The bare facts on Barrett
Brad Dicken | The Chronicle-Telegram
Police detail investigation into topless picture that brought down state rep
The photo of a topless woman that appeared on the screen when former state Rep. Matt Barrett was making a presentation at Norwalk High School was only a piece of his collection.
A 246-page Norwalk police report released Monday included about 60 photos of women, many of whom were bare-breasted or in explicit poses.
One of the women told police Barrett was “a very smooth-talking person.”
When one of the “topless lady photographs,” as Barrett described the images to police, was projected to a government class in Norwalk last year, Barrett immediately shut down his computer. But it was too late; the picture — which would spell the end of his political career — had been seen by students.
In his first conversation with police, detailed in the report, Barrett blamed his son, state employees or someone who might be trying to “sabotage” him for the photo that flashed on the screen. The file was displayed automatically when he inserted a state memory stick into a school computer.
The photo and subsequent lies about it placed the Amherst Democrat at the center of a police investigation. Barrett won’t be charged, but he has been disowned by his political party, which demanded his resignation last month and now seeks to replace him to hang onto the seat that Barrett narrowly wrested from Republicans in 2006. The report also includes details of the interview Barrett allowed police to have with his son.
During questioning, Barrett and his wife, Wendy, sat with their son as he described downloading pornography off his father’s laptop computer and putting it on a memory stick to move to another computer in the family’s home.
In a separate interview, Barrett’s wife said she had caught her son looking at Internet pornography in the past, but when police asked the boy what kind of Web sites he had visited to get the photos found on the memory card, Barrett refused to let his son answer.
“Don’t. I don’t want him to answer,” Barrett can be heard saying during the interview. “Don’t. Don’t answer, please.”
Police determined that the photos had been sent to Barrett’s e-mail accounts, one of which was in his own name and the other of which was under the name John Doe.
The photos came from at least two women, although detectives said during interviews with the women that there were photos of other women they couldn’t identify. The Chronicle-Telegram is not identifying the women by name.
One of the women, a 39-year-old former mayor, said that Barrett blaming his son for the photos was “disgusting.”
She told police she met Barrett at the Seneca County Fair in 2004 when he made his unsuccessful first bid for the House seat he won two years later.
The woman said she became friendly with Barrett as the two talked politics. Later that year, she said, she met Barrett for dinner, and he gave her tickets to a Browns game.
That, the woman told police, is when their relationship began.
The affair lasted until January 2007 when the woman said she met her now-husband. It was before that time that she sent numerous images she had taken of herself to Barrett.
“He told me he missed me and wanted to see me and things like that,” the woman told police.
Asked by police if she would allow police to tap her cell phone and then call Barrett to urge him to tell the truth, the woman readily agreed.
“Absolutely,” she said, although she never reached Barrett while police were with her.
The other woman wasn’t as open about the details of her relationship with Barrett, but she did say she had photographed herself with her camera phone and sent the images to Barrett, a practice she said started as a joke.
She also said she and Barrett — whom she said she hadn’t talked to in months — met through mutual friends.
Throughout the investigation, which police wrapped up in April, Barrett denied any wrongdoing and led police and the public to believe that his son was responsible for the images.
That, said state Rep. Joe Koziura, D-Lorain, was a mistake.
“If he would have come out and said, ‘Wow, I messed up. That’s mine,’ it might have been a different story,” Koziura said.
While Barrett’s attorney, Jack Bradley, agreed that Barrett made a mistake when he denied knowing the women, he said he believes his client was being truthful when he said he didn’t know how the images got on the flash drive.
“You do something bad, you don’t want to hurt your family,” Bradley said of Barrett, who has four children.
Sandusky County Prosecutor Tom Stierwalt decided not to prosecute Barrett after reviewing the case at the request of Norwalk Law Director Stuart O’Hara.
“It was not a case where they believed they would be successful in front of a jury,” Bradley said.
Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com.
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Filed by Brad Dicken | The Chronicle-Telegram May 6th, 2008 in Top Stories.
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Are there any “normal” people left in this world?!!
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Oh yeah, Barrett loses his job but yet Marc Dann is still Attorney General. What’s the deal with that?
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It’s amazing that he actually blamed it on his own son at first…Thanks, Dad!
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Marc Dann didn’t implicate his teenage son for his disgusting actions with the kid’s own mother at the wheel. His wife is as much to blame at her much shared “husband.”
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Barrett was embarrassed that the pic should up…who wouldn’t be red faced…… and the cyoa kicks in…. shouldn’t have been a big deal…
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