Mayor Brandon Johnson claimed Thursday that he was unaware of his former communications director’s alleged misconduct till he noticed public data requests for his personnel file, regardless of him sending pressing textual content messages about Ronnie Reese days earlier than his dismissal.
At an unrelated press convention in Englewood, the mayor once more advised reporters that “like everybody else,” he turned conscious of the sexual harassment, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobic complaints in opposition to Reese after he a Freedom of Information Act request was made. The Tribune filed a FOIA request for these paperwork on Oct. 25, after information broke that the mayor’s longtime pal and former press secretary for his marketing campaign to mayor and for the Chicago Teachers Union he had been fired.
But texts from Oct. 19 that the Tribune additionally obtained by way of FOIA present the mayor making an obvious reference to Reese whereas texting CTU President Stacy Davis Gates simply 4 days earlier than Reese acquired notification of his firing.
“Ronnie!” he wrote. “Call me. Message from the Elders.”
Davis Gates responded to the obvious reference to Reese, who beforehand labored together with her and Johnson on the academics union, solely with an exclamatory response, in response to a duplicate of the textual content trade. She stated this week that she wouldn’t interact additional or be taught concerning the allegations surrounding Reese till the Tribune reported them.
Johnson addressed his October messages on Thursday, saying, “I’ve conversations and textual content messages with a wide range of folks, and I’ve communicated with Stacy on a number of events the place there are alternatives for us to proceed to develop our metropolis by way of the lens of public schooling”.
Asked why he could not elaborate on what he needed to debate with Davis Gates concerning Reese, the mayor merely stated, “I’m really saying greater than something. … I’ve stated a number of instances that when the FOIA requests got here in and so they had been made public, that is after I discovered.”
The mayor additionally stated he had no particular details about earlier allegations made in opposition to Reese in 2023, which the Tribune reported on in January.
“If you are referring to individuals who have been fired from the division, that is a personnel challenge, proper?” Johnson stated when requested if he was conscious of the primary set of complaints. “And as I’ve stated a number of instances, we don’t focus on personnel issues. But when these people had been terminated by the town of Chicago as staff, there was no dialogue or details about their particular interactions with their supervisor at the moment.
In August 2023, three members of Reese’s employees had been fired after complaining about how Reese and Johnson’s senior advisor, Jason Lee, handled them. They had been then positioned on the town’s “don’t rent” record, and two of them had been eliminated simply final week, after the brand new allegations in opposition to Reese turned public.
The January Tribune article notes that Reese’s staff had complained to Mondine Harding on the mayor’s workplace about his remedy of girls, together with allegedly telling feminine employees that they “snicker an excessive amount of” whereas “in distinction, Ronnie joked with my male colleagues”.
The mayor additionally hinted Thursday at future, unspecified modifications to City Hall’s reporting mechanism for workers complaints.
“There is a breakdown inside that system the place data was not made available till the FOIA request,” Johnson stated. “This is one thing we should always actually discover and look into. But make no mistake, an important factor right here is that I’ve no tolerance for sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ-plus.”
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