Kevin de León shows up at a City Council meeting, sparking an uproar
After a nearly two-month absence, Councilmember Kevin de León showed up for a Los Angeles City Council meeting on Friday, triggering an uproar in the audience involving both his critics and supporters.
De León’s return lasted only a few minutes. Council President Paul Krekorian immediately called for a recess, with protesters shouting and police officers filling the room.
When the council meeting resumed, De León did not return.
It was the first time he’d been in council chambers since mid-October, when fallout from a leaked racist audio tape roiled the city.
De León, in a statement, later said he returned to council chambers on Friday to represent his constituents, especially monolingual Spanish-speaking residents. Some of those Spanish speakers called into a council committee meeting on Thursday, only to find that bilingual translation services were not available.
“I remained out of the room after the outburst by agitators to give the council president the opportunity to regain control of the meeting and allow public comment to continue since so many of those present were my constituents,” he said. “Unfortunately, neither of those things happened.”
Hours later, De León was involved in a fight at Lincoln Park with an activist who had been at the council meeting.
A 10-second, slow-motion video clip posted to Twitter shows a brief portion of an altercation between De León and a man identified in the description as Jason Reedy, an organizer with the People’s City Council.
In a statement, De León said that he, a staff member and a volunteer were “violently and physically assaulted by self-proclaimed activists at a community holiday event to the dismay of a multitude of families and children who were there to celebrate a Christmas tree lighting and to receive toys and food.”
In a statement to The Times, Shakeer Rahman, an attorney representing Reedy, called De León “a disgrace.”
The council member said in a statement that he was assaulted. Activists said De León was the aggressor.
“Video footage clearly shows him and his supporters initiating this assault while Mr. Reedy stands prone,” Rahman said. “Not only has Kevin de León lost all political legitimacy, his claims that he was the one attacked here simply underscores how he’s lost touch with reality.”
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed only that it had responded to the location for a report of a large fight involving eight possible suspects.
At City Hall, the question of when — or if — De León would return had loomed large before Friday’s meeting. His name was frequently invoked even as his seat remained conspicuously empty, with protesters regularly interrupting the thrice-weekly meetings to demand his resignation.
De León, who apologized in the wake of the tape, has been adamant that he has no plans to resign. He began to quietly reenter the public sphere about a month ago, attending food giveaways, holiday meals and other community events, but avoided council chambers until Friday morning.
The council member showed up in Los Angeles City Council chambers Friday, appearing briefly at a meeting for the first time since fallout from a racist leaked audio tape roiled the city in October.
De León entered the room just before 11 a.m., about 45 minutes after the meeting began, and sat in his chair with a staffer nearby.
Dozens of people, many of them Spanish-speaking, had come to the meeting to show their support for De León. Some of them had been testifying against proposals to impose new punishments for council members who, like De León, have been censured.
Once it was clear that De León was back in the room, several members of the audience began yelling at him to leave.
“This is why these meetings need to be shut down!” Michael Williams, a 29-year-old Pasadena resident who volunteers with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, shouted from the front row, referring to De León’s presence.
Krekorian approached De León and spoke to him, and a few of De León’s colleagues began leaving the chambers. After Krekorian called for a recess, De León walked out, waving to his supporters in the audience.
With the meeting halted, about a dozen protesters continued screaming for De León to leave. Supporters of the embattled council member responded by chanting “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.”
While members of the crowd shouted at one another, police ejected two men from the room, saying they feared a fight would break out between them.
“Both men made comments or gestures to suggest that it was going to become physical, so we intervened at that time,” said Los Angeles Police Department Officer Marco Duarte, who is assigned to the council chambers.
Kevin de León says he won’t resign after he was caught making racial insults on a leaked tape. What happens to his constituents?
During the recess, more than a dozen officers wearing helmets formed a line on the council floor. Others were scattered around other parts of the room.
Art Pulido, an El Sereno resident who had come to support De León, said he believed De León was “doing a good job in our community” and suggested that the protesters didn’t actually live in the district.
“We’ve got a good councilman,” Pulido told a reporter during the recess. “He’s not perfect — nobody’s perfect. But it’s sad when it comes down to this.”
The meeting restarted about 45 minutes later with De León nowhere in sight. It’s unclear whether he will return for Tuesday’s meeting, when five new council members will be in attendance.
The racist comments on a recording that rocked Los Angeles City Hall ensnared Councilman Kevin de León in controversy. The tape also revealed an undercurrent of ambition and grievance in his political career.
During Friday’s meeting, council members also voted 8 to 3 to have city agencies assess the cost of assigning LAPD officers to respond to the protests that have broken out during the past few months, largely in response to the audio of De León and his colleagues.
The report would also assess the cost of any damage to the council chamber. Councilmembers Mike Bonin, Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Nithya Raman cast the dissenting votes.
Bonin said he agreed that disruptions inside the council chambers are “bad,” and that the council needs to conduct its business. But he argued that the proposal places the emphasis on the wrong place.
“The problem was on those tapes. The problem is in this room. The problem is somebody’s ego refuses to get out of the way of his need to resign,” he said. “The road to redemption begins with resignation, and that will end the protests.”
Some of the racist comments on the leaked tape were about Bonin’s son, who is Black. Nury Martinez, who was then council president, said Bonin handled his young son as though he were an “accessory” and described the child as “Parece changuito,” or “like a monkey.”
De León appeared to compare Bonin’s handling of his child to Martinez holding a Louis Vuitton handbag. He later said he was referring to Martinez’s “penchant for having luxury accessories.”
In his final City Council meeting, outgoing member Paul Koretz quoted protesters “in their own words,” saying, “I yield the rest of my time. F— you.”
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who co-authored the proposal, said she supports the right to protest. But she criticized behavior that leads to the destruction of city property or prevents people in the chamber from being able to speak.
“We’re not always going to agree around this horseshoe. But there is decorum,” she said. “There is respect that needs to be exhibited. This is the people’s house.”
Krekorian said after the meeting that he asked De León to leave the chamber, in part because other council members were going to walk out of the room, causing the council to lose a quorum needed to cast votes. He said he also told De León that his arrival had created a “potentially dangerous situation” in the audience.
“We had obviously a very strong emotional reaction from people in the crowd who were confronting one another,” Krekorian said.
Prior to Friday, De León last publicly appeared in council chambers on Oct. 11, when the council held its first meeting after The Times reported on the leaked audio of a private 2021 conversation among Councilmembers Gil Cedillo, Martinez and De León, as well as then-president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Ron Herrera.
De León and Cedillo started out that October council meeting by sitting in their chairs, but immediately became the subject of angry chants from the crowd, and eventually left the room. Cedillo has not been back to a council meeting since.
De León apologized in the wake of the tape but said he has no plans to resign and does not want to leave his constituents without representation.
Virtually the entire Democratic establishment called for Cedillo and De León to resign in the wake of the leaked audio. The two other participants in the secretly recorded conversation, Martinez and Herrera, resigned from their posts in the immediate aftermath of the leak.
Protesters have been a constant presence at council meetings in recent months, with frequent chants promising to keep interrupting meetings until both Cedillo and De León resign. The LAPD’s process for removing the protesters — usually one by one or in pairs — typically consumes the first 45 minutes of each meeting.
Demonstrators also camped out near De León’s Eagle Rock home for days.
Cedillo was ousted by incoming Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez in a June election, and his term expires this weekend. But De León has two more years in office.
Times staff writer Gregory Yee contributed to this report.
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