West avoided accusers, lawyer says

An attorney who helped Shannon Sullivan in her successful pursuit of a recall election for Spokane Mayor Jim West said West’s attorneys backed away from a chance to hear from two accusers – young gay men who say West offered them city jobs and appointments in exchange for sex.

West has complained publicly that he’s never been able to question Ryan Oelrich and an unnamed second man who contend they met West online and were offered city positions, said attorney Jerry Davis.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” said Davis, who spoke Saturday at a forum on West’s conduct sponsored by Stonewall News Northwest, a newspaper for the gay community. West was invited to participate in the forum but said he could not appear and did not send a representative, said Stonewall News publisher Mike Schultz.

Davis represented Oelrich and the unnamed man referred to as “Witness No. 2” in a Nov. 18 report by attorney Mark Busto, who conducted a workplace investigation of West for the Spokane City Council. Busto concluded that West violated city policies on computer use and violated state law by offering public jobs in exchange for sexual favors.

Oelrich and the second man have been interviewed by the FBI in an ongoing public corruption probe of West.

West appointed Oelrich to the city’s Human Rights Commission and offered Witness No. 2 an $80,000 a year job as Human Resources Director, saying, “The Mayor has to like you. It’s totally my choice,” according to Busto’s report.

Shortly after a Spokane Superior Court ruling on June 13 that Sullivan’s recall petition was legally valid, Davis said he arranged a meeting at the downtown office of Bill Etter, one of West’s private attorneys. The meeting was to answer any questions West had about what the men were saying, Davis said.

“We got to his office, and they changed their mind. They are trying to manipulate the facts here,” Davis said.

West’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

At the Saturday forum, Davis cited Busto’s report, calling it a “stinging indictment” of West.

West has been a good mayor, but he should not have used city computers and city time to pursue young men, said textile artist Suzi Hokonson.

“If he’d been a high school principal, he would have been ousted instantly,” Hokonson said.

Panelists also discussed the closeted nature of Spokane’s gay community and debated why West hadn’t been outed earlier.

They agreed that West succeeded in hiding his sexuality while sponsoring bills that would have banned gays from public jobs and curtailed AIDS education. West also voted against expanded protections for gays in employment and housing.

People in Spokane were reluctant to connect the dots between West’s legislation and his private life, said Travis Mayfield, a gay KXLY-TV reporter who said his mother worried about his decision to attend Gonzaga University because Spokane is not seen as a gay-friendly city.

The laws West sponsored “happened in Olympia – it was ‘over there,’ ” Mayfield said.

That doesn’t explain why Spokane’s gay community didn’t stand up and fight, said Davis, who is from San Diego and has practiced law in Spokane for three years.

“It’s an odd community. There are lots of closeted people here who won’t identify themselves … the mayor banked on that,” he said.

Spokane’s gay community wasn’t organized or secure enough to take on West, said Dean Lynch, a retired social worker, former City Council member and Spokane’s first openly gay elected official.

“We are behind the times – it’s collectively who we were,” Lynch said.

The West controversy has helped to unite the gay community, Mayfield said. “It has forced people to have a conversation – what is it like to be gay in Spokane?”

Davis scoffed at West’s claim that he’d been the subject of a “brutal outing” – a claim West made in an e-mail to dozens of members of the Task Force on Race Relations shortly after his online conduct was revealed by The Spokesman-Review on May 5.

“I was brutally outed in the Air Force – with no chance to respond,” Davis said.

In an interview Tuesday, Davis said he was an Air Force officer in Texas when “they found out I was gay and showed me the door. I don’t feel sorry for West at all. He wasn’t outed – his behaviors finally caught up with him.”

West could not have gotten elected two decades ago if he’d revealed he was gay, but being forced to hide one’s sexual identity is harmful, Davis said.

“Nothing good can come out of forcing people not to reveal who they are,” he added.