D.C. Councilman Marion Barry said Thursday that his weekend arrest for stalking by a U.S. Park Police officer was “inappropriate,” but he refused to say whether he planned to bring a lawsuit against the law enforcement agency.
The former mayor also dodged questions about the controversial contract he awarded to the woman he was accused of stalking.
Barry, 73, addressed reporters for the first time since he was stopped Saturday night near Anacostia Park, handcuffed and charged with stalking 40-year-old Donna Watts-Brighthaupt, a former girlfriend. The two had eaten lunch together hours earlier in Annapolis and had planned to spend the weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but returned to Washington instead.
Prosecutors announced Wednesday that they would not pursue the case.
“The Park Police should never have arrested me,” Barry, the Ward 8 councilman, said outside the John A. Wilson Building.
The officer who made the stop, Barry said, “has caused great pain for my family, for this community and for this nation.” It has caused “consternation,” the former mayor said, and “led to embarrassment.”
The ex-mayor refused to discuss the $60,000, taxpayer-funded contract he awarded to Watts-Brighthaupt last year when the two were dating. He declined to address why he would hire a woman whom his spokeswoman described days earlier as “unstable.” And he would not talk about Watts-Brighthaupt’s ex-husband, whom Barry had barred from the Wilson Building last Friday.
Those questions, he said, would be dealt with “at the appropriate time.”
Support for an investigation into the contract to Watts-Brighthaupt is growing. Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells said the first step must be to determine whether Barry did anything illegal by hiring Watts-Brighthaupt for his staff, though Wells spoke highly of Barry as a “very engaged council member.” The council does not appear to have any way of censuring its own members, Wells said.
“The first question is whether he broke any laws,” Wells said.
Barry’s stalwart supporters, meanwhile, condemned the coverage of Barry’s arrest as racially motivated.
They took particular issue with Thursday’s Washington City Paper cover, which shows Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt with a headline in which the ex-girlfriend claims Barry booted her from their Denver hotel room last summer because she would not perform oral sex on him. That headline was pulled from a recorded argument between the couple, released by her ex-husband.
“This is an outrage,” said Tisa Mitchell, a Barry backer. “City Paper would be shut down right now if that was a corporate white man on the cover.”
