Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum is finally responding to the news that his anti-gay expert witness was caught vacationing with a male prostitute after they were photographed together at the Miami Airport on April 13.
McCollum paid Baptist minister and Christian right leader George Alan Rekers to testify in defense of Florida’s ban on gay adoption.
In a statement, McCollum said they wouldn’t hire Rekers again, knowing what they know now. He then attempted to shift responsibility to the Department of Children and Families (DCF), the agency representing the state in cases arguing over Florida’s ban on adoption by homosexuals.
“I think our team’s done what it should do,” McCollum told the Miami Herald. ”We’ve been defending the constitution of the state and we’ve been representing the Department of Children and Families, who hired him and paid him and needed expert witnesses and he was available and credentialed.”
McCollum then concluded: “I wouldn’t do it again if I knew what I know today but I didn’t know that then and neither did anybody else.”
However, the Florida Tribune then revealed that McCollum wrote a letter to DCF Secretary Bob Butterworth, personally recommending they hire Rekers after the department expressed a preference for another witness.
“[The other candidate’s] areas of expertise are different from Dr. Rekers,’’ wrote McCollum. “Our attorneys handling this case have searched long and hard for other expert witnesses with comparable expertise to Dr. Rekers and have been unable to identify any who would be available for this case.”
“They believe that this expert and his testimony are necessary to ensure a successful result in this case,’’ McCollum wrote.
The day after the Rekers story broke, McCollum’s Facebook page was flooded with comments demanding he address his witness’ hypocrisy. The page’s administrator has been deleting comments and banning the users who make them, but apparently has been unable to keep up with the deluge of comments condemning McCollum and calling for his retirement. Here’s a sample: “You have helped damage GLBT youth. Suicide rate is highest with them. You wasted taxpayers’ money on a sham witness.”
Initial reports stated that McCollum’s office paid Rekers and a colleague $87,000 for their testimony that gay people are mentally unstable and unfit to adopt children, but Equality Florida reported that public records show the amount paid to Rekers alone was actually $120,000 – double the amount recommended by the DCF when they responded to McCollum’s recommendation that they hire Rekers.
“It is disgraceful that the attorney general used taxpayer dollars to compensate this discredited bigot-for-hire,” said Equality Florida executive director Nadine Smith. “It shows just how low they have to scrape to find anyone even willing to defend this awful ban that denies children permanent loving homes.”
Rekers has made some clumsy attempts at damage control since the prostitute, who was hired via RentBoy.com, confirmed that they did vacation together and did have sexual contact in the form of erotic massage. Rekers’ initial reaction was that he hired the “rentboy” – now identified as Jo-Vanni Roman – to lift his luggage as he was recovering from surgery, and didn’t know Roman was an escort till halfway through their 10-day European vacation. Rekers quickly changed his story to state that he was helping to reform Roman. In Facebook correspondence with the blogger behind the popular gay blog Joe.My.God, Reker said he was sharing the gospel with the escort and “spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse.”
The Miami New Times broke the story, and Rekers has threatened to sue the paper for defamation.
In the meantime, a second escort has come forward claiming that Rekers was a client. Former porn star Carl Shepard posted on his personal blog that in 1992, he was hired to give Rekers an erotic massage in Chicago. When gossip blog Gawker contacted Rekers for contact, he only denied even having visited the hotel where Shepard claimed the encounter occurred.
Read original story – and see the photo of Reker with Roman – here.
