Lori Lightfoot email – Chicago Mayor slammed for repeating sentence 16 TIMES in ‘deranged’ note likened to The Shining
LORI Lightfoot’s email to a staffer is getting slammed for its patronizing tone where she repeated the same sentence over and over, prompting critics to compare her to the main character in The Shining.
On Jan. 28, the Chicago mayor wrote the same sentence 16 times in an email, saying: “I need office time every day!"
At the time, several key posts in Lightfoot’s administration were going unfilled as she faced a crime wave and the issue of Covid-19.
The leader’s message was sent to her former scheduler Taylor Lewis and was exposed as a result of a fact-finding effort led by the Chicago Tribune to examine the high turnover rate at City Hall.
The email was sent not only to Lewis but also cc-ed to her former chief of staff and a personal aide, the paper reported.
Seven times Lightfoot reminded her: “Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Then the mayor included five sentences repeating: “If this doesn’t change immediately, I will just start unilaterally canceling things every day.”
It was followed by a closing rhetorical question that she typed 13 times: “Have I made myself clear, finally?!”
Lewis left the mayor’s office as Director of Scheduling and Advance, according to a 2019 press release.
The ridiculing caused Lightfoot’s pontification with Lewis to the disturbed character in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of author Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining.
In a hair-raising scene, Shelley Duvall discovers her hotel caretaking husband, played by Jack Nicholson, has become completely off-kilter when she flips through a ream of pages from a novel he’s supposedly writing is actually various forms of the same typed phrase: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The mayor appeared before reporters on Monday, explaining away the email as being sent “after a lot of conversation and born of frustration.”
The Tribune also found that Lightfoot sent Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Samir Mayeka and Lewis a snap of ripped documents bearing her name.
“Here’s my new practice for memos that come at the last minute,” Lightfoot wrote.
“As I noted, I want decisions memos no later than 48 hours before the decision is needed and I have directed (staff) to reject all efforts to bring things to me directly that skirt these rules.
“I have asked nicely, now I am done,” she wrote, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Lightfoot is the Windy City’s first African American female and first openly gay mayor, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
She has dealt with a variety of controversies in her two years at the helm after Rahm Emanuel stepped away.
The mayor declared she would only answer one-on-one questioned with minority reporters.
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“I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically,” Lightfoot wrote in a May 19 letter circulated to city news outlets, according to the Chicago Sun.
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Back in May, a reporter for the Daily Caller sued the mayor after she refused to permit interviews with him because he isn’t a "journalist of color,” according to the Hill.
She’s also tussled with the city’s aldermen on various issues including housing and police reforms and had to sort through economic hardships brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.