Altogether now, boys and girls: P-E-R-J-U-R-Y, perjury.
I said it when Marion Jones was sentenced. I said it when Mary J. Blige, Timbaland, Wyclef, Tyler Perry, and 5 Cents [no typo] were name-dropped as part of a steroid investigation.I said it yesterday when news surfaced that Detroit’s Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff lied under oath,saying they did not have a sexual relationship (text messages on a city-issued pager tell a very different story).
Stop lying under oath and to federal investigators, people.
Just stop it. Once the feds are questioning you, and certainly once you are sitting on the witness stand, face it: The jig is up. Tell the truth, tell what you know, and try to save yourself as much as possible. Anything else, is going to come back and bite you in the ass. Hard.
Marion Jones isn’t going to prison because she took steroids. She is going to prison because she lied about taking steroids, and because she lied about her knowledge of check fraud on her baby-daddy’s part.
As of the most recent reports, there’s no evidence that Mary J. Blige and the other celebrities violated any drugs laws, but they may well be questioned as part of the statewide investigation targeting doctors and pharmacists, including the doctor who is currently awaiting trial for prescribing steroids to pro wrestler Chris Benoit who killed himself, his wife, and his son. If questioned, Mary better sing like she’s never sung before.
As for Mayor Kilpatrick and his Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty, the issue of their affair was a private one amongst the two of them, their respective spouses, and their consciences–until they decided to fire a cop and a mayoral bodyguard who knew too much. After that, it was just one lie after the next…under oath at the whistleblower lawsuit trial which followed.
What I find particularly irksome is that when Kilpatrick denied the affair on the witness stand, he invoked his mother, a U.S. Congresswoman, and his aunt, a Michigan State legislator, naming them among the “strong women” he’s been around all of his life, saying that the accusation of adultery was an offense to strong women like Christine Beatty–an insult to suggest a woman can’t work with a man unless she’s a whore (his word, not mine).
If I was Kwame’s mother, I’d be upside his head right about now.
Now, instead of the affair only costing the involved parties personally, it is costing the people of Detroit millions and milllions of dollars in legal costs and judgments–a hit that struggling city is in no shape to take.
