Detroit Mayor Is Charged With Eight Felonies

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Detroit Mayor Charged With Perjury

Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was charged Monday with perjury and other counts after sexually explicit text messages surfaced that appear to contradict his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide.

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Accused of leasing a cherry-red Lincoln Navigator for his wife at $1,000 a month, Kilpatrick denied it at first, admitting the truth of the report only after the evidence was indisputable. When he ran for reelection in 2005, he took out his earring and promised to learn from his mistakes. He came from behind to beat an opponent who promised, "I won't embarrass you."

Kilpatrick's latest troubles stemmed from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by police officers who charged that they had been fired in part because they were conducting investigations that could have led them to discover the Kilpatrick-Beatty romance. When asked about the affair in court last August, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied a romantic relationship.

"My mother is a congresswoman. There have always been strong women around me. My aunt is a state legislator," Kilpatrick testified. "I think it's absurd to assert that every woman that works with a man is a whore. I think it's disrespectful, not just to Christine Beatty but to women who do the professional job that they do every single day."

The jury believed that the former officers were wronged and awarded them $6.5 million in a September verdict. Kilpatrick vowed to appeal but abruptly changed his mind, according to published accounts, when a lawyer for the officers said he would reveal the text messages in court documents as part of his bid for attorney's fees.

Kilpatrick signed off on a deal in October to pay $8.4 million to settle two lawsuits and allegedly ordered the drafting of a secret document designed to keep the text messages hidden. The Free Press published messages in January that showed Kilpatrick and Beatty had ordered the firing of Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown and had conducted the affair that they had explicitly denied.

A judge recently released the covert settlement pact, signed by Kilpatrick and Beatty, that had sworn the officers to secrecy.

The felony charges filed Monday include allegations that Kilpatrick and Beatty fired Brown to prevent him from discovering their affair, then lied about it. Worthy told reporters: "In this case, we asked, number one, can we charge perjury? Yes. Are there other crimes and offenses that we can charge, other than perjury? Yes."