Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca defended his department's handling of Mel Gibson's drunken driving arrest, rejecting claims that deputies tried to cover up anti-Semitic comments the actor made.
"Those are completely false," Baca said on Wednesday while attending a congressional hearing in San Diego. "The district attorney in his statement clearly verifies that all of the evidence -- including inappropriate remarks, hateful remarks, anti-Semitic remarks, including with the videotape along with the audiotape," is there.
Gibson was charged with misdemeanor drunken driving on Wednesday, five days after he was stopped on Malibu's Pacific Coast Highway for speeding and unleashed an anti-Semitic tirade that has stained his public image.
Baca called the cover-up allegations "ludicrous" and took a swipe at Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ.com, the celebrity gossip site that first posted a sheriff's report containing the alleged comments and has accused sheriff's officials of doctoring an initial report to keep the story from the public.
"It's ludicrous. Ludicrous. It's a blog, it's a Harvey Levin opinion. And legitimate media should deal with facts and not opinions," Baca said.
He said that Gibson, who helped a charity organization for the Sheriff's Department, received no special treatment.
"And we're pretty confident that with all things considered, with all the hoopla about charitable donations, all the hoopla about the idea that he was a celebrity and was given a favor -- if that were the case he would not have been arrested," Baca said.
Baca also said the deputy who stopped Gibson "had the full authority to not arrest him and just take him home."
When asked to elaborate, the sheriff's spokesman said, "By law in misdemeanors, we have the option to arrest or not arrest. But it is the LA County Sheriff's Department policy to always arrest drunk drivers."
also see story:
Reel News
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees