By Jim Brunner and Lewis Kamb / The Seattle Times
SEATTLE — An attorney for Seattle Mayor Ed Murray fired back Tuesday against sexual abuse allegations, saying a doctor’s examination disproves a key claim in a lawsuit filed last week against the mayor.
Attorney Robert Sulkin said the physical exam showed no trace of a deformity or mole on Murray’s genitalia claimed in the lawsuit filed Thursday by a 46-year-old Kent man under his initials “D.H.”
“This is game-changing. This is the heart of the allegations and they’re false,” Sulkin said.
The exam also found no evidence Murray had such a mole removed. Sulkin called the alleged mole “the fingerprints” of the case and demanded D.H. drop his lawsuit.
Lincoln Beauregard, an attorney for D.H., immediately responded with a defiant statement saying his client “is not running for office” and was planning “to win this lawsuit on the merits in due time.”
He attacked the mayor’s “political hit team” and said the doctor’s exam could not be independently verified.
Filed in King County Superior Court, D.H.’s lawsuit alleges Murray sexually abused the teenager over several years for payments of $10 to $20. It says D.H. was a high school dropout addicted to crack cocaine who met Murray on a Metro bus.
Murray, a Democrat elected mayor in 2013, has flatly denied the allegations and said in a news conference Friday he intended to stay on the job and continue his campaign for re-election this fall.
The mayor also has denied sexual abuse allegations by two men who say they knew Murray when they were growing up in a Portland, Ore., center for troubled children.
Jeff Simpson and Lloyd Anderson alleged Murray abused them in the 1980s, when they were teenagers. Both raised the allegations a decade ago, with Simpson threatening a lawsuit that never emerged, and repeated them in recent interviews.
Like D.H., Anderson described what he said was an anomaly on Murray’s genitals, describing it to a paralegal in 2007 as “an unusual bump,” rather than a mole.
Simpson, when interviewed by The Seattle Times last month, said he did not remember any such abnormality, though he recalled his attorney asking about Anderson’s recollection.
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