Conservative Babylon

Claims to fame: Former mayor, Spokane, Washington (2003-2005); former U.S. Army paratrooper, 82nd Airborne; former police officer; former deputy sheriff; former Washington state legislator (1982-2003); Rotary member; Boy Scout leader; anti-gay Republican; closet homosexual; chatroom patsy; chickenhawk; accused child molester; careless idiot

Moral apex: Actively working against equal rights for his fellow gay and lesbian Americans, abusing his position of power to chat up potential booty calls, then getting busted coming on to someone he thought was barely-legal gay male in a chatroom sting at Gay.com.

How Jim West was the ultimate anti-gay closet gay:

Spokane Mayor Jim West’s votes on gay-rights and human-rights issues:

• On Christmas Eve 1985, Gov. Booth Gardner signed an executive order banning discrimination in state hiring based on sexual orientation. West and 14 other Republicans responded by introducing a bill in January 1986 that would have barred gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. The bill called for screening prospective employees for sexual orientation and firing state workers whose sexual identities became known. The bill failed.

• Also in 1986, West voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex.

• West opposed gay rights bills introduced in 1985 and 1987.

• In 1989, West opposed a proposal to expand a needle exchange program to protect people from AIDS from Pierce County to the entire state.

• In 1990, as part of a bill on AIDS education, West proposed that teen sex be criminalized. The bill, written by the abstinence group Teen Aid, would have made sexual contact a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers under 18. Sexual contact was defined as “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person” for sexual gratification.

• West voted in 1998 for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Gov. Gary Locke vetoed the bill, but the Legislature overrode his veto.

• As Senate majority leader, West and other Republicans in 2003 bottled up the gay-rights bill in committee and it died.

• As Spokane’s incoming mayor in November 2003, West said he’s opposed to extending City Hall benefits to domestic partners, citing the cost. In April 2005, the City Council approved domestic partner benefits in a 5-2 vote, enough to withstand a mayoral veto.

Spokesman-Review
May 10, 2005

“I think they only identified maybe five votes over a 20-year career and tried to make that out as a pattern,” West would later tell PBS Frontline, in its documentary, A Hidden Life. “That’s a pretty thin pattern, if it is a pattern at all.

“What my legislative background was around was health care, budget issues, financing state government, creating solutions to problems. Had nothing to do with social agenda. I’m pro-life; I believe in that. I’m pro-family; I believe in that. But I never wore those issues on my sleeve; I never hid them. People knew where I stood on those issues, and they returned me time and time again to the Legislature.”

Later, West backtracked even further:

PBS: It does seem that you consistently took a position in the Legislature —

West: Five bills in 20 years.

PBS: In all of them, though, you signed —

West: Five bills. No, no, no, no. I didn’t sign them. I don’t know that I signed any of those other bills that they mentioned. They didn’t say I signed them … I voted for them. Didn’t sponsor them, wasn’t an advocate for them. It was not me pushing that agenda.

PBS: Why did you vote for them?

West: Why did I vote for them? You’re talking about specific pieces of legislation that I can’t recall, and if I didn’t have them before me I couldn’t tell you exactly why I voted for them. But I’m guessing on whole that I voted for them because they advanced the agenda that I didn’t agree with, that my constituents knew I didn’t agree with. …

Certainly if I had sponsored that and if that was my agenda, I would have sponsored it every single year and worked hard to — I was the majority leader. I could have sponsored anything and gotten it through the Legislature, just about. So I would have sponsored that if that’s really what I was about. …

What West was “really about” was this: He was a closeted gay man who shunned — nay, punished — the very community that would have welcomed him with open arms — not an uncommon trait among closet cases who believe they’re too old, too ugly, or too whatever to be accepted. As West said in the course of various online chat sessions:

“It’s just that the openly gay guys are a little over the top for me. I don’t really like the in-your-face attitude some guys have. And the massive political agenda either. I say live and let live. Most gay guys turn me off, too.”

“I could never be into the gay scene with its politics and all. I’ve just seen too many guys decide once they come out that it becomes everyone else’s problem to deal with. I’m not into femmy guys.”

We think Jim West was the embodiment of the old Groucho Marx one-liner:

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

What Jim West was doing behind the scenes:

• Offering internships, jobs on the city payroll, money, gifts, and other perks to young men in exchange for sex. Specifically:

Ryan M. Oelrich, a 24-year-old openly gay man, said he was appointed by West to the city Human Rights Commission in April 2004, but didn’t know at the time that West was the same man he’d met earlier in Gay.com using the screen aliases “Cobra82nd” and “RightBi-Guy.”

Sometime after the appointment, Oelrich said he realized the mayor was the same person he’d been talking to online beginning in 2003. While on the commission, Oelrich said he rebuffed a series of sexually explicit online advances from West.

After appointing Oelrich to the policy-making Human Rights Commission, West “offered me $300 cash if I’d swim naked with him in my swimming pool,” Oelrich said.

He declined West’s offer as “being totally inappropriate,” said the 2004 graduate of Gonzaga University.

Another man, who is 24 and has a business degree, provided his name to the newspaper but asked that he not be publicly identified because his family doesn’t know he is gay.

The unidentified man said West offered him a job as the city’s human resources, or personnel, director.

“When I told him I wasn’t qualified for that job, he told me I would be qualified if I was a friend of the mayor’s,” the young man said on condition of anonymity.

When he rejected the job offer, he said West offered him a job as “aquatics director,” overseeing operations at the city’s swimming pools.

— Bill Morlin
Two accuse West of offering jobs
Spokesman-Review
May 9, 2005

[West] admitted offering an internship in his office, sports memorabilia he’s collected, help with college admissions, and trips to sports events and Washington, D.C., to a man he believed was an 18-year-old he me
t online at Gay.com. But he emphatically said he didn’t view those offers as “enticements to teenagers” or an abuse of his public office.

— Bill Morlin
West tied to sex abuse in ’70s,
using office to lure young men
Spokesman-Review
May 5, 2005

• Masturbating in his City Hall office while chatting online. This, he confessed to City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers; West denied he ever said any such thing, but Rodgers stuck by her account.

How West was busted:

He went on a date with an online hookup who was just 18 (West was 53), and the “evening ended with consensual sex.” That’s when the Spokesman-Review got into the act. Reporter Bill Morlin…

…learned of the mayor’s online activity [in the fall of 2004]. But the Internet connection between the young man who was Morlin’s first source could not be verified independently. To make sure the adult behind the fake screen names on Gay.com was Jim West, we hired a computer specialist who worked several months to nail down the identification.

— Steven A. Smith
Editor, Spokesman-Review
Timing of West story had to wait on facts
May 8, 2005

The computer expert registered on Gay.com as “Moto-Brock,” a fictitious 18-year-old Ferris High School senior questioning his own sexuality and eager to met older gay or bisexual men. Once in the chat room, which has a policy that all participants be 18, the consultant changed his age to 17 because the newspaper wanted to know whether West was using the Web to meet underage children.

Within two months, Moto-Brock and RightBi-Guy were discussing sex in the Gay.com chat room, and the dialogues were being recorded by the newspaper’s consultant.

. . .

According to the transcripts of those online conversations, RightBi-Guy [West] was the first person to raise the issue of sex.

— Bill Morlin
Online relationships
Spokesman-Review
May 5, 2005

On his profile, he said that he was interested in action, sex, [that] kind of thing. So after a couple of chats, it did devolve into discussions about sex. … In his profile he said he was interested in talking about that. So I guess it was a question of who did initiate it. … We talked about it. Some of that was he was saying: “Well, I’m closeted. I’m not sure that I like guys, but I think I do. Girls find me attractive.” So some of that was just questioning, just to draw him out to see, to help him figure out what he was doing.

— Jim West
A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

Over a period of several months, RightBi-Guy offered Moto-Brock autographed sports memorabilia, prime seats for Seahawks and Mariners games, help getting into college, an internship job in the Spokane mayor’s office and the promise of trips to Washington, D.C.

In mid-March, Moto-Brock told RightBi-Guy that he’d turned 18.

On two occasions, RightBi-Guy appeared to believe he was engaging in mutual online masturbation with Moto-Brock, according to transcripts of the explicit exchanges.

Asked about simulating masturbation online with a teenager, West said Wednesday, “You have a better memory than I do.”

— Bill Morlin
Online relationships
Spokesman-Review
May 5, 2005

I don’t think either one of us was seducing the other. I think there was no seduction going on. Numerous times in the conversation, he says: “I want to meet you for lunch. I want to meet you for dinner. I want to get together. I want to meet you. I want to meet you.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no.” … Then finally after I think two or three months, it’s like OK, maybe we can go to the golf driving range and hit some golf balls. Hardly a sexual activity.

— Jim West
A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

According to the online conversations, RightBi-Guy asked Moto-Brock to meet him for golf at Indian Canyon at 10 a.m. April 10. So Moto-Brock would know whom to look for, RightBi-Guy e-mailed him his picture.

The picture was of West. He also e-mailed Moto-Brock a link to the mayor’s Web page on the Spokane City Hall site.

Three people affiliated with The Spokesman-Review reported seeing West arrive at the course in his blue Lexus at 9:45 a.m. April 10. …

— Bill Morlin
Online relationships
Spokesman-Review
May 5, 2005

What happened next: Everybody, from constituents to former mayors to the heads of the state Democratic and Republican parties, called for West’s resignation. He refused to step down. So voters (65% of them, in fact) recalled him in a special election in December, 2005.

“The demise … was absolutely Shakespearean,” says David Ammons, who covered West’s career for the Associated Press. “I would say he was the most important Republican in the state for a while. And now he’s exiled in disgrace.”

A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

By this time, an FBI investigation was already well under way; the agency raided West’s home and seized his personal computers. Technically, West was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, in February of 2006.

The announcement detailed the investigation’s specific focus:

“In a potential public corruption case such as this, the government would have to prove certain elements beyond a reasonable doubt to obtain a conviction. The government would have to prove that West specifically intended to defraud citizens of their intangible right to honest services. The central allegation was that the mayor denied citizens ‘honest services’ by providing city hall jobs or internships in exchange for sex. The investigation uncovered no evidence that had occurred. A review of city records reveals that virtually every person who applied for an internship with the city was offered a position. There was no indication that West had improperly assisted any potential employees or interns.”

“It is important to remember the limited scope of the federal investigation,” [First Assistant United States Attorney Mark Bartlett] noted. “Our probe determined federal criminal charges were not warranted. Our investigation did not address whether Jim West’s activities were ethical, moral or appropriate.”

The Spokesman-Review picked up on that point in its coverage of the announcement, calling the federal public corruption law “very narrow.”

A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

But, wait — there’s more:

When West’s duplicity hit the news, several men came forward to accuse West of sexually abusing them when they were boys:

One man, Robert J. Galliher, claims in a court deposition that Jim West molested him in the mid-1970s when he was a boy and West w
as a Spokane County sheriff’s deputy and Boy Scout leader.

A second man, Michael G. Grant Jr., also accuses West of sexual abuse during the same era, including an incident at Camp Cowles, a Boy Scout camp on Diamond Lake.

. . .

[West] called the allegations leveled at him by Galliher and Grant “flat lies” … West said, “I didn’t abuse them. I don’t know these people. I didn’t abuse anybody, and I didn’t have sex with anybody under 18 — ever — woman or man.”

. . .

Galliher claims he was molested at least four times by West, twice while West was on duty in uniform, driving a sheriff’s car.

— Bill Morlin
West tied to sex abuse in ’70s,
using office to lure young men
Spokesman-Review
May 5, 2005

Brad Crelia, of Seattle, said he was a 15-year-old Lewis and Clark High School student in 2001 when West, then Senate minority leader, asked him out.

The other man said he was sexually abused in 1980 by David Hahn when Hahn and West – his good friend and fellow Spokane County sheriff’s deputy – took a group of Boy Scouts on a 50-mile hike around Mount Rainier. The man said he was 12 at the time.

— Bill Morlin
West faces new allegations
Spokesman-Review
May 7, 2005

Early in the Spokesman-Review investigation, Bill Morlin discovered that Hahn’s close friend at the sheriff’s department and the Boy Scouts was future Mayor Jim West. “Sources that I interviewed said that [Hahn and West] were peas in a pod,” Morlin tells FRONTLINE. “They were inseparable.”

A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

Speaking of underage youths, a funny thing jumped off the screen while we were looking at The Wayback Machine’s archived “Mayor’s Bio” page from the City of Spokane Web site. Well, really, it isn’t funny at all. It’s this:

• Board Member, Morning Star Boys Ranch.

Those of us who follow the dirty goings-on amongst the self-appointed arbiters of morality knows about the Morning Star Boys Ranch. In short, it’s a Catholic “residential group home for boys,” located in Spokane — and fraught with allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

The Spokesman-Review has maintained ongoing coverage of the abuse charges against Morningstar (and at least one pay-off) since mid-2005.

Not surprisingly, Jim West’s name surfaced in some of the Spokesman-Review’s earliest reports:

Report false, ranch director says

5/12/2005 | The longtime director of Morning Star Boys Ranch on wednesday denied a report that Mayor Jim West and a former sheriff’s deputy “checked out” boys for day outings and camping trips in the late 1970s and early 1980s. …

West, Hahn could have taken boys from ranch, official says

6/26/2005 | An official for Morning Star Boys’ Ranch conceded last week that Jim West and a fellow sheriff’s deputy who killed himself amid allegations of child molestation could have removed boys in the 1970s for outings without registering their names in ranch log books. …

Speaking of the Spokesman-Review: While turning out a superior investigative series on West, the paper took heat for failing to blow the story wide open when it first came to light in 2003. Editor Steven A. Smith addressed the issue at the height of the chatroom revelation:

Why, we are asked, did the newspaper endorse Jim West for mayor in 2003 if its reporters were aware of sexual abuse allegations? Was it because West had vowed to settle the [River Park Square] battles while his opponent, Tom Grant, remained an implacable foe of settlement and an outspoken critic of the newspaper?

Furthermore, we are asked, was publication of the West package delayed until last week so that the recently completed RPS settlement agreements could be wrapped and ribboned by the courts?

These are fair questions that deserve answers.

This is what our newsroom knew in the summer and fall of 2003 when West was running for mayor: We had just published a series of stories documenting abuse of young boys in the late 1970s by Scout leaders George Robey and David Hahn, a Spokane County sheriff’s deputy. Hahn had killed himself in 1981 and Robey did the same in 1982. Our story noted the close relationship between Hahn and West – they were co-leaders of a Scout troop and both were deputies. The story included West’s denials that he knew of or was involved in Hahn’s abuse.

Shortly after the stories ran, reporter Bill Morlin received tips suggesting that he continue to dig and that he might discover links to West. He had no names. No dates. No corroborative evidence. Light smoke, at best, but nothing close to a fire.

. . .

Questions about West’s sexual orientation had circulated for years. But sexual orientation was never viewed as relevant to our coverage of or the editorial board’s endorsement for this race.

We now know that West’s mayoral opponent, Tom Grant, knew of West’s predatory nature well before the election. West had tried to date the underage son of Grant’s boss. Furthermore, Grant knew about allegations of past sexual abuse…

. . .

Why, we are asked, did we not report the West stories during that time, before RPS was resolved? Was it because West’s intervention was producing a result favorable to the newspaper’s owners and his “fall” would interfere with that process?

The simple answer is no. We didn’t have a story yet.

. . .

Professional journalists and perhaps those involved in law enforcement will understand the pace of our investigation. And anyone familiar with the legal elements of libel will understand any newspaper’s unwillingness to print unqualified rumors and unsubstantiated allegations.

The stories were ready when they were ready. And they were published as soon as we could give the mayor the courtesy of an interview and the opportunity to defend himself.

. . .

Our newsroom values statement includes the following: “We tell people what we know when we know it without fear or favor.” In the case of the Jim West investigation, that is precisely what we did.

— Steven A. Smith
Editor, Spokesman-Review
Timing of West story had to wait on facts
May 8, 2005

At the same time, the Spokesman-Review took heat for reporting the story at all.

“We wanted to know, ‘Do we have a mayor trolling on the Internet for underage boys?’” Spokesman-Review reporter Bill Morlin [told] FRONTLINE of the paper’s decision to hire a consultant to pose as a 17-year-old boy on a gay web site. The consultant then sought out the mayor to see how far West would go. “The intention wasn’t to bait anyone,” says Morlin. “The purpose of our investigation was a search for the truth.”

A Hidden Life >PBS Frontline

The newspaper’s investigation began as an attempt to reckon with a shameful secret from the past — a wave of child molestation that swept through Spokane in the 1970s, implicating men in some of the city’s most trusted institutions: the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, and the sheriff’s office. One of those men was a decorated Vietnam veteran, Boy Scout troop leader and sheriff’s deputy named David Hahn, who committed suicide in 1981 after being accused of sexually abusing boys.

A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

Where Jim West is now: Dead. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003, West died of complications from surgery for the disease on July 22, 2006.

Memorable quotes:

I can’t tell you why I go there, to tell you the truth … curiosity, confused, whatever, I don’t know.

— Jim West
on why he visited Gay.com chatrooms
to The Spokesman-Review

I’d visited them [gay chatrooms] at home, using my personal computer. You know, it’s kind of a fantasy. The Internet’s kind of interesting. Do you recall the game Dungeons & Dragons that kids all got sucked into and became fantasy characters? Well, it was kind of that curiosity. Then you get sucked in, and then you just converse with people, and it’s role-playing almost. It was in my mind, in many ways. …

It really wasn’t [real], but it allowed you to say things that you might not say otherwise because of that fantasy element, because of that anonymity element, because of that private element of it all.

— Jim West
A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

What I do as a public official, in my public role as the mayor or as a state senator or a state representative, it’s totally separate from what I do as a private citizen, private individual. … If I go out and have a beer or if I go out to a party or something or go to a movie, that has nothing to do with the policy of whether or not we should build this street or build that street or anything else.

— Jim West
A Hidden Life
PBS Frontline

Memorable observation:

Jim West claims he has taken to prayer since his cancer and asks that he be prayed for. Well, Jim, I am praying for you that you have the guts to resign and save our city from any more humiliation and what taxpayer dollars this will or has already cost us.

— Letter to the editor
Spokesman-Review
May 8, 2005

Suggested Bible reading for Mr. West:

None. He’s gone wherever it is he’s supposed to go, and there’s nothing the Bible can do for him now.

Boy, you’re sure brutal on a dead guy, aren’t you?

When we’re talking about another self-loathing, right-wing queer who made the lives of gay and lesbian Americans a helluva lot harder than they have to be, yeah.