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San Diego City Council candidate John Hartley has mailed a campaign brochure to residents saying he merely “had to take a leak” the day he was arrested – but the women who accused him of lewd conduct say it was clearly more than that.
The women's version of the story is told in a newly obtained police report from the March 27 incident in Kensington.
One of them, Jennifer Johnson, 35, is also speaking out. She says Hartley, a councilman from 1989 to 1993, got favorable treatment because he was allowed to plead no contest to a lewdness charge, not the more serious indecent exposure offense.
The lesser charge means Hartley does not have to register as a sex offender, though it cost him his job as a substitute teacher in the San Diego Unified School District.
“(City Attorney Michael) Aguirre's office just kind of played favoritism and dropped the ball at the end,” said Johnson, who commented that she didn't know who Hartley was before the incident.
Assistant City Attorney Chris Morris said his office stands by the case, which ended with Hartley being sentenced to three years' probation, a $500 fine and the order to avoid the victims.
“We felt that the facts did not support the charge of indecent exposure, which requires the defendant to commit a lewd act while knowingly being watched,” Morris said.
Hartley, 65, broke his silence yesterday and said his mailer, with its folksy “take a leak” language, is forthright.
“This is very serious to me. The whole thing was like a near-death experience,” said Hartley, who is running to replace Councilwoman Toni Atkins.
Talk of the case has centered on whether Hartley – a tireless door-to-door campaigner – simply needed a restroom when none was nearby. But the women say there was no mistaking what Hartley was doing.
Johnson's account of the afternoon starts when she heard a vehicle outside on her quiet residential street. She looked through the window and saw Hartley sitting inside his low-slung 2002 Ranger truck.
Johnson said she observed Hartley unzipping his pants and urinating into a cup. After that, she saw him place a T-shirt over his lap and masturbate.
“The windows were wide open, with no screen on them,” Johnson said, adding that her one-story house is close to the sidewalk so she could easily see. “It was a direct shot into the cab less than 20 feet away.”
She called her roommate, Jean Talerico, 24, over to the window. The two women started to make noise and point their fingers, trying to force Hartley to leave, Johnson said.
“We were making it very, very obvious we were watching him because we wanted to scare him off,” Johnson said in an interview yesterday.
But Hartley didn't leave, even when Talerico went outside to his truck with her pitbull-mix dog, Johnson said.
In a copy of the incident report, obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Talerico told police: “I looked directly inside the truck to make sure he could see me.
The guy had stopped masturbating and was now flipping the pages of a magazine or something. The guy was flipping the pages as if that was the motion he was doing when we saw him masturbating.”
Talerico went on to tell the police, “I know that we were not mistaken.”
According to Hartley, he was out talking to voters and didn't want to leave.
“I had to go to the bathroom real badly. I should have gone somewhere else. I just wanted to canvass for another half-hour, and I probably shouldn't have pushed myself,” Hartley said. “I've done this before, but as discreetly as possible.”
He said his subsequent movements were so he wouldn't “soil” his pants after urinating. “I think what they saw was misunderstood, that's all.”
Officers collected a white T-shirt and a paper cup from Hartley's truck as evidence, according to the police report. They took a DNA sample.
Johnson said the two women believe they did the right thing.
“He's still making out like we were mistaken, and it's all just a silly mistake,” she said. “We did what we're supposed to do as citizens and any other normal person would have done.”
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