New text messages may be released in stripper lawsuit.
DETROIT — A federal magistrate judge may order the release of more city text messages exchanged between former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his former chief of staff Christine Beatty and other city officials.
The text messages that could be ordered released are those filed under seal in U.S. District Court in Detroit in connection with a lawsuit brought against the city, the former mayor, Beatty and other defendants by the family of slain exotic dancer Tamara “Strawberry” Greene.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven Whalen issued an order late Tuesday instructing lawyers for the city, Kilpatrick and Beatty to appear before him April 7 and show why Whalen should not give Norman Yatooma, the lawyer for Greene’s family, all of the hundreds of thousands of text messages Yatooma has requested in connection with the lawsuit.
SkyTel Corp., the city’s former text messaging pager provider, submitted the text messages to the court under seal and Whalen has been combing through them to identify whether any are potentially relevant to the lawsuit.
But in his order Tuesday, Whalen said “there is a substantial overlap between the texts that have been submitted for in camera review and those texts that have been publicly released by order of the Wayne County Circuit Court,” and which have been posted on the Web pages of local media outlets. Those text messages, filed by prosecutors in connection with a criminal perjury and obstruction of justice case against Kilpatrick and Beatty, were recently ordered released by Wayne Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny.
“The public availability of the texts SkyTel has submitted to this court would appear to obviate the need for in camera review of that material,” Whalen said in his order.
Greene, linked to a long rumored but never proven party at the mayor’s Manoogian Mansion in the fall of 2002, was shot to death in Detroit on April 30, 2003. Her family is suing, alleging top city and police officials obstructed the investigation of her killing for political reasons. The defendants deny the allegations.
Whalen ordered the city defendants’ lawyers to show “why the court should not order the production to (Yatooma) of all text messages contained in (Yatooma’s) document request.”
Yatooma requested text messages exchanged between Kilpatrick, Beatty and more than four dozen other city and police officials for nearly a two-year period between Aug. 1, 2002, and April 17, 2004.
Although Whalen’s order refers to the large volume of text messages between Kilpatrick and Beatty, the judge appears to be proposing to release to Yatooma all of the text messages filed under seal. It’s not clear from the order whether the text messages provided to Yatooma would remain subject to a protective order or whether Yatooma would be free to file them in open court in connection with his lawsuit.
Lawyers for the parties could not immediately be reached late Tuesday.
