In Unanimous Vote, King County Council Calls for Assessor John Arthur Wilson, Accused of Stalking, to Step Down

Wilson, who's running for King County Executive, has not denied the allegations.

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Council voted late Tuesday afternoon to approve a resolution stating they have "no confidence" in King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson and calling on him to resign. As PubliCola reported exclusively last month, Wilson's ex-partner Lee Keller has accused him of stalking and harassing her and obtained a restraining order against him for the second time this year. Wilson is currently running for King County Executive, as are King County Councilmembers Girmay Zahilay and Claudia Balducci, who sponsored the motion.

Balducci said Wilson's behavior since the new accusations came to light was classic DARVO, a term used to describe the way many men accused of mistreating women during MeToo behaved. DARVO stands for "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender," and Balducci said Wilson has done everything but deny the allegations against him. But he has denied he did anything wrong, attacked people who have criticized him and demanded he resign, and painted himself as the victim.

"The only way to remove an elected official from office is through a recall election, which is not in our power to initiate or to do," Balducci said. "But I believe we should make very, very clear that we have a line, and this behavior is beyond that line."

Balducci was one of the only elected officials to call out Wilson publicly the first time he was accused of harassing Keller, in January, when the Seattle Times reported that Wilson had found Keller when she was hiding from him, refused to leave or stop texting and calling her, and even tried to get someone she dated briefly fired by calling his boss and falsely accusing him of sexually assaulting Keller. She didn't call for his resignation at the time, she told PubliCola, because “I was concerned at the time that the focus should be on survivors and supporting survivors."

Councilmember Jorge Barón said he had supported the council's decision to give Wilson a week to respond to the call for him to step down, but said he did not agree with Wilson's defenders who have said the council should let the allegations work themselves through the court system before passing judgment.

"I think it's important to note that this isn't a judicial proceeding," Barón said. "This is about our assessment, about whether this elected official has sound judgment ... and the confidence of this body, as representatives of the residents of King County, to continue to carry out [his duties]. And I believe that the answer to the questions is clearly, no, we don't have that confidence because of the way that Mr. Wilson has acted."

The vote came after the council withdrew to a conference room for a nearly 40-minute executive session.

Since we first reported on the allegations against him, Wilson has been defiant, telling other reporters he has no plan to step down and putting up self-pitying posts on Facebook. In one, he posted a photo of a church in Seattle and said going to church "gives me a chance to ask God for forgiveness for those who I might have hurt and to forgive those who are bearing false witness against me. May that person find peace," he concluded—an apparent reference to Keller.

In another, he wrote that it was "[g]reat to have friends that stick by you and don't simply parrot what's being said by the chattering class. #Onward!!!!"

In a third, he posted a photo of a plaque displayed at former state House Speaker Frank Chopp's memorial, of a famous quote from a Theodore Roosevelt speech now known as "The Man In the Arena."* The excerpt, which is frequently quoted by politicians frustrated with their critics, is about how critics, "those cold and timid souls," stay on the sidelines and point fingers while the man of action strides forward to victory or valiant defeat. "This quote from Teddy Roosevelt seems particularly timely for me," Wilson wrote on June 1.

"After seeing a glimpse of what accountability for unacceptable behavior looks like during the MeToo movement, I refuse to have to continue to operate in a society that just expects women to deal with stalking, harassment, assault," Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. "I refuse to tell my daughter that she will have to continue to grow up in a society that just expects that of women. ... So I hope that this act today will be one more effort to ask him to step down and to see that he has lost the trust of this body."

The motion passed unanimously, with only Reagan Dunn—a Republican council member who was present via Zoom earlier in the meeting—absent.

* Politicians love to quote this one partial (partial!) paragraph from this one fucking speech, which is in reality almost 9,000 words long and probably took at least an hour to read out loud. The speech, "Citizenship In A Republic," is a lengthy jeremiad against extremism in political and personal affairs, with a populist tilt favoring men who do "the rough work of a workaday world." Unsurprisingly for such a long speech, it's a bit all over the map—there are references to pioneers conquering an "Indian-haunted land" and Gamaliel the Old (had to look that one up), and at one point TR encourages his audience to "perpetuate the race" by having as many children as possible. What the speech does not encourage is grandiosity or self-pity, which is usually the context in which it is quoted.