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Warren's mayor digs in amid growing suggestions that he leave office after fresh audio evidence of crudely expressed race, gender and age bias.
"I will be here through at least 2019," he vows online Tuesday morning.
A joint statement from eight elected officeholders, including a congressman, says the four short recordings posted Monday by Motor City Muckraker have a "voice we recognize [as] Mayor James Fouts. They calls on him to leave the office he first won in 2007.
"it would be best for the people of Warren for Mayor Fouts to resign," says the letter signed by U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, four state legislators and three county commissioners. (Text below with their names.)
Update, 8 p.m. Tuesday: The situation jumps from Metro Detroit front pages to national news Tuesday night as The Washington Post publishes a 29-paragraph report.
Editor's column: Lengel: Mayor Fouts' Remarks Are a Critical Test in the Trump Era
The embattled politician responds defiantly at his Facebook page:
There is tremendous effort to force me out immediately by slander, by character assassination, lies and by outright condemnation of me.
This is an attempt to reverse the 2015 election results, when I won with 85% of the vote. I won with 81% in 2011. This is despite solid evidence that I did nothing wrong whatsoever.
My actions as mayor have been inclusive and no one can deny that. We are the best-run city in the state when it comes to police, fire and fund balance.
I will not resign. I will be here through at least 2019, as the people wanted me to [be]. I will not capitulate to a rush to judgment by those who wish to take over city hall and hijack the 2015 election.
Why? Because I have changed things for the better in the city. I serve the citizens 24/7 and they know it. I'm not answerable to any politician I'm only answerable to the people of Warren. I serve the interests of the people of Warren, not the politicians
'Hateful, racist and disparaging'
Here's what Congressman Levin and allies say in their public appeal, posted by Muckraker and other media:
Each of us represents the citizens of the City of Warren. We have listened to the audio tapes with the voice we recognize of Mayor Jim Fouts. These comments are hateful. They are racist and disparaging of women.
The leader of our state’s third-largest city should be a role model for how we treat each other and anyone that harbors these feelings and expresses them is not fit to lead. We believe that these comments, and the previous comments about people with disabilities, do not represent the people of the City of Warren.
Therefore, we believe that it would be best for the people of Warren for Mayor Fouts to resign, and we call on him to do so.
It would have been our preference that the individuals making these audio recordings would have immediately turned them over to the proper authorities for investigation so they would have been handled in an appropriate manner and reduced the discussion about the motivation for the recording and the circumstances of the release.
In addition to Levin, the signers are:
- State Sen. Steve Bieda
- State Reps. Henry Yanez, John Chirkun and Patrick Green
- County Commissioners Andrey Duzyj, Veronica Klinefelt and Marv Sauger
Earlier update, Monday night:
Warren's embattled mayor, in office since 2008, faces his second serious public embarrassment in a less than a month. Newly surfaced recordings have racist, sexist and age-bias comments in what's apparently Mayor Jim Fouts' voice.
Major Mike Duggan of Detroit and Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County suggest that Fouts resign.
Four blockbuster audio clips, posted Monday morning by Motor City Muckraker after being provided by an unidentified source, spark region-wide news coverage and defiance from Fouts. (Details of the spoken content are below.)
"It does sound like Mayor Fouts," this Rochester Hills analyst tells Jim Kiertzner of WXYZ.
“I’m not interested in hearing it." he said at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Warren, according to The Macomb Daily. "All it’s designed to do is distract, divide and destroy. That's all it's designed to do."
In an effort to authenticate the inflammatory remarks, WXYZ arranged a forensic comparison with Fouts' voice in online videos of speeches. "It does sound like Mayor Fouts to me, based on everything that I've heard," says Ed Primeau, a nationally recognized audio analyst certified as an expert witness in legal cases.
Inquiries to the Warren politician went unanswered, The Detroit News and Free Press say. "Fouts did not return calls or respond to a text," writes Nicquel Terry of The News.
Duggan and Bouchard condemn the remarks:
- "If Mayor Fouts said those disgusting things, he has to go. The tapes are sickening. It's hard to believe anybody could say those things." -- Duggan, on Twitter
- "I just listened to the recordings of Mayor Fouts. While I am not a member of the Warren community, I am a member of the human community. You need to go." -- Michael Bouchard, on his Facebook page
The independent news site's scoop by Steve Neavling, a former Freep reporter who founded Muckraker in April 2012, also generates coverage by Fox 2, CBS Detroit and Metro Times.
Original article, Monday afternoon:
We all know about the final straw that breaks a proverbial camel's back.
Explosive new audio revelations could be the final flaw that breaks Mayor Jim Fouts' grip in Warren.
In taped comments provided to Motor City Muckraker by an undisclosed source, a man the site identifies as Fouts uses the n-word, compares black people to chimps and characterizes women with two sexist slurs.
The 74-year-old suburban politician claims on Facebook that the new material is "a phony, manufactured tape to distract from my outstanding record as mayor."
Warren Mayor James R. Fouts says the new clips are from "a phony, manufactured tape to distract from my outstanding record." (WXYZ photo)
Investigative journalist Steve Neavling posts four brief SoundCloud files totaling 43 seconds with a voice said to be Fouts. There's no information about when or where the mayor was speaking, or whether he was aware of being recorded in what appears to be a private or semi-private conversation.
Another local reporter, Chad Livingston of Crain's Detroit Business, posts on Facbeook with Neavling's link that the voice "sounds awfully like Warren Mayor Jim Fouts."
At the same social media platform, veteran political consultant Joe DiSano says:
I may have been in the "chimp" meeting. Comments like this are why I severed any reltionship with Mayor Jim Fouts.
He elaborates in a Free Press phone interview:
“In many meetings I’ve heard him casually use the N-word. At one of the last meetings I ever had with him, he actually stood at the front of the conference room table and danced around like he was monkey. And that was in reference to voters in Detroit."
Fouts was elected mayor of Warren in 2007 after 26 years on the city council.
In Monday afternoon's 460-word social media response, he accuses Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel of "releasing more vile, vitriolic, phony tapes against me." The mayor adds:
"This was timed so that they came out just before our noon ceremony [marking MLK Day]. . . . This tactic dishonors the memory of Martin Luther King, a man of peace. . . .
Shame on Mark Hackel for this transparent attempt at character assassination."
Two weeks ago, Hackel gave a recording to two TV stations in which a person sounding like Fouts disparages mentally disabled people as "not even human beings" and unworthy of being allowed to live. The mayor, embroiled in a ongoing feud with Hackel, denies making the statements and claims the audio files are doctored.
The ensuing uproar includes criticism from the lieutenant governor and from residents urging him to resign. "It’s hard to see how an elected official could hold such disparaging views of any group of people and still remain in office," says an editorial in The Detroit News, calling on Fouts to prove the voice isn't his or to "answer for the insulting, dehumanizing way in which he regards people with developmental disabilities."
Steve Neavling's news site coverage.
Now the outcry is sure to grow. The four new clips, if authentic, expand the politician's smears to broader groups.
The inflammatory content can be heard clearly at Neavling's site:
- “Blacks do look like chimpanzees. I was watching this black woman with her daughter and they looked like two chimps. Their mouths were elongated out -- you know, a duckish look”
- Fouts uses the n-word while telling a story from his teaching career.
- The unmarried mayor explains why he doesn’t like to date older women: “Think I want to date a fucking 60-year-old hag?” Fouts said. “Fuck that shit. I’m not interested in any old ugly hag. I think after a certain age they are dried up, washed up burned out.”
- In the fourth SoundCloud file, lasting just six seconds, he rants again about older women: "They are pussies when they are young, and when they get older, they’re just mean, hateful dried-up c----.”
This fresh disclosure generates more than 130 comments at Muckrakeri, over 250 at Neavling's personal and news site Facebook pages.
Steve Neavling's scoop at the Motor City Muckraker news site generates region-wide media coverage. (Collage by Alan Stamm)
