November's issue of Essence goes on sale Thursday. (Photo via WXYZ)
Long before City Hall jobs, text messages and criminal charges, Christine Beatty and Kwame Kilpatrick were Cass Tech sweethearts who shared a first kiss on her mom's couch, she recalls wistfully in a first-person Essence magazine story titled "A Real-Life Scandal."
Excerpts from an advance copy of the November issue are quoted in The Detroit News by Robert Snell, who writes that Beatty "offers behind-the-scenes details of a scandal that drew international headlines." (The Free Press also has a front-page account of the upcoming article, which goes on sale next Thursday.)
Beatty, who filed for bankruptcy last fall, may have been paid for the interview, Snell speculates. It's unclear "why she is rehashing the text-message scandal," he notes.
"My happiness was completely dependent on whether I felt he adored me personally and was proud of me professionally,” Christine Beatty writes of the ex-mayor.
She served four months behind bars in 2009 for lying under oath about her relationship with Kilpatrick while serving as his chief of staff. The couple hid their relationship for almost six years before it was revealed when the Free Press printed racy text messages.
“He made me laugh, he made me angry, he propelled me to ecstasy and reduced me to tears,” Beatty writes of the ex-mayor. . . .
“I was totally consumed by my affair with Kwame. We would find any spare time we could to be together, at the office or at my home when my children weren’t there. In the morning as I dressed for work, I would find myself wondering if Kwame would approve of my outfit. . . . My happiness was completely dependent on whether I felt he adored me personally and was proud of me professionally.”
Snell writes that Beatty says the pair originally became intimate in 2002, his first year in office.
“I knew immediately that we had crossed a line, but there was no turning back,” she wrote.
She divorced in 2006 after nine years of marriage to Lou Beatty.
She also discusses her attempts to find redemption, living with shame and lessons learned from the text-message scandal. . . . “I had disgraced my family and friends, lost my career, compromised the hard work of my colleagues and our administration and let down my city,” Beatty wrote.
