Monisha Harrell, the former Deputy Mayor Seattle and niece of current Mayor Harrell recently gave an interview to KUOW where she made the case that the Harrell administration’s office environment has been marked by a contemptuous and condescending attitude toward women. This culture was marked by “casual cruelty;” she said the disrespect was “coming from the top.”
Every Seattle voter should read it.
It is important to note, though, that the red flags have been there for quite some time. Harrell’s history of covering for abusers certainly corroborates a dismissiveness toward women and punching down against people who are vulnerable rather than standing up to the powerful.
Ed Murray abuse scandal
Bruce Harrell was the City Council President in 2017 when then-Murray Ed Murray was accused of sexually abusing a minor.
One accusation followed another, alongside compelling independent evidence from public records in Oregon. Harrell and most of the council did not call for Murray to resign. Harrell was, however, one of the few councilmembers, who actively pushed back in defense of Murray.
Harrell’s argument was: “The people of Seattle […] did not ask us to judge anyone for something that happened 33 years ago or that maybe didn’t happen. We just don’t know. And I would ask that I don’t want to be judged for anything 33 years ago.”
While most of us certainly would appreciate avoiding judgment for our past mistakes, most of us don’t seek to be mayor, and most of our past mistakes do not involve sexually abusing children. I think most reasonable people recognize that this crosses the unfit-for-office threshold. Perhaps Harrell was engaging in some motivated reasoning. After all, it has recently come out that in 1996, Harrell was arrested for pulling a gun on a woman who was eight months pregnant in a parking dispute. Harrell says this didn’t happen, but it was also confirmed by a casino employee who witnessed it.
Whatever the case, Harrell did not think Murray’s obvious pattern of sexual abuse was disqualifying. He seemed to think instead that then Mayor Murray’s work ethic was far more relevant than whether he had abused children. “The question is, are you doing your job right now?” He also said, “I don’t believe he should resign today. If I see examples of him abdicating his responsibilities, not working hard, and not making sure a smooth transition occurs, I would ask for his resignation. But I have no basis to believe that at all today.”
Five men separately accused Murray of molesting them as children. Five.
Finally, Murray gave in and stepped down.
Shortly thereafter, Harrell was interviewed on a Seattle Times podcast. The reporters asked him about his resistance to calls with questions like “why did it take five accusers? Why did it take so long? Should you have acted sooner?”
Harrell tried to avoid answering, making a football joke about Monday morning quarterbacking and chuckling aloud while the reporters sat silent. His chuckle said all that was needed about how seriously he saw the matter.
Pressed, yet again, he finally said, “In my personal judgment, if I were to self assess, the value system or the lens by which I look at these issues was spot on.”
Harrell accused of pushing for a smear campaign against abuse victims
When Harrell was running for Mayor in 2021, Lola Peters took to the South Seattle Emerald oped section to accuse Harrell of something similar:
“In 2001 —2002 I was on the board of a nonprofit providing services primarily to low-income Black people in the Central District. A senior staff member was accused of sexual harassment and predatory behavior. The irrefutable compounded evidence pointed to his guilt. The board turned to its legal counsel, Bruce Harrell, for guidance. Given the concrete evidence, he recommended we launch a campaign to discredit the reputations of the accusers. We did not follow his advice.”
(Elma Horton, also on that board, denies this happened. Lola Peters maintains it did, and says Elma was not at the meeting where Harrell offered this advice.)
“I stand with this fine leader.” – Diaz affair and abuse
The pattern continued after Harrell took the mayoral helm.
After promising police reform, Harrell passed over a reformist candidate for Chief of Police and chose Adrian Diaz instead. Diaz’s term was a textbook example of poor management, and under Harrell, Seattle switched from solid decreases in violent crime to a big increase.
Diaz’s department was beset with one scandal after another. By the time Harrell finally got around to demoting him, Diaz “face[d] numerous investigations for an alleged pattern of gender and racial discrimination in his office and for hiring a chief of staff with whom he was allegedly in a romantic relationship.” In addition, more than a month before he stepped town, four women joined in a $5 million sexual harassment suit against the department–including specific harassment allegations about Diaz and his involvement in covering up others’ harassment as well.
Even then, Harrell didn’t fire Diaz. He merely reassigned him to special projects and held a press conference praising him.
“His integrity, in my mind, is beyond reproach,” Harrell said. “He’s a human being, and a good human being at that. . . . And if there’s one takeaway from this press conference, it is I stand with this fine leader. That is his sacrifice for 27 years that we are building upon, so the people of Seattle should have the utmost confidence that we’re trending in the right direction with the right policies and the right people and we’re going to keep on keeping on.”
Harrell let Diaz keep his Chief salary, $338,000. In fact, he didn’t bother to fire Diaz until almost six months later, when even more damning evidence emerged. Two weeks later Publicola reported that Diaz was going to be placed on the national “Brady List” of dishonest cops. Harrell stood by that “good human being” all that time.
Harrell’s slow to fire external relations director accused of rape
More recently it emerged that Harrell’s longtime association – his former campaign manager and recent external relations director Pedro Gomez was credibly accused of rape. The Harrell administration’s spokesperson says that Harrell’s office was notified of the police report in late September. They did place Gomez on leave at that time.
However, Harrell still didn’t make him resign until January when the case ripened enough to be referred to the King County Prosecutor. No one has yet reported on whether Gomez was continuing to collect his roughly $150,000 salary at that time.
Fool me four times?
Early in the 2017 podcast interview, Harrell said “The voice of the survivors was very strong… [They] were saying that they want the city to understand what this whole controversy means to me. I gained a better appreciation for that.”
It seems he didn’t.
If anything, his attempt to pivot away from the topic a few minutes later with a football analogy and a chuckle seems far more telling.
This article is a crosspost from Ron Davis’s blog Rondezvous.
Ron Davis (Guest Contributor)
Ron Davis is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, political consultant, and past candidate for Seattle City Council. He is focused on making his community a place where anyone can start a career, raise a family, and age in place without breaking the bank. He has a JD from Harvard Law School and lives in Northeast Seattle with his wife — a family physician — and their two boys.
