Ex-Los Angeles City Council president Nury Martinez has broken her silence since audio leaked of her spewing racist comments.
It comes a year after the infamous tape leaked and exposed her talking about her colleague’s adopted son, who is Black. In the secretly recorded audio, she spoke about former councilman Mike Bonin’s child’s behavior on a float during a Martin Luther Day Parade in 2017.
According to reports, she compared him to “a little monkey” in Spanish. Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo were present during the 2021 private discussion, as well as former LA County Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera.
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In the recording, she said that Bonin’s son was being raised as “a little white kid” and that “this kid needs a beatdown,” according to FOX LA. Bonin publicly denounced her remarks, reportedly stating he is “disgusted.”
Martinez sat down to discuss the scandal during a podcast interview with the LAist, which was released on Monday, Oct. 9.
“The way I grew up with that word, ‘parece changuito.’ It has nothing to do with skin color. It has more to do with behavior. You’re sort of just playing around. You’re horsing around. Another word that we use in Spanish, ‘es travieso’ [mischievous], you can’t stay put,” Martinez told the LAist. “It’s a conversation I should not have repeated. And I think that’s an example of a bunch of moms sitting around, you know, being critical of little boys’ behavior. That was my mistake.”
She continued, “It was insensitive. It was mean. I never meant to hurt Jacob, and I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life, you know? I never meant to hurt Jacob. I thought about this a hundred times of what I would say to him if I would see him.”
She explained how she would tell Jacob that she didn’t intend to hurt him and that her mother called her that term in her childhood.
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