Detroit mayor had secrecy accord with police

DETROIT — During negotiations over lawsuits, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick reached a confidentiality agreement with three former police officers in which they agreed never to reveal text messages that suggested he had conducted an extramarital affair with an aide.

When the talks were finished last fall, the city and the mayor — who had vowed months earlier to continue fighting the officers' claims that they had been unfairly fired — agreed to pay $8.4 million in taxpayers' money to end the cases. The confidentiality agreement was one of several documents a judge made public Friday, the most recent in a series of revelations that have bruised Kilpatrick, 37, and his administration this year.

In January, the Detroit Free Press published a series of text messages, some of them racy, between Kilpatrick and the aide, Christine Beatty, 37, his chief of staff. That set off an investigation by the county prosecutor, Kym Worthy, into whether the pair had lied under oath when, during a trial of the former officers' claims, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied having had an affair. The officers said in part that they had been fired to block an investigation that could have brought the affair to light.

The perjury investigation is continuing.

Beatty has since resigned.

The Free Press and The Detroit News are seeking the release of more documents connected to the legal settlement that city lawyers have said are not subject to public-records laws.

Robert Colombo Jr., a Wayne County circuit judge, released the confidentiality agreement Friday and said he would make the other documents public, but city officials have taken their case to an appeals court.

Neither a spokesman for Kilpatrick nor his legal adviser, Sharon McPhail, returned telephone messages.

But Kilpatrick, who appeared on television Jan. 30 beside his wife, Carlita, to issue a public apology for his failings, went on a local radio show Friday. There, Kilpatrick, who is in his second term as mayor, praised his wife, said he loved his city and indicated he had no intention of resigning.

"I believe I'm on an assignment from God in this position," he told the audience.

The mayor repeatedly invoked God in apologizing again for an extramarital affair with Beatty.

Kilpatrick also questioned how the Free Press had obtained the text messages from 2002 and 2003 and accused the newspaper of wrongdoing.

Caesar Andrews, executive editor of the Free Press, denied that. "The Free Press did nothing illegal," he said. "We verified our coverage in numerous ways and reported only on the facts. No one, including the mayor, has challenged our factual reporting."

Kilpatrick also said he and attorneys for the city were within their rights to sign the secret agreement last fall to keep the text messages private as part of the settlement.

He said the agreement involved records personal to him, Beatty and the former officers, and therefore should have stayed private.

City Council President Ken Cockrel Jr. disagreed with that privacy argument.

"I'm not buying it," Cockrel said. "I have seen the documents and I've read them and there's no doubt to me that these documents center on actions that the mayor took acting in his capacity as mayor."

Other council members, meanwhile, seemed increasingly weary of the continuing effects of the mayor's troubles. The council is expected to meet Monday to decide whether to hire its own lawyer in the case, separate from the city law department and separate from the mayor's lawyer.

"I believe that we have a crisis in leadership in the city, in the mayor's office," Councilman Kwame Kenyatta said. "We're just trying to see our way through it."

William Ballenger, editor of the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, said, "This has all been dribbling out, bit by bit. Knowing the city and knowing Kilpatrick, when this first started, I really thought he would just tough it out and probably could."

He added that now he was not as certain.

Material from the Detroit Free Press is included in this report.