Thursday, May 15, 2008
Christine Beatty's dilemma: Fight or cut a deal?
Disgraced by scandal, the mayor's former chief of staff now grapples with whether to fight or make deal with prosecutor
Charlie LeDuff and Ron French / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- For Christine Beatty, it has been an emotional and precipitous fall from brassy City Hall powerbroker to humiliated "other woman."
Now, the woman who built a formidable reputation for bare-knuckle deal-making may soon face the toughest call of her life: keep mum and hope for an acquittal, or talk and hope for a deal -- and absolution.
"The only way to be cleansed is to admit it," said Beatty's minister, the Rev. Ronald L. Griffin, pastor of the Rose of Sharon Church of God in Christ, who has counseled her. "It must all be revealed. Something is coming forth soon, I promise you." telling all would be good for her soul, says her minister, and good for her children, according to family. The pressure to cut a deal with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy is just one of the stresses that confidants say she has faced in the 108 days since she resigned as the mayor's chief of staff.
Both Beatty and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick are charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, stemming from the release of text messages that conflict with their denials under oath that they fired a police officer and had an intimate relationship. If convicted, each faces up to 15 years in prison.
The mayor's defense, according to statements made by his stable of lawyers, is a simple one: Prosecutors must prove that the messages sent from Kilpatrick's text message device were typed by the mayor's own fingers. But assuming it was not the thumbs of a poltergeist that composed love missives to Beatty, then Kilpatrick's liberty may depend on the loyalty of his former paramour.
The woman at the center of the most publicized scandal in Detroit history spends her days anonymously in an ivy-covered Tudor in the Rosedale Park section of the city. These days, she rarely goes out alone, her pastor says, sometimes even taking a companion just to go to the grocery store. She has avoided being seen in public, fearing what angry residents may say or do to her.
"I don't know if paranoia is the right word," said her minister, Griffin, "but she's paranoid. She's going through the shame process."
The transition from powerbroker to powerless has been devastating to Beatty, said her attorney, Mayer Morganroth, as he waited for Beatty to appear for a court hearing Tuesday. "It's been especially rough on the kids," he said. Beatty's two girls, ages 9 and 7, live with her.
Out of work since resigning from her $142,000 job as Kilpatrick's chief of staff, Beatty has been unable to find work locally and is hobbled from looking outside Michigan because of her pending criminal case.
Even her lawyer has been searching for a job for his client.
"I was looking for opportunities (for Beatty) in the music industry," Morganroth said, but he's struck out.
Jennifer Howard, a social worker who has been a friend and sorority sister of Beatty's since 1994, said she hasn't seen her in public since November.
She still talks to Beatty, who turns 38 this month, several times a month on the telephone. After the text messages made headlines, "she was despondent and depressed," Howard said. "She's regained the strength in her voice. She sounds more hopeful."
Apologizing to God
On the last Sunday of January, just a week after the damaging messages surfaced, Beatty stood before the congregation of Rose of Sharon Church of God in Christ with tears in her eyes and asked both God and the people of her church for forgiveness, Griffin said.
"No one condones her behavior, and we're not whitewashing this," Griffin said. "She's repented and asked God to forgive her. She's said to God, 'I'm sorry.'
"Now what she must do is ask people whom she's hurt for forgiveness. It's restoration. She needs to do this in order to rebuild her life."
Once one of the most powerful women in Detroit, Beatty's life has devolved into a sordid cliche: a story straight from the Book of Genesis about the desire for and dangers of forbidden fruit. If text messages between her and the mayor are to be believed, Beatty pulled away from her autoworker husband for a powerful man with tastes for expensive suits and diamond earrings. One in three married women with children admit in a recent poll to having had an affair, but few face the consequences Beatty now confronts: no husband, no job, mounting legal bills and the specter of prison.
A deal to testify truthfully in the case against Kilpatrick might let Beatty avoid prison, assure that she stays with her children, and allow her to move on with her life.
But a Beatty plea deal would not be good for the mayor, whose men still have their arms wrapped tightly, if not invisibly, around her. Her legal defense fund is being run in part by the Rev. Horace Sheffield III and Detroit attorney William Phillips, men with close connections to the mayor. Her lawyer, Morganroth, was first hired by the mayor to represent him, the city and Beatty in a federal lawsuit concerning the death of a stripper who allegedly worked at a party at the mayor's residence. It is unclear how Morganroth, who earns a reported $700 an hour, will be paid should the court battle rage on for months.
A long history
No one knows how the story will end for Beatty, but the first chapter was written two decades ago at one of the city's premier high schools. Turn the pages of the Cass Tech yearbook of 1988, and you find a story of two young stars. Beatty, then Christine Rowland, voted most popular girl, a football majorette and student government representative. Kilpatrick: the football and basketball hero, the gregarious big man on campus. Both members of the Cass Tech hall of fame.
Some former classmates don't recall a romance between Beatty and Kilpatrick, while others do. The text messages, now part of the official record, seem to confirm this history. On April 27, 2003, Kilpatrick wrote to Beatty: "You were my girl for as long as I can remember. I was too young and stupid to know. I promise for the rest of my life you will be my girl."
Their clique, known at Cass as the Dream Team, reunited eight years after graduation, when Kilpatrick was running for his mother's seat in the Michigan House of Representatives.
Beatty helped run Kilpatrick's campaign, and then joined his staff in Lansing, where the woman with no political experience developed a reputation as the hatchet woman, the aide de camp who twisted arms while her boss smiled and shook hands.
When Kilpatrick became mayor in 2002, he made Beatty his chief of staff, a remarkable rise for a woman who had planned a career as a jailhouse counselor just six years earlier.
Beatty, with a master's degree in social work, was put in charge of negotiating multimillion-dollar contracts between the city and labor unions.
"She didn't know what she was doing," said John Riehl, president of AFSCME Local 207, the largest union representing city workers and a vocal critic of the administration. "She acted like she was better than us."
While Riehl tried to negotiate a reduction in the number of layoffs of city workers planned by the administration, Beatty often would ignore him, putting her head down and typing text messages. Concessions she helped win helped lift the city out of a $300 million deficit, but also slashed thousands of jobs.
'Severely power-struck'
Beatty began to change, recalled Chris Beatty, uncle to Christine's former husband, Lou Beatty. "She'd always been stubborn, but I'd never known her to be devious," Chris Beatty said. "What happened to Christine and Kwame both is they became severely power-struck. Not everyone can handle power. Power is what drove them to be different people."
In their first year in office, Kilpatrick and Beatty worked long hours trying to turn around the nation's poorest big city. They spent so much time together that Walt Harris, who worked on Kilpatrick's security team, testified in court that he and his partner wondered if they would have to shoot Lou Beatty if he showed up while the mayor and his chief of staff were having a late-night get-together at her house.
In early April 2003, Lou Beatty complained in a text message to his wife that she smiled only when Kilpatrick was around. "I wish you smiled at me like that," he wrote.
The affair between the mayor and his chief of staff was the "ultimate betrayal," said Chris Beatty. "They (Kilpatrick, Christine Beatty and Lou Beatty) all went to high school together."
Today, feelings of betrayal among the Beatty clan have been replaced with concern for Christine and her children. "Our request (for Christine) is to please turn him in. Spare yourself. Spare your children," Chris Beatty said. "I'm afraid that if she waits too long, she will lose the sympathy of the people. I pray that she talks to the prosecutor."
Doug Guthrie and Oralandar Brand-Williams contributed to this report. You can reach Ron French at (313) 222-2175 or rfrench@detnews.com and Charlie LeDuff at (313) 222-2071 or charlie@detnews.com