Murray's lawyer says doctor's exam shows sex-abuse suit is 'meritless'; not so, says opposing attorney



SEATTLE -- The attorney for Seattle Mayor Ed Murray gave a press conference Tuesday evening, alleging that a doctor's examination of Murray's genitals earlier in the day debunked one of his accuser's primary pieces of evidence in a sex-abuse lawsuit filed last week.

"This is game-changing," attorney Bob Sulkin said. "This is the heart of the allegations, and they're false."

The lawsuit claims Murray paid a drug-addicted teenage boy to perform sexual acts on him in the 1980s. In the suit, the alleged victim claimed Murray had a "unique mole on his scrotum - it is a small bump."

"This is game-changing:" Watch attorney Bob Sulkin's full press conference below:



Sulkin said the doctor's examination found no such mole, and no evidence of a mole that had been removed.

"We have to understand what the heart of the accuser's allegation is," Sulkin said. "It's the detail of Mayor Murray's private anatomy.

"This is game-changing. This is the heart of the allegations, and they're false.

Sulkin called on the accuser's lawyers to drop the complaint.

"The complaint is meritless, and now proven to be such," he said. "There is no air in that balloon anymore."

Lawyers for the accuser - who is named only as D.H. in the lawsuit - released the following statement about an hour after Sulkin's press conference:

D.H. has found peace in knowing that two other of the Mayor’s victims were given a voice as a result of D.H.’s having stepped forward.  In relation to the prior victims, the Mayor’s political hit team used thousands of dollars of publicly collected campaign funds to extinguish their voices.  The latest strategy is victim blaming.

Immediately after this lawsuit was filed, on Friday morning, we sent the Mayor’s attorney a letter inviting his legal team to depose D.H. as quickly as this week, or even this afternoon.  We received no response whatsoever.  Instead, the Mayor’s team hired their own medical witness to look at the Mayor’s private parts and declared that which nobody in the public can verify — until long after the election filing deadline of May 19.  We look forward to fighting the merits of this lawsuit in the appropriate venue and exploring the need for an independent medical exam as ordered by the court.  But if the Mayor’s mole doesn’t fit the description as observed by D.H. and another victim who tried to come forward in 2008, why didn’t the Mayor just say so at his first press conference on Friday?

Our invitation to the Mayor and his clever lawyers to immediately confront our client under oath remains open, and unanswered.  The fact that the Mayor has already spent his working days trying to disprove the details of his private parts (which shouldn’t require a medical evaluation) emphasizes the need to consider the calls for him to step aside and not utilize public resources and campaign funds to fight this lawsuit.  A petition is circulating and can be found in the comment section of the stories published online in the Seattle Times.  The public should please understand that D.H. is not running for office, he is planning to win this lawsuit on the merits in due time.   After the trial, in April of 2018, a jury is likely to confirm that this City’s Mayor is a serial child molester.