The Tennessean’s Clarksville-based liberal columnist and opinion writer Saritha Prabhu penned a passionate call on Mayor Megan Barry to resign from office Friday afternoon after a new wave of revelations surrounding Barry’s affair and cover-up with top staffer Rob Forrest came to light.
“Disappointed on many levels describes how I feel about the Megan Barry situation,” she begins, in a surprisingly candid and heartfelt indictment of Nashville’s first woman to hold its top elected office:
Mayor Barry shocked and saddened our Middle Tennessee community when she revealed recently that she had had a nearly two-year extramarital affair with her top security officer.
I live in Clarksville, but I was proud when Nashville elected its first female mayor in late 2015.
But now, each new revelation about the affair has been damning to her and to her continued political survival.
To cut to the chase: She should do Nashville and herself a favor and resign.
To continue as mayor would be to prolong the ugliness, and drip-drip nature of the revelations, and to further undercut her authority to lead.
If this had been an affair with a private citizen on her own dime, it’d probably be none of our business.
But this is different, and both the optics and substance look terrible: a Metro employee, her subordinate, several out-of-state and overseas trips alone with him, massive overtime pay for him, extra days on some trips seemingly paid for with taxpayer dollars.
Just the difference in overtime pay that Sgt. Robert Forrest Jr. earned in different years looks ridiculous: He earned $75,462 just in overtime during the 2016-17 fiscal year compared to the $31,748 he earned in 2013-14 when Karl Dean was mayor.
There seems to have been an astonishing amount of hubris, nonchalance, and lack of judgment on Barry’s part.
Read the full piece here.
She didn’t say it would be ok for her to have had an affair, just that if it were a private citizen it would probably not be our business.
She has a black heart! What kind of person, while in an extra marital affair, loses their only child to drug overdose, and continues on with their affair? A nomal person would go into a mourning period, including withdrawing from public view , and surrounding themselves with family. Not the Mayor, nope, business as usual, including pushing her progressive transit plan and continuing with the affair. For all we know, her son restarted taking drugs because he learned about his mother’s infidelity. At the funeral, the few tears you saw were “crocodile tears!” She’s got a black heart!
Typical Liberal logic. “If she’d had an affair with a private citizen on her own dime, it’s OK. Adultery is always wrong, no matter who you are.
My thoughts exactly. Ethics and morals are neither public nor private. They are the define the person. Mayor Barry is unethical and immoral.