"Yes, He Was Touching My Butt”: On Working With Kevin Johnson

Yesterday, we published a story about former NBA star and current Mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson’s quest to destroy the National Conference of Black Mayors for the sake of bolstering his own brand. According to one of the people that his coup targeted, NCBM executive director Vanessa Williams, Johnson found time to do some sexual harassing while waging his war.

Here’s what Williams told us:

“He hugged me,” she says, “and I’m saying to myself, ‘Is he touching my butt?’ Yes, he was touching my butt.”

She claims later that night, Johnson emailed her, then made what she took to be a booty call over the phone. She says she declined. (Johnson and Rhee had announced in the fall of 2009 that they were engaged, but didn’t marry until September 2011.) Williams provided an email sent by Johnson at 11:18 pm on the night of the D.C. gathering, in which Johnson seems friendly and bored—”how are you? how did today go? anything going on this weekend?” Johnson writes.

And here is how Dora Muhammed, the former NCBM communications director who was in the room when Williams received Johnson’s messages, remembers the experience:

“We were all like, ‘What time is it? This is really out of order!’” says Muhammad, now a technical writer in the Washington, D.C., area. “She had to remind him that she was a married woman. We were all very offended. There were mayors who were very protective of us, and the mayors were like father figures to us. For somebody stepping into a leadership role, somebody that a lot of mayors were looking forward to working with, you can’t come in and violate our integrity like he did. If she was a man in that position, we never would have been approached that way.”

Scroll down to read the whole story and a lot more about why Kevin Johnson sucks.