Ex-Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh, acting as a mentor, tried convincing a Detroit high school senior who came from an economically disadvantaged background to make money off his body, a lawyer alleged in a civil trial in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Tuesday.
"Charles Pugh was trying to turn (him) into a male prostitute," attorney William Seikaly said in opening statements on behalf of his client, now 20, who is identified in court records only by his initials, K.S.
The former student, who attended the trial, is suing Pugh and the Detroit Public Schools, alleging that Pugh sexually harassed him in 2013 and took advantage of his role as a mentor at the Frederick Douglass Academy. Seikaly told jurors Pugh bombarded K.S. with sexually suggestive texts, provided gifts, offered money to perform oral sex on K.S., paid K.S. to make a video masturbating, and said the youth could make money off of his body.
The lawsuit, which is seeking more than $1 million in damages, alleges that the youth, as result of his encounters with Pugh, and the fallout, suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, depression and loss of friends and family, who feared that he was gay. Seikaly said his client is heterosexual.
The trial is expected to show an unflattering side of Pugh. it will include plenty of sexually-charged text messages that Pugh sent the student, trying to convince him to engage in sex.
There's no indication there was ever any sexual activity between the two with the exception of one allegation that Pugh grabbed the youth's inner thigh while they were in a parked car in Oakland County. Pugh had taken the youth shopping in the suburbs and bought him clothes and a cell phone. Pugh also gave him $40 at the time.
Seikaly said the school district's emergency managers were forewarned by school board members that Pugh had a keen interest in teenage boys. But the EMs and other officials did nothing to terminate his tenure as a volunteer mentor.
“He was sexually harassed by Charles Pugh and it was allowed by the Detroit Public Schools,” Seikaly told jurors. “It would be easy to talk about titillating text messages and make it all about sex but this is about power and the abuse of power.”
Not so fast, said attorney Marc Deldin, the attorney for Pugh, who lives in New York and has chosen not to attend the trial, which is his option.
Deldin told jurors that Pugh and the student, who was 18 at the time, were consenting adults, who both regretted some of the interactions.
"He did it, he regrets that," Deldin said of the ex-student. He said the student was ashamed of the interactions with Pugh.
"He sold his self respect, and he regrets it," Deldin said of the youth.
Theophilus E. Clemons, attorney for the school district, denied that the emergency managers or other school officials did anything wrong or were aware something improper was going on. He said the texting and Pugh's shopping excursion with the youth all took place off school property.
He said texts will show that the student responded to all of Pugh's texts and never told him to stop.
“He was touched on a pant-covered thigh in Oakland County, not DPS. The text messaging was at home in his basement, not at DPS,” he said.
Clemons conceded the school district never conducted a criminal background check on Pugh, but had it done so, he said it would have come up with nothing.
Seikaly told jurors that his client's mother went to the press to expose Pugh after she felt the school was ignoring her concerns that Pugh was giving her son things of value.
Seikaly says when word got out about the ordeal, some of his client's relatives and friends, who are homophobic, disowned him.
The trial is set to resume Wednesday morning with the calling of witnesses.
