Not the first allegations against the mayor.
A 46-year-old Kent man sued Seattle Mayor Ed Murray on Thursday, claiming Murray “raped and molested him” over several years, beginning in 1986 when the man was a 15-year-old high-school dropout.
The lawsuit in King County Superior Court, filed under the man’s initials, “D.H.,” alleges Murray sexually abused the crack-cocaine addicted teen on numerous occasions for payments of $10 to $20.
“I have been dealing with this for over 30 years,” the man, now sober for a year, said in an interview with The Seattle Times. He said he was coming forward as part of a “healing process” after years of “the shame, the embarrassment, the guilt, the humiliation that I put myself through and that he put me through.”
Murray vehemently denied the allegations and abruptly canceled a news conference about police reform scheduled for Thursday afternoon.[…]
D.H. is not the first to accuse Murray, one of the state’s most powerful politicians, of sexual abuse that occurred decades ago. Murray, 61, has known of other allegations for years, and has quietly, but vigorously denied them.
Two men, Jeff Simpson and Lloyd Anderson, said they knew Murray when they were teenagers growing up in a Portland center for troubled children. They accuse Murray of abusing them in the 1980s when he was in his 20s. Simpson made the claim as a teenager in 1984, and talked with a social worker and detective at the time. No charges were filed.
Both men raised the allegations a decade ago in calls to reporters and Washington state lawmakers, and they repeated them in recent interviews with The Seattle Times, saying they would testify in court if needed.
Now, with the D.H. lawsuit, Murray faces a formal public accusation for the first time, and details of the case bear similarities to the earlier allegations.
While The Seattle Times chose not to publish the 2008 allegations, the similarities between those claims and the new public case gave additional weight and relevance to the previous information.