Los Angeles City Council President Steps Down After Racist Comments
In a meeting last year, Nury Martinez mocked Indigenous immigrants and the Black child of a fellow council member. She will remain on the council but relinquished her leadership role.
By Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan
Published Oct. 9, 2022 Updated Oct. 10, 2022, 2:30 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES — The president of the Los Angeles City Council stepped down from her powerful leadership role on Monday after a leaked audio recording revealed racist and disparaging remarks that she had made about the Black child of a white council member, and about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood.
“I take responsibility for what I said, and there are no excuses for those comments. I’m so sorry,” Nury Martinez, the council president, said in a statement on Monday announcing that she would resign from the leadership role, but not from the council as some people had demanded. “As a mother, I know better and I am sorry. I am truly ashamed.”
The comments, which Ms. Martinez made during a meeting last year with two other council members and a labor official, exposed longstanding racial tensions in the governance of one of the nation’s most multicultural cities, as well as fault lines among the city’s Democrats.
In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Sunday, Ms. Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark people.”
It was unclear who leaked the recording of the October 2021 meeting, which included Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members representing parts of the city’s East Side, and Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Also unknown was who made the recording, which was initially uploaded to Reddit earlier this month by an unidentified, now-suspended user, and continued to circulate via email after the post was taken down. No one has disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Ms. Martinez, Mr. de León and Mr. Herrera have issued apologies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/l ... -leak.html