Chicago Mayor Laurie Lightfoot has been accused in court of using obscene language against a city lawyer who tried to oppose her wishes by allowing Italian-Americans to display a removed statue of Christopher Columbus in a parade.
Former Chicago Park County Deputy Chief Counsel George Smirniotis filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the city and Lightfoot, claiming she slandered him with her remarks at a meeting last year.
“You are concluding a secret agreement with the Italians,” Lightfoot said, according to a complaint first reported by Chicago Tribune. “My doll is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest doll in Chicago.”
It is one of two statues of Columbus that Lifefoot ordered removed during widespread riots in the summer of 2020, which urban Italian-American groups hoped to unveil and display temporarily during their Day Day parade. Columbus last fall.
Smirniotis and his bosses in the Park area agreed to allow the display – but according to the costume, Lightfoot was furious when he learned of the plan and threatened to withdraw permission for the parade if the statue was displayed.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been charged in court with using obscene language against a city lawyer and claiming to have “Chicago’s biggest bastard”
Former Chicago Park District Deputy General Counsel George Smirniotis filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the city and Lightfoot, alleging she slandered him.
In the summer of 2020, Lightfoot ordered the removal of the statues of Columbus in Grant Park (left) and Arigo Park (right). Italian-American groups wanted to show one of them in a parade
“You’re there petting your dog over the statue of Columbus, I’m trying to keep the Chicago cops from getting shot, and you’re trying to shoot them,” Lightfoot said.
According to the lawsuit, Lightfoot told Park District attorneys that they should submit all their moves to the city’s legal department for approval, warning them “not to do anything wrong with this status without my approval.”
“Return this fucking statue before noon tomorrow or I’ll fire you,” Lightfoot said, according to the complaint.
Smirniotis and Lightfoot representatives did not immediately respond to inquiries from DailyMail.com on Wednesday morning.
The lawsuit alleges that Lightfoot “continued to insult and slander him” during the meeting, questioning his credentials as a lawyer to his park bosses.
“Where did you go to law school?” Have you ever been to law school? Do you even have a license? Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, is said to have said so.
According to the case, Lightfoot called Smirniotis and his “damn” supervisor and asked, “What the hell was he thinking?”
The statue of Christopher Columbus was removed from the region of Little Italy in Chicago in July 2020
City teams inspected the straps around the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park when they began removing it in 2020.
A spokeswoman for the city’s legal department told the Tribune: “The city has not yet received a complaint and there will be no further comments as the matter is pending.”
Smirniotis resigned from the Park District last month, according to the lawsuit, and now appears to be in private practice in Chicago.
The two statues of Columbus – which have stood for decades in Grant Park and Arigo Park in Little Italy – have been at the center of a fiery storm of controversy since Lightfoot ordered their removal in 2020.
Critics of the statues and others like them call them symbols of oppression, citing Columbus’s brutal abuse of the indigenous people after he arrived in the Caribbean in 1492.
For many Italian Americans, however, the Genoa-born researcher is a cultural hero and a symbol of their heritage.
Lightfoot ordered the removal of the statues in Chicago in the context of violent unrest over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and while groups of protesters clashed with police and tried to demolish the massive Grant Park statue.
The Democrat mayor, who initially spoke of his desire to preserve history, warts and everything else, ordered the removal after 49 police officers were injured by a mob throwing stones and fireworks as they tried to tear down the statue.
“This step is related to an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for inclusive and democratic public dialogue on the symbols of our city,” Lightfoot said at the time.
A group of people in support of the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus applauded as it was expelled from Grant Park
Since then, the statues have remained out of sight in a city warehouse.
Meanwhile, the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans in Chicago has engaged in a long-running legal battle over the statue removed from Arigo Park.
In a lawsuit filed last year, the group claims that the Park District violated a deal signed in 1973 when it removed the statue in Little Italy.
The group’s lawyer, Enrico Mirabelli, told the Tribune that he believed Smirniotis’ allegations reinforced their case.
“Assuming the mayor is quoted correctly, her comments provide evidence that she has wrongfully interfered in my client’s contract with Chicago Park to an unprecedented extent,” Mirabelli said.
The president of the Joint Civil Committee of Italian Americans expressed outrage at Lightfoot’s alleged obscene remarks.
Ron Onnes told the Tribune that he was “literally outraged that someone in her position would ever use such words to refer to a group of people.”
“When will the disrespect end?” Onesti asked.
Why did Christopher Columbus become so divided?
Christopher Columbus, (1451 – 1506)
Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa, Italy in 1451, secured a place in history by leading the first expeditions to establish European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.
Sponsored by the Spanish monarchy, Columbus made four expeditions across the Atlantic in search of a western sea route to the East Indies.
Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his trip, promising that the wealth he would collect would be used to finance a crusade to “return” Jerusalem to Christians. Instead, he discovered new foods, animals and local people who, he wrote, were childish and could easily be enslaved.
Even in his time, Columbus was accused of cruelty and incompetence in his role as viceroy and governor of India and in the brutal harassment of the local Taino on the island of Hispaniola.
Proponents of Columbus say many of the allegations are exaggerated or false, and that the issue has been clouded by a modern slander campaign against both Columbus and his political rivals and northern European countries against Catholic Spain.
However, there is good evidence that Columbus brutally subjugated and enslaved the Taino people in search of gold.
In 2006, historians uncovered a modern investigative report in Spanish archives that revealed the results of an investigation into allegations that Columbus had ruled brutally as governor.
The report contained accounts of mutilation, torture, and cruelty that shocked even Columbus’ contemporaries and led to his eventual removal as governor and temporary imprisonment by King Ferdinand.
“The Columbus government was characterized by a form of tyranny,” Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who saw the document, told reporters. “Even those who loved him had to confess the atrocities that had taken place.”
About 60 years after Columbus arrived, Taino’s indigenous population in the Caribbean has shrunk from about 250,000 to several hundred due to slavery and death from new diseases.
However, for many Italian Americans, the Italian-born researcher remains an important symbol in their heritage.
Millions of Italian immigrants traveled across the Atlantic and Ellis Island in New York to start a new life in America in the late 1880s and 1920s.
They face xenophobia and prejudice, including one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, when 11 were killed in 1891 in New Orleans.
In this way, the Italian explorer became a cultural hero for Italian immigrants to linger on during this time, and the Columbus Day parades began in the late 1800s.