Sex, Lies and Texting: Misuse of Technology Lands Detroit Mayor in Jail and Out of Office.
The improper use of cell phones by Mayor Kwame Kilpartick and his Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty, issued by their employer, the City of Detroit, led to the downfall of both after a series of legal proceedings. Kilpatrick agreed to resign as Mayor of Detroit effective September 18, 2008, as part of a plea agreement on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and official misconduct, filed after hundreds of sexually explicit text messages, printed in local papers, proved that he had committed perjury when he testified in a civil trial that he had not had an affair with Beatty.
In a whistleblower suit Kilpatrick was accused of blocking a criminal investigation into his office and firing a police deputy to cover up an extramarital affair. Two cops accused Kilpatrick of retaliating against them because of their roles in an internal affairs investigation of the mayor’s security team — a probe that potentially could have exposed the affair. The city of Detroit paid $8.4 million to settle the lawsuits, but legal fees have pushed that figure to at least $9 million.
During the trial, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied under oath that they had a sexual relationship. But the records, a series of text messages, show them engaged in romantic banter as well as planning and recounting sexual liaisons. SkyTel, the Mississippi-based company that provided text devices to the city, confirmed the existence of messages. On September 4, 2008 the mayor pleaded guilty to two obstruction of justice charges for lying in the whistle-blower trial. Under his plea deal, Kilpatrick agreed to 4 months in jail, 5 years of probation, $1 million in restitution and a 5-year ban on seeking political office. He also agreed to resign effective September 18, and is to be sentenced Oct. 28. 2008.
The fallout from the sordid affair extends to yet another lawsuit filed by newspaper organizations trying to find out the details of the $8.4 million settlement of the whistle-blower case and whether any corruption was involved. The Free Press filed the lawsuit in early January, a few weeks before it published the text messages — some of them blatantly sexual — that Kilpatrick and Beatty exchanged on her city-issued paging device in 2002-2003. The paper reviewed about 14,000 messages covering four months. The messages showed the mayor and Beatty lied under oath at last year’s police whistle-blower trial when they denied having a sexual relationship and provided misleading testimony about firing Deputy Chief Gary Brown.
During a deposition in the freedom-of-information case, Kilpatrick invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination 82 times. There are additional possible charges from Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy in her ongoing probe of the text message scandal and a federal grand jury investigation into allegations of corruption in the city.
The improper use of technology devices such as cell phones, pagers, PDAs, and Blackberries are causing major problems for employers throughout the country. For example, the City of Ontario Police Department in California issued two-way pagers to its SWAT team members and paid for the text message service provided by Arch Wireless Operating Company. The City’s written policy prohibited personal use of City-owned computers, e-mail, Internet and other systems, and allowed the City to search the content of messages. The policy warned that employees “should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality”; that all communications using the network were the City’s property; that the devices should not be used for personal reasons. The City also banned communications containing “inappropriate, derogatory, obscene, suggestive, defamatory, or harassing language.” Officers on the SWAT team used their devices to exchange personal messages, sports information and steamy sexual banter. In the ensuing litigation whether the City had the right to discover the content of the text messages, the appellate court ruled that the City did not use proper procedures to monitor texting. This case is a warning to employers about the dangers of allowing informal customs to trump established policies and the consequences of lax enforcement of existing policies. To ensure enforceability, the electronic resources usage policy should be crafted broadly enough to include all technology being used by company employees
Tags: Cell Phones, electronic resources usage policy, sexually explicit text messages