In mid-June, Donna Watts-Brighthaupt had an encounter with Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry. Watts was driving around, taking care of some personal business, when Barry caught sight of her. He made a point of getting her to pull over, and the two quickly got involved in an intense discussion.
The exchange hinged on their roughly yearlong relationship, a bizarre one even by the standards of one of the District’s most-watched womanizers. As Barry attempted to stake out his position on their fortunes, Watts-Brighthaupt was quick to point out the ways in which she felt mistreated. One stood out:
“You put me out in Denver ’cause I wouldn’t suck your dick,” Watts-Brighthaupt yelled at Barry, according to a tape recording of the conversation.
Watts-Brighthaupt was referring to an incident that had occurred about 10 months prior, at the Democratic National Convention. At the time, Watts-Brighthaupt was working on Barry’s ultimately successful re-election campaign and traveled to the Barack Obama-crowning affair. For reasons that remain murky, she ended up assigned to the councilmember’s hotel room in the Crowne Plaza hotel. Once behind closed doors, Barry allegedly asked Watts-Brighthaupt to perform oral sex on him. She refused, whereupon Barry threw her clothes out of the room and barred her from coming back in. She slept in the hotel’s parking garage, in a Cadillac Barry had rented.
Sourcing for the above incidents comes not from Watts-Brighthaupt or Barry, but rather from Delonta Brighthaupt, Watts-Brighthaupt’s ex-husband. Brighthaupt managed to record the mid-June confrontation between Watts-Brighthaupt and Barry, and he also participated from afar in the Denver fiasco, counseling Watts-Brighthaupt after she’d been bounced from her hotel room.
“She called me from the garage,” says Delonta Brighthaupt, who is assisting his ex-wife during her treatments for cancer.
Brighthaupt was present, too, on July 4, when Barry was arrested by Park Police officers for allegedly stalking Watts-Brighthaupt—an event that has called into question their private–public partnership. Barry put Watts-Brighthaupt on his staff two months after they began dating and paid her at least $20,000, according to city records. The arrangement kept Watts-Brighthaupt close to the councilmember, which is really, really where Barry wanted her, according to testimony and documentation provided by Brighthaupt.
The two met early on in 2008, as Barry began politicking around town for his re-election campaign. He came across Watts-Brighthaupt at the councilmember’s campaign kickoff. A former lobbyist for the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, she was ambitious, smart, and, crucially, unemployed.
“He said that he could assist her in finding employment,” Brighthaupt says. “A lot of people who are his loyalists, that’s the way they get in.”
Got in she did: The 40-year-old started working as Barry’s driver and a personal assistant. She was lightly compensated—campaign finance records show she got only $600 over the course of the campaign. “Like Bugs Bunny,” Brighthaupt says, “where the carrot is there, but the character never gets it.”
But there were fringe benefits: Convention time came, and she accompanied Barry to Denver. Despite the Crowne Plaza encounter—the first sexual overture, to Brighthaupt’s knowledge—and the subsequent drama, Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt left Denver on good enough terms that Barry, not more than two weeks later, invited her to tag along to Jamaica, where Barry was headed for a little post-primary R&R. Come Inauguration Day in January, she tagged along with Barry as a van took them up Pennsylvania Avenue to the special viewing area reserved for city officials. “She didn’t have credentials; she was afraid,” said one councilmember in the group. “Marion was like, ‘Come on, nothing’s gonna happen. I got you.’” In May, she accompanied Barry to Las Vegas for the annual retailers’ convention.
Throughout, the telenovela dynamic was constant, with the two regularly fighting, only to make up within days or hours, sometimes minutes. The tussles happened in private and in public—in an incident recalled to LL by an independent source, a verbal scuffle between the two in Vegas erupted into blows, right in the lobby of the Paris hotel. “She told me she put a shellacking on him,” Brighthaupt says.
Between the blowups, Barry would serenade Watts-Brighthaupt with sweet nothings. “You know I love you—love of my life,” he’d say. “Donna Watts Barry,” he’d call her—“We’re gonna get married.” She’d roll her eyes at such comments, especially since his marriage to Cora Masters never officially ended. He’d stop by the Watts-Brighthaupt residence at all hours; if she had gone to walk her terriers, she’d usually leave the door open. He’d slip in and wait for her.
But in the last couple of weeks, things got rockier. Last Tuesday, Brighthaupt accompanied his ex-wife and her 16-year-old daughter to the John A. Wilson Building, where a screening of a CNN documentary was being held. When Barry found out that Brighthaupt had personally RSVP’d to the event, he dashed off a memo asking the council secretary to ban him from the building, citing threats “by telephone and in person.” Brighthaupt, who denies ever having threatened Barry, was turned away at the door. Watts-Brighthaupt was incensed and demanded Barry retract what he’d written about the threats.
The Ward 8 councilmember couldn’t handle estrangement from the love of his life, as he made plain on numerous voicemail messages to Watts-Brighthaupt. With the assistance of Brighthaupt, LL got access to several of these recordings [listen and read full transcripts], all of which came after the Wilson Building tiff. Some highlights:
- “I’m gone. I’m not gonna think about it anymore. I’m not gonna worry about it like I used to, not gonna pray about it, not gonna do nothing….You don’t even exist. Goodbye, good luck, God bless you.”
- “Wake up, Donna. Come down here and enjoy yourself. Let’s meet and try to resolve this thing. You don’t want to meet? I’m gone.You won’t hear from me again.”
- “I’m getting ready to leave the situation, but call me and we can meet away from your house. I would suggest in a park or something and talk about this….I want to help save your life. So, call me.”
- “Donna, this thing’s gotten outta hand. That’s too bad. I don’t want to continue talking to you about anything and I don’t want to press no charges, I don’t wanna do nothin.’ I just want to be left alone and so you oughtta do the same thing. Don’t call me.”
- “Donna, you don’t have to answer your home phone….Don’t call me back. I will not take a call from you; I’m not gonna call you, so this is it.”
- “Donna, call me….I’d like to apologize and settle this matter. It’s not anybody’s interest to continue.”
- “Call me and let me know what you think ’cause I’m ready to end all this and let it go. I apologize to you. I’m sorry. You know I love you and that after this we gonna go our separate ways and I’ll give up trying to help….Call me.”
- “It’s not in either one of our interests or anybody’s interest to keep this stuff going. I’m prepared…to apologize…And, uh, so call me back. Please. On my cell phone.”
To mend fences, the two decided to take a July 4 trip to Rehoboth Beach, Watts-Brighthaupt told LL on Sunday. When it became clear that Barry had no intent of complying with her wishes that he apologize for the Wilson Building shaming, she turned her Land Rover around and drove the two home, resulting in the encounter that led to Barry’s arrest.
“Some women, they deal with abuse when it comes to people of power, people they can profit from, but it can become very hard depending on what the situation is,” says Brighthaupt. “She found, hey, he’s a weak individual for real, as far as succumbing to his lower desires.”
A Barry spokesperson issued the following statement: “Any sexual relationship that Mr. Barry and Ms. Watts had was consensual. And if Ms. Watts felt at all threatened by Mr. Barry then she should have addressed it at that time. These current allegations have nothing to do with the events that occurred on July 4.”
Listen to the Audio Clips with Transcripts
Additional reporting by Jason Cherkis
###NEXT PAGE:Medical marijuana could soon be reality in D.C.###
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Green PartyMedical marijuana could soon be reality in D.C.
More than a decade ago, Steve Michael and Wayne Turner decided the citizens of the District of Columbia deserved the right to use medical marijuana, and that they would lead the fight to get it. They had a decision to make: Start lobbying District lawmakers to take up the cause, or take the question straight to the people, via a ballot initiative.
They decided in the power of direct democracy. What followed was one of the great triumphs of grassroots politicking in District history—and one of the greatest congressional insults ever leveled against home rule.
“We thought it would be so much harder for Congress to overturn a vote of the people,” Turner remembers. “How naive were we.”
Michael and Turner, veteran AIDS activists on a shoestring budget, started collecting petition signatures in 1997, hoping to get the question on the 1998 ballot. Their first effort fell short by a few hundred signatures. They tried again, starting in early 1998, and again the Board of Elections and Ethics ruled that they didn’t have enough John Hancocks. But they sued, successfully, and got the measure on the 1998 ballot.
That’s when the naiveté came in.
That October, some two weeks before the vote, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) added a rider to the District’s annual budget appropriation, saying money couldn’t even be spent on counting the votes on the initiative, let alone allowing the law to take effect. A year later, a federal judge ruled that the votes could be counted—just shy of 70 percent of voters had endorsed the measure—but, with at least one house of Congress belonging to Republicans, the funding restriction has remained tacked onto every District budget since.
Until this year: On June 25, the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the District, chaired by New York Democrat Jose Serrano, removed the Barr amendment. On Tuesday evening, the full appropriations committee beat back an attempt by Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson to put it back on.
The bill still has to survive a floor vote in the House and several rounds of consideration in the Senate and in conference committee.
In years past, that’d be way too many hoops for any soft-on-pot legislation. Yet the Marijuana Policy Project’s Aaron Houston, the only Hill lobbyist working full time on marijuana-related issues, says he “definitely feel[s] less jittery about this bill.”
If the rider rides into the sunset, the medical marijuana issue would end up back in the hands of District lawmakers. What exactly would happen is up for debate: The reigning school of thought is that the Barr amendment essentially placed Initiative 59 in a deep freeze—the votes were counted and certified by the elections board, per the federal ruling, but city officials were still barred from expending any resources to move forward with it. So, the thinking goes, the bill should be able to be thawed out, so to speak, sent to Congress for its usual 30-day review, and become law.
Brian Flowers, general counsel to the D.C. Council, says there is “a very real possibility” that once the president signs a rider-free District budget bill, the law can simply be sent to Congress and then become law. No new initiative necessary.
Even in that scenario, the District body politic would have plenty of opportunities to weigh in. Flowers says there’s a possibility that the council would have to appropriate money to put the initiative into effect, and then there’s the simple fact that no District ballot initiative is out of the reach of the council: If lawmakers don’t like it, they can strike it down, much as they did to the term-limit statute passed by 62 percent of voters in 1994.
But fat chance of that happening: Even in 1998, a majority of councilmembers came out publicly in support of the medical marijuana law, not to mention Mayor Anthony A. Williams (though his police chief, Charles Ramsey, was against it). And since then, the D.C. Council’s become no less liberal, and medical marijuana’s become no more controversial, either nationally or locally.
Not only have 12 states passed medical marijuana laws since D.C. took its vote, but the political climate surrounding the issue has chilled significantly. Houston points out that President Bill Clinton was “terrible” on this issue, with his drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, coming out against the D.C. initiative in Op-Eds and on talk shows. “Clinton didn’t shy away from any opportunity to grandstand and look tough on crime and look tough on drugs,” he says.
Moreover, you don’t have a Republican ideologue like Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook overseeing the District budget these days—that’s a guy who once asked, “Where do you draw the line?…If you say it’s OK for D.C. to legalize marijuana, then what’s next? Legalizing cocaine? Or heroin? Or perhaps rape and murder?” You do have an attorney general, Eric Holder, who is not only a creature of local Washington but has vowed to end federal prosecutions of medical marijuana in states where it has been legalized.
Oh, and there’s this delicious fact: The Barr amendment has long outlasted the antidrug bent of its namesake. Back in 2007, Barr renounced his crusading and actually began lobbying for looser marijuana laws.
Locally, don’t expect much problem. Seventy percent in 1998 is at least 70 percent in 2009.
As for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, his record of public comment on the issue is thin. In 2000, Fenty the council candidate vowed in a Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance questionnaire to oppose a council bill upping the penalties for marijuana possession and distribution, based on the implications for medical pot users.
If Initiative 59 were do go straight into law, the Fenty administration would be required to do a number of things. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs would be required to license nonprofit, tax-exempt corporations “for the purpose of cultivating, purchasing, and distributing marijuana” for medical marijuana patients. The health department would have to come up with a plan to get medical marijuana in the hands of patients in Medicaid or government-funded HIV/AIDS programs. And the mayor himself, along with the council, would have to “deliver a copy of this act to the President and the Congress to express the sense of the people of the District of Columbia that the Federal government must develop a system to distribute marijuana to patients who need it for medical purposes.”
All that surrounds a bigger question: What would medical marijuana look like in the District of Columbia? In most places that marijuana’s been legalized for medicinal purposes, possession limits are strict—rarely more than an ounce of two at a time, and the supply is tightly controlled. Not so, of course, in California, which passed the country’s first and best-known medical marijuana ballot measure in 1996 (the District’s was second) and has since developed by far the most elaborate infrastructure, with a wide network of dispensaries and doctors willing to recommend cannabis for a range of maladies.
The California model is closest to the decriminalization ideal that many marijuana activists aspire to—including many of the groups that jumped into the 1998 fight and pushed an unsuccessful repeat initiative in 2001—but Turner’s not one of them. He says the idea was solely to help the chronically and seriously ill—particularly late-stage AIDS patients like Michael, his partner, who used cannabis in the last weeks of his life to try to keep food in his failing body.
Michael died in May 1998, weeks before Turner turned in the Initiative 59 petitions.
“The vision was not to help people with hangnails. This is for sick people,” Turner says. “The sponsor of this didn’t spend the last weeks of his life” on the initiative campaign, he says, “so people could have fun.”