Six years after being sworn into office with hopes of revitalizing his troubled city, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is under increasing pressure to resign now that he's been booked on charges of lying about steamy text messages with his former chief of staff.
The former aide, Christine Beatty, went through the same booking process, the first step in criminal arraignments scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
(((I wanna see the jury of their peers that never sent or received a steamy text message. Who are such people? Do they even exist?)))
Attorneys for Kilpatrick and Beatty said Monday their clients would be exonerated.
Both were accused of multiple counts of perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and misconduct (((all behavior that appears only BECAUSE he is being investigated))) in a scandal that is threatening to prematurely end Kilpatrick's second term as mayor of Detroit, a city of 900,000 with deeply entrenched poverty made worse by the downturn in the auto industry.
Kilpatrick met with the leaders of several philanthropic organizations Tuesday morning, just hours before his arraignment.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced the charges after an investigation that began in late January after the Detroit Free Press published excerpts from 14,000 text messages that were sent or received in 2002-03 from Beatty's city-issued pager. (((And who leaked those, one wonders idly. Whoever they are, they're probably text-messaging friends right now eagerly explaining how to decapitate mayors' offices. By now, maybe they've got their own wiki and some how-to videos.)))
The messages called into question testimony Kilpatrick and Beatty gave last August in a lawsuit filed by two police officers who said they were fired for investigating claims that the mayor used his security unit to cover up extramarital affairs. (((Cops fired for investigating cops.)))
In court, Kilpatrick and Beatty strongly denied having an intimate relationship. But the text messages revealed a flirty, sometimes sexually explicit, dialogue about where to meet and how to conceal their trysts.
Kilpatrick, 37, is married with three children. Beatty, also 37, was married at the time and has two children.
The city eventually agreed to pay $8.4 million to the two officers and a third former officer. Some of the charges brought against the mayor accuse him of agreeing to the settlement in an effort to keep the text messages from becoming public.
"I'm madly in love with you," Kilpatrick wrote on Oct. 3, 2002.
"I hope you feel that way for a long time," Beatty replied. "In case you haven't noticed, I am madly in love with you, too!"
On Oct. 16, 2002, Kilpatrick wrote: "I've been dreaming all day about having you all to myself for 3 days. Relaxing, laughing, talking, sleeping and making love."
(((These must be Crackberries, because punctuation is pretty hard to text.)))
All of the charges against the mayor are felonies. (((!))) Under the city charter, a felony conviction would mean the mayor's immediate expulsion....
