,” was unable to silence the critics in his appeal to the deputy city attorney who makes such determinations.
Krekorian, who currently faces a recall effort, bounced animatedly in his chair and hurriedly walked in protest toward Council President Herb Wesson’s elevated podium despite the city attorney’s ruling, as the subject turned to the accusations of sexual harassment and coercive sexual misconduct of fellow Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar -- both of whom are married fathers of young women and girls, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by the city in settlements and legal fees related to those accusations.
It continues to be lost upon our city officials that it is inherently sexual harassment, and coercive rape, when a boss has sex, whether once or a hundred times, with anyone who works in his or her office.
Even if it was a “consensual” relationship, it is coercive rape if the consequences of not having sex with the boss could result in economic harm to, for example, a single mother or a staffer who wants some day to run for office and seeks her boss’s endorsement.
That is what may have happened when Francine Godoy, a former staffer in Huizar’s office, sued the city for sexual harassment. From 2006 to 2013, her salary jumped 280%, a rate considerably faster than others in his office received at a time of claimed city cutbacks, because she and Huizar (a graduate of Berkeley, Princeton and UCLA Law School) had a “consensual” relationship, according to him, in which she also sought his support for a political run. The taxpayers eventually paid $200,000 in legal fees, while it is unknown whether or how much Huizar may have paid Godoy to settle the case. She moved on to another job in the city, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
Council President Herb Wesson, who has referred to Huizar as “my best friend” and supported his re-election, also held his head and urged the deputy city attorney – to no avail – to silence the speakers when the subject turned to Councilmember Mitch Englander.
Englander is also in denial about sexual harassment claims by former staffer Melody Jaramillo against himself and his chief of staff John Lee.
Englander has said that the $75,000 settlement paid to Jaramillo was for financial and legal expedience, yet he earlier favored squandering $600,000 to defend the city in the damages phase of David “Zuma Dogg” Saltsburg’s winning 1st Amendment suit against the city rather than paying him even a sliver of that amount for expedience.
The men who approved these settlements, Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Attorney Mike Feuer and Wesson, who are fathers or grandfathers of young women and girls, have yet to publicly condemn any of these specific actions – let alone declare the inappropriateness of having sex with the office staff – because, at LA City Hall, protecting their own, not your own, seems to be Job #1.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a writer who lives in Los Angeles and blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
LA City Council Soapbox Evades its Own Sexual Misconduct Failures
