Lawyer: I gave text messages to Detroit Free Press

A lawyer who obtained a trove of sexually explicit text messages while suing former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in 2007 said Thursday he gave a copy to the Detroit Free Press, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning stories led to criminal charges and forced the mayor from office last year.

Mike Stefani made the disclosure while testifying before the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board, where he's accused of acting unethically while representing police officers in lawsuits against Kilpatrick.

"I gave one to the Detroit Free Press for safekeeping ... a day or two after I got them," Stefani said, according to the newspaper's account of his testimony.

During a break, he told The Detroit News: "It wasn't something just for the Free Press; it was just that it needed to come out."

The Free Press never disclosed how it obtained text messages for a blockbuster story in January 2008 that revealed a torrid affair between Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

The story contradicted repeated denials that there wasn't a sexual relationship. The question was critical because police officers had sued Kilpatrick, claiming they were punished when they tried to investigate wrongdoing by his inner circle.

Free Press publisher and editor Paul Anger declined to comment when asked by The Associated Press if messages supplied by Stefani were the basis for its story. Messages seeking comment were left with Stefani and his lawyer, Ken Mogill.

Stefani obtained text messages from the city's communications provider after a jury awarded $6.5 million to his clients, two officers in a whistle-blowers' lawsuit, in 2007. Kilpatrick vowed to appeal, but he settled the case and another for $8.4 million when he learned what Stefani had.

The Free Press story followed a few months later. Kilpatrick and Beatty subsequently pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice because of their lies at trial and were sent to jail.

Kilpatrick's lawyer, Michael Alan Schwartz, said Stefani's disclosure "makes this all the more insidious."

"It seems to me something has happened in this case from the beginning that undermines the criminal justice system," Schwartz said.

The 2009 Pulitzer was for local reporting.