Councilman caught peeing on door outside a bar resigns
A councilman who went No. 1 has been 86'd from his post.
Crescenta Valley Town Councilmember Chris Kilpatrick resigned from office after surveillance video showed him and another man urinating outside an LGBTQ+ bar in downtown Los Angeles. Kilpatrick and his boyfriend were seen relieving themselves at the employee entrance to Precinct, a bar on South Broadway, sometime around 2 a.m. Saturday, according to video posted to the bar's Instagram.
The two men walked out of the bar carrying cocktail glasses just before they urinated on a set of glass doors, according to the post. An employee approached the men and tried to take their drinks away.
But the taller man, who was later identified as Kilpatrick, threw the employee to the ground, according to the post.
"Precinct is a safe space for all; let’s have a good time," the post said before urging patrons not to be jerks (in cruder terms). "Oh, yeah, we also have several bathrooms."
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Kilpatrick's attorney, John Duran, said two employees from the bar approached Kilpatrick and his boyfriend without identifying themselves and aggressively grabbed Kilpatrick, asking him if he had been at the bar.
"My client instinctively pushed back in self defense," Duran said in a statement. "It was reasonable for him to believe that they were about to possibly be gay-bashed" by the bar employees, who were not in uniform.
While Kilpatrick was not identified in the Instagram post, people wrote in the comments that it looked like Kilpatrick, who was elected to the Crescenta Valley Town Council in 2020.
Crescenta Valley, northwest of Pasadena, includes the cities of Montrose, Sunland and La Cañada Flintridge, along with sections of the city of Glendale. The town council where Kilpatrick served works as "an advisory body, advocating for interests and concerns of our residents," according to the Council President Harry Leon in a recent blog post.
Council members learned about the surveillance video on Tuesday and asked Kilpatrick for a statement, but by that time he had retained an attorney, according to a letter detailing the council's response. Leon called for a special meeting about the issue, but before it could take place Kilpatrick "expressed his desire to resign from the council," the letter said.
His resignation was accepted by the council and effective that day.
"While we do not condone any of the behavior we observed on social media, we appreciate his 3 years of commitment and dedication to the community while serving on the council," the council leadership said in the letter.
Duran, Kilpatrick's attorney, said that public urination is not a criminal offense, and battery is a misdemeanor offense, including "unlawful touching as exhibited by individual one who grabbed my client first."
It's unclear if the bar employee was injured during the incident.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.