San Diego Mayor Total Sex Creep, Yet Not a Republican, What Up With That?

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner is being pressured to resign after a number of former supporters have come forward with accusations that the first-term Democrat had sexually harassed them. While the mayor has released a video in which he apologizes for treating women on his staff disrespectfully, even admitting "I need help," Filner also somehow thinks that the accusations from multiple sources are all just a big misunderstanding and he will just take some classes to make everything better, and a full investigation will clear his name because he is just a really friendly guy who likes to hug everyone and we think we need a bucket, urrrrggghhh.

Of course, Wonkette isn't covering this story, because Filner is a Democrat.

The  LA Times  has plenty of disturbing details of the allegations against Filner, leveled by three people who had previously supported him. He's accused of forcibly kissing two constituents, grabbing a female staffer's buttocks and breasts, and of skeevy behavior that sounds like it could have come from that one movie with Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Dabney Coleman:

In a City Hall elevator, Filner told a female staffer that women employees would do better "if they worked without their panties on," attorney Marco Gonzalez said at a news conference outside City Hall.

Filner's behavior toward women is so egregious that women who work for him call him a "dirty old man" and coined the phrases "the Filner headlock" and "the Filner dance" to describe how he isolates women and then makes unwanted advances, Gonzalez said.

Filner explained to San Diego station KUSI that everybody just misunderstood his intentions: "I'm a hugger of both men and women," he said. Also, let us just reiterate, due process, innocent until proven guilty, and eew, eew, yick, gross, WRONG!

If the allegations are substantiated, Filner will have pissed away an admirable background as a civil rights advocate -- he was arrested in 1961 with the Mississippi Freedom Riders -- as well as a career in Congress, where he served from 1993 to 2012. He also earned a Wonkette footnote in 2007 when he was charged with assault after going slightly apeshit at Dulles Airport and pushing a United Airlines employee, which suggests maybe that Freedom Rider training in nonviolence didn't take hold so well. More recently, Filner stood up for that guy who was charged with vandalism for writing unkind things about Bank Of America with sidewalk chalk.

Anyway, now his ex-fiancée says she caught him trying to cheat multiple times, and while she didn't know anything about sexual harassment, she basically said he's a scummy scumbag who should resign. Former councilwoman and Filner ally Donna Frye says that he would regularly try to get women alone, then try to get all in their business (we are paraphrasing). Frye said at a news conference Monday, "Bob Filner is tragically unsafe for any woman to approach."

Here is his pathetic apology video if you want to watch it. Filner's accusers are planning to file a lawsuit, and we're going to go think happy thoughts about ducklings and kittens.

[ LAT / WaPo ]