Well, look what we have here. First, former Councilman Gil Cedillo had the balls to speak up about his role(ish) in the viral LA City Council phone leak scandal. Now, the main character, former Council President Nury Martinez, followed suit addressing the mouthful she gave on the call.
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If you recall, last November, The Los Angeles Times published the leaked call as well as an annotated transcript documenting all the mess Martinez was spewing. She was recorded calling former Councilman Mike Bonin’s son—who is Black—a monkey and suggested he needed a “beatdown.” She mocked the Oaxacan residents of Koreatown by calling them ugly, “short, dark people.” She also predicted her plot to suspend Mark Ridley-Thomas, an influential Black member of the City Council. The decision followed this phone call and resulted in backlash from the Black community. That was only part of her scheme to secure the Latino majority in the council for redistricting and ultimately, silence Black voters. However, in an exclusive interview with NBC4 and Telemundo 52, she insisted she wasn’t racist but instead made some “horrible jokes.”
Read more from NBC Los Angeles:
“I don’t remember exactly, I even had to hear the audio back … of what I was talking about,” Martinez said. “I used language, I expressed myself in a way that was really shameful for me. I made a joke in an environment where I felt as if that’s how things were going on. In reality, I don’t have the words to express how badly I feel for having said that. It wasn’t my intent to make anyone feel bad. And there were comments that were very hurtful to the Black community and especially toward a Black child, the son of a colleague.”
“In my home, we used that word a lot,” Martinez said. “My mother, when we were little and we played, told us, ‘You look like a little monkey.’ So, for me, using the word never meant anything racist against Black people. Clearly, I now understand how it was perceived. Clearly, I understand and take complete responsibility for that, but my intention wasn’t that.”
You buying that? Me neither.
The outrage following the leak led Martinez to resign almost immediately. The others who were on the call—Councilman Kevin de León, former colleague Gil Cedillo and head of LA County Federation of Labor Rob Herrera—felt the heat from the public too. However, only Cedillo ended up without a job as he lost his reelection bid in 2022, the report says.
It is still under investigation who leaked the call but authorities say two former employees from the Federation of Labor are suspected to the whistleblowers, per The AP’s report.
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