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
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