Mayor Takes Leave Over Molestation Charges

Amid a mushrooming scandal over allegations he molested at least two boys and used city-owned computers and internship offers to solicit sex with young men, the mayor of Spokane, Wash., said Monday he would take a few weeks of leave to prepare a vigorous defense against the charges.

The mayor, James E. West, has not been criminally charged, and he staunchly denies the allegations of two men who say they were molested by West in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he was a sheriff’s deputy and Boy Scout leader.

West, a Republican and former state Senate majority leader who had been considered a potential gubernatorial candidate, has acknowledged in recent days that he has had sexual relationships with adult men and that he is working out the issue of his sexuality, which he has variously described as bisexual or gay.

West, who proposed marriage from the floor of the state Senate to his wife, Ginger, in 1990, was divorced after five years.

The swirl of allegations and denials has rocked Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city after Seattle, and cast controversy over the local newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, which hired a computer expert to pose as a gay young man on a gay website as part of a sting operation.

The newspaper said it made the move reluctantly and only as part of an attempt to verify an online alias that West was using, it said, to lure young men on dates while dangling offers of perks such as internships, baseball tickets and autographed footballs.

The paper published the molestation allegations Thursday and has continued to report other details in subsequent editions.

West called the paper’s editor, Steven A. Smith, early Sunday to adamantly deny a story that he had behaved inappropriately in his office.

The child-abuse allegations against the mayor have sent chills through a city where both a scout leader and a sheriff’s deputy -- who were friends of West’s -- killed themselves several years ago amid molestation charges.

In brief remarks to the City Council on Monday announcing his leave, West seemed angry and defiant, and in no mood to accede to widespread calls for his resignation.

“I hope that you and the people will reserve judgment on me until the newspaper is done persecuting me,” he said, “and allow me to have the fair opportunity to respond to each of the allegations in due time.”

He did not take questions.

Also Monday, city officials took the mayor’s computer as part of an investigation into whether it had been improperly used to visit gay Internet sites.

In his phone call to the Spokesman-Review editor, West said he was “being destroyed because I am a gay man.”

But no gay rights organization has stepped forward to defend him.

“This man -- whether he’s straight, bisexual, or gay -- deserves nothing but scorn,” Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told Associated Press.

“He needs to resign immediately.”

West has been accused of what the Seattle Times calls “the hypocrisy of his stances on gay rights” because he is opposed to a city measure that would extend benefits to same-sex partners, and, as a state legislator, once proposed barring gays and lesbians from working in public schools.

The Seattle Times and the Spokesman-Review have called on West to resign.