Karen Schwartzman's Advice

Lexington schools have hired Karen Schwartzman who successfully discredited herself failing to conduct her due diligence into the MGC's Stan McGee cover-up fiasco and offering misguided advice in emails reported by Commonwealth Magazine [quotes below].

This isn't about Gambling, rather about appropriately handling child abuse.

A special needs child was locked in a closet. Do the details matter?

Times says op-ed on Lexington schools had inaccuracies

By Deirdre Fernandes

| Globe Staff      September 16, 2012

 

Karen Schwartzman, a crisis management consultant the district hired to help with the controversy, called Lichtenstein’s account of his daughter’s experience a “fabrication.”

“Bill Lichtenstein strung together lie after lie to paint a picture of abuse that never happened,” Schwartzman said in an e-mail Saturday.

“At the end of the day, the truth will come,” Lichtenstein said. “Lexington has hired a PR person and has been maliciously and recklessly attacking me.”

The inside story of gaming agency hire

“Based on all I know, this can be managed, and . . . the risk to the agency is small relative to the benefit of hiring such a perfectly suited person for this slot," wrote the commission’s outside public relations consultant, Karen Schwartzman, in an email to the commissioners on April 30.

Schwartzman added, "Bottom line: I believe that the media will mention [McGee's Florida] history, but I also believe that I can appeal to their sense of fairness in making clear that Stan has already been though the ringer for a crime he didn't commit and that it would be grossly unfair to put him through it again. I think it likely that the media will feel that they have to mention this, but I think it will be no more than a paragraph deep into an otherwise extremely favorable story about Stan and what it is that makes him a quality candidate for this job."

Commissioner James McHugh, a retired appeals court judge, emailed Schwartzman, who was being paid $150 an hour by the commission, to ask whether McGee had entered into a civil settlement of any kind with the boy’s family.

“Stan did indicate to me that there was indeed a settlement, though he didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, how much money was paid,” Schwartzman responded. “He did say it was not a big number, but that it made him sick to pay anything at all. He said that he was advised by counsel that it was in his interest to make a settlement so as to end the nightmare as expeditiously as possible.”

In a recent interview, Schwartzman conceded that her advice to the commission was misguided because she did not have complete information. “I relied on what the governor's office told us about the sexual allegations against Stan. They said they did their own review and let Stan come back to his state job after the charges were dropped,” she said. “A lot of new information came out later in the press that I was not aware of. If I knew all these things before, I likely would have done things differently.”

For more: Stan McGee