Are Sex Abuse and Charter School Scandals Catching Up With Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson?
A former NBA star plays fast and loose with young women and taxpayer funds.
Is Kevin Johnson the Democratic Party’s Bill Cosby?
Johnson is the famous ex-NBA basketball star who became a charter school founder, then the mayor of Sacramento, CA, and was recently president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. But according to a series of investigative reports on Deadspin.com., a sports blog, Johnson’s past is filled with underage women who he molested as a sports star two decades ago, to teenage students and teaching assistants he fondled as the principle of a charter school that he founded. Some are now speaking up and not burying that past.
“There was no penetration. No rape. No knife to the throat threatening death. Just something that happened,” writes Mandi Koba on her blog, recounting the summer two decades ago when she was 15 and hanging out with Johnson the basketball star. “But it nearly destroyed me. It’s not been the physical harm that was caused me that’s taken the longest to heal from. Not the way his hand felt on my body. Not his hot breath on my face. Not even the words that he whispered. It’s been the messages. The feelings of worthlessness. Feelings that I was responsible.”
Koba, now in her mid-30s, wrote that she “lost control” of her life “because of who my abuser was.” Like many of the women who have kept secret their abuse by Bill Cosby years ago and are now speaking up, Koba said she is trying to “support victims on their journey to becoming survivors, [to] use my own story to add to the other voices of survivors who choose to speak out and try to dispel the many myths people have about sexual abuse.”
Johnson’s history with Koba is detailed in a 1996 Pheonix, Arizona, police report that describes how he gained her trust and began physically imposing himself. Her therapist contacted police and an investigation ensued. No charges were filed, as is often the case when celebrities are involved and the details less than black and white. A decade later, Johnson’s personal attorney, Fred Hiestand, told the L.A. Times that “his accuser was mentally unstable and had been swayed by a zealous therapist.”
But what’s telling in the Deadspin article by Dave McKenna is that Johnson apparently didn’t change his behavior after that sordid chapter—where he writes that “Kevin Johnson paid [Koba] precisely $230,600 for her silence.” A decade later, in 2007, Johnson was back in hometown, Sacramento, and the founder of a charter school, St. HOPE, where he laid the building blocks for his political ascent. Yet at St. HOPE, Johnson’s history of crossing innappropriate personal lines repeated itself.
A teacher, Erik Jones, “went to police in 2007 after a student told him that she and other kids at St. HOPE had been molested by Johnson,” McKenna writes. A child abuse report filed with police by Jones quoted one of the young women saying, “Mr. Johnson [a teacher and President of St. HOPE publics Schools] came up behind me and started to massage my shoulders. Soon his hands Are Sex Abuse and Charter School Scandals Catching Up With Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson? | Alternet: