12/1/17: Conyers’ Attorney Arnold Reed Questions Conyers Accuser Marion Brown

Arnold Reed, attorney for Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), said a few things that many in the press do not want to report. In a moment where the victims are not to be questioned, Reed is rolling a large boulder up a steep hill.  But his information hasn’t been denied by Conyers’ accuser Marion Brown. 

On Friday, December 1, 2017, Detroit attorney Arnold Reed held a press conference outside his office on Schaefer Highway. The subject was Marion Brown, the former Conyers staffer who had gone public on the Today show two days earlier to describe years of alleged sexual harassment by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Reed, who represents the Conyers family and has previously represented Aretha Franklin and R. Kelly, did not deny Brown’s account. What he did was raise what he called “questions the national media has not asked.” Chief among them: the $27,000 settlement Brown received in 2015 through the Office of Compliance was covered by a non-disclosure agreement Brown had signed voluntarily. By going on NBC, Reed argued, Brown had broken that agreement and exposed herself to a return of the settlement funds.

“We are not attacking Ms. Brown,” Reed told reporters. “We are asking whether she understood the document she signed. We are asking who advised her to go on television and violate that agreement. We are asking why this story is moving through Megyn Kelly’s couch instead of through the House Ethics Committee.”

Reed also pushed back on the financial structure of the 2015 payment. The $27,000 came out of Conyers’ congressional Members’ Representational Allowance, known as MRA funds, which are appropriated each year for office operations. The payment was not from the Office of Compliance’s separate taxpayer-funded settlement account. Reed argued this matters because it means Conyers personally signed off on the settlement rather than using the anonymous OOC process, a distinction many news reports had glossed over.

The press conference was, by design, an effort to slow a story that was moving at the speed of cable news. By Friday, at least three women had spoken publicly, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-LA) was asking for due process, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had already reversed her Sunday praise of Conyers as “an icon.” Within 96 hours, on December 5, Conyers would call Mildred Gaddis’ Detroit radio show and announce his resignation.

Brown’s attorney, Lisa Bloom, responded that afternoon with a statement calling Reed’s questions “a smear, pure and simple.” Bloom said the NDA was unenforceable because it covered conduct that constituted discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The legal question has not been tested in court. The political question, as Reed knew when he called the press conference, was already lost.