▶ Chris Churchill:
Evidence against Morse is hard to overlook.
When I was a cub reporter workbiddeford, ing in Maine, a politician I covered taught me a valuable lesson. This guy was a powerful figure in that small mill city, a former mayor, and he was often dishonest. But he spoke with such force and conviction that his lies didn’t matter. People believed him. He was that good.
Heck, I usually knew when he was being dishonest, but I would catch myself nodding along as he delivered long and vehement monologues. There’s something within us that wants to believe people who seem as though they are telling the truth. That’s how demagogues gain power.
But just because a person seems as though he or she is speaking honestly doesn’t mean that’s the case, and it’s a mistake to allow someone’s apparent conviction to outweigh other evidence.
That brings me to Shawn Morse, who on Monday gave an extraordinary
press conference designed to address the domestic violence allegations that have dogged him for nearly a year.
It was vintage Morse. The mayor of Cohoes was combative at times and emotional at others. He said he has been treated unfairly by this newspaper. He said he will not resign. Most importantly, he said there is no truth to the allegations.
“I’ve never laid my hands on my kids even when I punished my kids,” Morse said. “I’ve never laid a hand on any woman in my life.”
Morse has many supporters in Cohoes, and I will not be surprised if many of them became more convinced of his innocence after watching his performance. I would not be surprised if many who have never stepped foot in Cohoes feel the same way. Nobody in local politics speaks with more force and conviction.
But to fully believe Morse, you have to ignore way too much.
A former girlfriend says Morse repeatedly physically abused her in the 1990s. Assemblyman John Mcdonald, a former Cohoes mayor, says he saw Morse grab a different girl by the hair and drag her from Marra’s Pharmacy in the city’s downtown.
“There’s no question who it was,” Mcdonald told me unequivocally in December. “There’s no question that it happened.”
There’s more, sadly. Much more.
In an affidavit obtained by the Times Union, Morse’s wife, Brenda, accused her estranged husband of assaulting her throughout their 19year marriage. Brenda Morse also called 911 last November to report that the mayor grabbed her by the neck and threw her to the ground during an argument.
She filed a new complaint on Friday accusing Shawn Morse of grabbing her and spitting at her outside the Denny’s on Wolf Road.
There are also child protective services reports with allegations that Morse regularly used physical violence against his younger daughter, now 16. He pulled her hair, threw her to the ground, choked her and punched her in the head, the reports say.
This is serious and alarming stuff, and when Morse was pressed on it all Monday, his response was that all his accusers are lying. He’s asking us to take his word over theirs.
That’s tough to do. In fact, it would require serious gullibility.
I won’t get into all the details here, but Morse used the press conference to say, essentially, that his family has been wrecked by drug abuse and mental illness. Much of what he said was difficult to hear because it was so deeply personal. Morse even played a recording of a recent argument he’d had with his wife.
“These are hurtful, heart-wrenching things to share,” Morse said, calling himself “a broken man with a broken family.”
There is a political component to this, of course, given that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called for Morse’s resignation in response to a Times Union story with new and troubling details of alleged abuse.
Cuomo, as the top Democrat in the state, was not wrong to call out a member of his party. But the governor’s involvement also risked overshadowing new details in the allegations against Morse and may allow many to ignore them.
To listen to Morse, the former chairman of the Albany County Legislature, he is being treated unfairly only because he’s in politics. “If I were not the mayor of a city working every day to improve other people’s lives, nobody would care,” he said.
That ignores how Morse seems to have benefited from controlling the police department called to investigate him. And it ignores that elected office comes with higher standards and special responsibility.
There is, after all, the real likelihood that Morse’s continuing saga will hurt his city. Still, the mayor insisted he’s not going anywhere, saying only Cohoes voters have the right to eject him from office.
And he said it with all the force and conviction a person could muster.