Nury Martinez, the president of the Los Angeles City Council, resigned from her position on Monday after being exposed in leaked audio of a meeting with other Latino leaders for making racist remarks and disparaging her colleagues.
Martinez’s comments in the recording, which spans more than an hour and was first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, have sparked growing calls for her, councilmen Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Ron Herrera, who were all present at the meeting, to resign from their positions.
Martinez, the first Latina to lead the city council of Los Angeles, is heard making offensive and racist comments about her colleagues and other officials throughout the audio recording of their conversation, which was focused on the topic of redistricting. She describes Councilmember Mike Bonin’s Black son as “bouncing off the effing walls” on a float at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade and calls Bonin, who is white, “an accessory” at one point, calling him “parece changuito,” or “like a monkey.”
Martinez claims, “They’re raising him like a little white kid.” I thought, “This kid needs to get beat up. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.”
Martinez also makes fun of Oaxacan residents in Koreatown, Los Angeles, during the conversation, which the Times claims took place in October 2021. She calls them ugly and “little short dark people,” and she laughs about how she has no idea “what village they came” from or “how they got here.” She refers to the prosecutor as “fuck that guy” as the discussion turns to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón. She continues, “He’s with the Blacks.”
Martinez expressed regret in a statement announcing her resignation as council president and claimed there were “no excuses” for her comments.
The general election on November 8 is just a few weeks away, at this point. Martinez is not running for reelection this year, but other candidates and elected officials have used her comments as a talking point for the future of the city.
US Representative Karen Bass, a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement that “Los Angeles must move in a new direction, and that is not possible unless the four individuals caught on that tape resign from their offices immediately.”
Both Sen. Alex Padilla and her opponent, Rick Caruso, called for the council members to resign.
“These racist comments have deepened the pain that our communities have endured at a time when our nation is grappling with a rise in hate speech and hate crimes,” Padilla said in a statement. Better treatment is due to Los Angeles.
De León, who lost the mayoral primary earlier this year, is also audibly making an apparent comparison between Martinez carrying a Goyard or Louis Vuitton bag and Bonin bringing his child to events in the audio recording. The former majority leader of the state Senate also bemoans how white members of his caucus acted quickly to remove former state senator Tony Mendoza, who resigned after being accused of harassing several women.
De León is heard in the recording saying, “White folk will cut you in a heartbeat, and then when it’s them, they’ll figure out some shit.”
De León apologized for “seeming to support and even participate in certain insensitive comments made about a colleague and his family,” calling the comments “wholly inappropriate,” in a statement.
I didn’t live up to the standards we set for our leaders on that particular day, and I’ll hold myself to a higher standard going forward, he said.
After losing the primary election in June, Cedillo, who will step down from office later this year, told the Times he couldn’t recall the exchange. According to the newspaper, Herrera expressed regret for not “stepping up to stop them” and apologized.
Moving forward, I’ll have to carry the weight of that cross, he said
