B'KLYN RACE NO PLACE FOR EX-ABUSER
By Errol Louis
New York Daily News, 3/14/06
It's not often that a journalist gets to confront a candidate for public office with the classic entrapment question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" But in the case of Kevin Powell, a candidate for Congress in Brooklyn who describes himself as "a recovering misogynist" with a history of physically abusing women, a variation on that question must be asked.
Ever since the 2003 assassination of City Councilman James Davis by a sick, gun-toting wanna-be, I have been convinced that people with a propensity for violence have no place in politics. It's too tempting to resort to the thuggery that mars many elections.
Last year, for instance, two Queens City Council candidates were arrested for making death threats against each other, with one allegedly flashing a gun. And aides from rival campaigns in the Brooklyn district attorney's race got into a sidewalk scuffle with broken bottles that sent one man to the hospital.
Powell, 39, a writer and community activist who hopes to topple incumbent Rep. Ed Towns, didn't duck the issue when I reached him by phone yesterday. "If you're going to be a leader, you have to be transparent. You have to be honest about everything," he said.
Powell admits to a volatile temper described in his book "Who's Gonna Take the Weight?" He cites two college incidents, "one where I hit a female student in the head with a stapler during the course of an argument, and the other where I got into a punch-throwing exchange with a female student I had sexed and then discarded like an old pair of shoes."
Powell ultimately got expelled from Rutgers for pulling a knife on a female student during an argument. The pattern continued when Powell mentally and physically abused a girlfriend in 1991.
He says that was the last time he raised his hand to a woman. But Powell got arrested in 2001 after hitting and smashing the glasses of a fellow writer and showed up in a gossip column in 2004 for punching and biting yet another scribe at a nightclub.
"I take full responsibility for it. Huge mistake on my part," Powell says of the 2004 fracas. "I let myself down and a lot of other people down."
Powell is a powerful writer who was among the first journalists to recognize hip hop as more than a fad. He also is a creative community organizer who sponsors an annual coat drive, frequently speaks out against sexism and domestic violence, and is currently working in the Gulf of Mexico region on a project that links college volunteers with post-Katrina relief efforts.
Brooklyn politics could use that talent and energy. But Powell, who compares himself to a recovering alcoholic, acknowledges in his book that "I can lapse at any time." If that's true, Powell on the campaign trail is like an alcoholic who opens a bar - a man unwisely toying with temptations best avoided.