It was a conversation Bob Filner probably never thought he’d have.
In the early 1990s, he was asked if he could explain why there didn’t appear to be any record of him spending time in a local jail in Jackson, Miss., where he had been arrested more than three decades earlier with other Freedom Riders protesting segregation and discriminatory laws in the South.
To say he was angry would be an understatement. Apoplectic might come close. He wasn’t just upset and indignant, but something he didn’t often show, at least not publicly. He was hurt.
Obituaries following his recent death at age 82 naturally mentioned Filner’s days as a Freedom Rider and how they had been foundational to his philosophy, outlook and eventual political career.
He was incredulous anyone would doubt it. But back then, one of his congressional campaign opponents stealthily did and I checked it out.
Sure enough, a spokesperson for the Jackson Police Department said they had no record of Filner being jailed with other Freedom Riders.
After Filner calmed down during our phone call, he walked me through his recollection of how things transpired in June 1961 – when he was just a sophomore at Cornell University – after he got off the bus in Jackson. He said he had been transferred to another detention facility.
The police department official looked into it further and found that Filner spent two months in one of the state’s penitentiaries, which handled the overflow of arrested protesters. It was basically a record-keeping glitch. In the campaign, there was no story and nothing ever became of it.
At the time, I had been covering Filner on and off for more than a decade and would go on to do so for about two decades more, pretty much ending with his short time in the San Diego mayor’s office, which he left in disgrace in 2013, later pleading guilty to charges related to sexual harassment.
His reaction to the Freedom Rider question was very much Filner: anger, ion, aggressiveness. Both foe and friend had been on the receiving end of those emotions and, in some cases, hurt by them. This happened when he was on the San Diego Unified School Board, the San Diego City Council, in Congress and in the mayor’s office.
Filner had no qualms about being called confrontational. Using a borrowed term, he once said he engaged in “creative tension” advocating for veterans, homeless people and ethnically diverse, lower-income residents who historically have been underserved by government. That won Filner a broad, if at times uncomfortable, following.
Sometimes his anger seemed a tactic. Other times it seemed out of control.
A political consultant who once worked with Filner said sometimes when the candidate would explode, the best thing to do was just leave the room for a while. An opposing political consultant described Filner with an unflattering epithet, but did so with a sense of iration for how Filner attracted ers.
“But he’s their (expletive). They like him because he really fights for them,” the consultant said.
In 1997, then-Rep. Filner was arrested outside the White House along with others protesting for benefits for Filipino World War II veterans, further endearing him to the large Filipino American community in his district.
When questions were raised about the 2004 presidential election process in Ohio, Filner was among 31 House Democrats who voted not to count the state’s electoral votes for President George W. Bush.
Few, if any, lawmakers tended to their constituents more than Filner. Before internet communication was commonplace, a colleague once said that if you ran into Filner at a park in his district, you’d get a letter from his office by the end of the week, saying to call if there was anything he could do.
Filner’s rise to prominence in San Diego coincided with the region’s slow but steady transformation from a business-Republican bastion to a labor-Democratic stronghold. He clashed with the ruling establishment, which he said prospered at the expense of the powerless.
After two decades in Congress, his tenure as mayor lasted less than a year. Even before the harassment allegations were made — initially by ers — his months in office were tumultuous.
His feud with then-City Attorney Jan Goldsmith became legendary — Filner once crashed a Goldsmith news conference — and the mayor sought to slash the City Attorney’s Office budget.
Filner often considered city rules and contracts to be shaped unfairly to benefit powerful interests in town. So the mayor decided to review them himself, seriously slowing down City Hall business, if not grinding it to a halt.
Filner wanted to know why the city wasn’t getting something in return for things he viewed as giveaways. Some of his efforts to change that drew unwanted scrutiny, however.
For example, in 2013 Filner vetoed council approval of a waiver on an easement to allow an apartment complex by Sunroad Enterprises in Kearny Mesa to proceed.
He then agreed to let it go ahead in return for $100,000 from Sunroad to the city that Filner said he wanted to use for a veterans memorial and cycling event. The FBI eventually investigated whether any laws were broken and the money was returned.
In Rolando, a developer paid the city $150,000 to settle a lawsuit after Filner initially blocked another apartment complex opposed by nearby residents.
In an audacious move to keep the Chargers in San Diego, Filner talked about a deal for a downtown football stadium and sports complex financed in part by the sale of city-owned sports arena property in the Midway District and the Qualcomm Stadium site in Mission Valley.
Filner said the city should get an equity stake in the team as part of the transaction. The Chargers were intrigued by the proposal, except for the last part. Critics noted NFL rules forbid public ownership of its teams (the Green Bay Packers were grandfathered in). Filner said rules can change.
“It’s not the 10 Commandments,” he scoffed, according to the Voice of San Diego.
In retrospect, Filner’s downfall, and the stain it left on the city, seemed inevitable. It was self-inflicted, but there were not-so-quiet, widespread concerns about how Filner treated women long before he was elected mayor.
Some local Democrats looked the other way, and some party leaders said they couldn’t confirm the accusations that were brought to them. Maybe the local media didn’t press hard enough to determine whether anonymous tips were true.
The brief Filner istration often seemed dysfunctional. Whether it eventually would have morphed into something better had he not at times been given to abusive behavior is anybody’s guess.
But there’s no doubt it still would have been contentious.
