Public Records Request Shows Boston City Councillor Kendra Lara Lied About Receiving Daily Emails Calling Her The N Word
Editor’s Note: We discussed this story on the Live Show (1:41:15)
Three weeks ago there was a contentious meeting at Boston City Hall regarding multiple credible allegations of sexual assault being made against City Councillor Ricardo Arroyo, who was campaigning to be the Democratic candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney at the time (he has since lost). We published a blog about the two ratchet city councillors (Kendra Lara and Tania Fernandez Anderson) who were standing by the alleged serial rapist, and chose not to believe his victims. For the crime of believing survivors of sexual assault, Anderson accused the City Council of being racist and oppressing her in the most ratchet way possible:
“What the F*** do I have to do in this F***ING council in order to get respect as a black woman?”
Lara accused another Councillor named Erin Murphy of being a racist, and demanded that she tell her sister Darragh to get off of Twitter because she was Darragh was criticizing Lara on that platform. She alleged that as a result of this criticism she had to have full time security, “as a woman of color.” She also alleged that every day she receives an email calling her a “n***er whore” as a result of Darragh responding to her on Twitter.
In the blog I jokingly said that I might have to do a records request for her emails but never got around to it. Then a week later she tweeted this:
I stood up at last weeks city council meeting and talked about the daily hate emails I get and how I got called a “n*gger whore”
well, the very next day…..someone foia’d my emails for that exact phrase, I can only presume it was to see if I was lying.
these people a depraved.
— Kendra Lara (@CllrKendraLara) September 5, 2022
Notice the reply – “To be a black woman in public office is to deal with non stop harassment and people have the audacity to question our truthfulness.”
Yes, black women are the only elected officials to ever deal with criticism from the people they represent. Criticism is a form of harassment that must be silenced, and if you want to verify that your elected officials are being truthful then you are a racist. You simply are not allowed to ever question if an elected official is telling the truth, so long as that elected official is a black woman. They get special privileges.
But there’s just a couple problems with Lara’s tweet:
- You wouldn’t file a FOIA to get her emails, because FOIA’s are for federal documents
- She wouldn’t be alerted if a records request into her emails did happen
- If she was telling the truth about these daily racist emails then she should revel in the fact that a records request would prove she was telling the truth
It was clear at this point that Lara had read my blog, and saw that I mentioned doing a request. She then preemptively framed this pursuit of the truth as a racial attack on her, because it’s literally the only thing she knows how to do.
I hadn’t filed a records request at the time, but after I saw this tweet I was inspired to do so on September 7. Here is what I submitted to the City of Boston:
I would like to request all emails from August 1 2022 to September 7 2022 sent to City Councilor Kendra Lara that contain the words “whore” and/or “nigger.” She is claiming she gets emails that contain those words on a daily basis and would like to confirm. Thank you.
These are really easy to do because all they have to do is a keyword search through her emails and the results come up instantaneously. But because it’s Boston it took them two weeks to show me all the emails. A grand total of one email was sent to her from August 1 to September 7 containing the n word, and no emails came up with the word “whore” in it. The one email came from a black man in Boston named Jamarhl Crawford, who I’ve had as a guest on the Live Show before because he’s been on the front lines of exposing Monica Cannon-Grant for several years now.
His email on August 26 basically asks why the City of Boston was fighting to rename Faneuil Hall and Yawkey Way, but not renaming the rooms inside City Hall that were named after anti-desegregation former Councillors from the busing era in the 70’s. This came up in the records request because in the email Jamarhl uses the n word in quotes, claiming that he’d previously heard it from people who have things named after them in Boston.
The only Councillor to reply to his email was Tania Anderson.
It is undeniable that Kendra Lara blatantly lied on the City Council floor in order to advocate for the right of an alleged serial rapist to draw voting districts in Boston. In doing so she smeared another Councillor as the source of these threatening, racist emails, which never existed in the first place. Lara, a representative of the government, used this lie as a pretext to coerce the City Council President into censoring a private citizen on social media. That would be a First Amendment violation, and it’s also dangerous to Darragh Murphy. As a result of having her name smeared at a highly watched and contentious meeting, Murphy deactivated her account completely. Lara has 25 times the followers as Murphy had, and unlike Murphy she had actual political power. This was a classic example of the powerful using their power to attack and silence the powerless, and it was all based on a lie. It’s bullying and intimidation of a constituent, and should be investigated by the City.
Lara also accused Erin Murphy of not only being a racist for not endorsing a rapist City Councillor for District Attorney, but of stealing the election outright.
now that it’s over maybe we can take a good look at ourselves and the state of affairs were in.
a sitting state senator and a criminal of a DA, paired up with the corporate media, and two racist councilors to steal an election.
because criminal justice reform was too much.
— Kendra Lara (@CllrKendraLara) September 7, 2022
But remember though, if you ever baselessly question election results you are a domestic terrorist who represents a threat to democracy.
Lara laughed at the idea that she would make something like this up:
like why in the world would I make that up?! on the record, in front of 8 TV station cameras🙄
— Kendra Lara (@CllrKendraLara) September 5, 2022
Pro tip – give up the “why would you make it up?” defense when you do something like this. Everyone knows the answer to that, and it’s just no an effective defense. After Jussie, the BYU-Duke hoax, and the countless others that came before, we no longer need to ask that question because the answer is self-evident. Being a victim of racism makes you sympathetic, and victimhood is currency.
The irony here is that she said this in defense of Ricardo Arroyo, who called his accusers liars. Why would they make that up, Kendra? You clearly believe they made it up, since you’d never stand by a rapist. I guess the only women who should be believed are those who lie about daily racist emails or suddenly remember that Brett Kavanaugh dry humped them 36 years ago.
The City of Boston is currently being governed by a woman who yells the f word at Council meetings and is married to a convicted murderer doing a life sentence, an alleged serial rapist, and a woman who makes up blatant lies on the Council floor in order to intimidate and bully a private citizen. All 3 should resign, but none will. There is a 1,000% chance Lara will claim that we only investigated her because she’s a black woman. It’s the only thing she knows how to do, and it’s how she got the power she has in the first place. But hopefully the people of Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury choose better the next time she’s on the ballot.