Mayor Brandon Johnson on Thursday maintained that he was in the dark about his former communications director’s alleged misconduct until seeing public records requests for his personnel file, despite having sent urgent text messages about Ronnie Reese days before his termination.
At an unrelated news conference in Englewood, the mayor again told reporters that “like everybody else,” he learned about the sexual harassment, misogyny, racism, antisemitism and homophobic complaints against Reese after a Freedom of Information Act request was made. The Tribune filed a FOIA for those records on Oct. 25, after news broke that the mayor’s longtime friend and former press secretary for his mayoral campaign and for the Chicago Teachers Union was being fired.
But Oct. 19 texts that the Tribune also obtained via FOIA show the mayor making an apparent reference to Reese while messaging CTU President Stacy Davis Gates just four days before Reese was given notice of his termination.
“Ronnie!” he wrote. “Call me. Message from the Elders.”
Davis Gates responded to the apparent reference to Reese, who previously worked with her and Johnson at the teachers union, with only an exclamation reaction, according to a copy of the text exchange. She said this week that she did not engage further nor know about the accusations surrounding Reese until the Tribune reported on them.
Johnson on Thursday addressed his October texts by saying, “I have conversations and text messages with a variety of people, and I’ve communicated to Stacy on a number of occasions of where there are opportunities for us to continue to grow our city through the lens of public education.”
Asked why he couldn’t elaborate on what he wanted to discuss with Davis-Gates concerning Reese, the mayor merely said, “I’m actually saying more than more. … I’ve said repeatedly that when the FOIA requests came through and it was made public, that’s when I found out.”
The mayor also claimed he did not have specific information on earlier accusations made against Reese in 2023, which the Tribune reported on back in January.
“If you’re referring to individuals that were dismissed from the department, that’s a personnel matter, right?” Johnson said when asked whether he was aware of the first batch of complaints. “And as I’ve said repeatedly, we don’t discuss personnel matters. But when those individuals who were dismissed from the city of Chicago as employees, there was no discussion around or information around their specific interactions with their supervisor at that time.”
In August 2023, three of Reese’s staffers were fired after complaining about how Reese and Johnson senior adviser Jason Lee treated them. They were then placed on the city’s Do Not Hire list, with two of them only getting removed last week after the new allegations against Reese became public.
The Tribune story from January notes that Reese’s employees had complained to Mondine Harding with the mayor’s office about his treatment of women, including allegedly telling female staffers they “laugh too much” while “in contrast, Ronnie would joke with male colleagues.”
The mayor on Thursday also hinted at future, unspecified changes to City Hall’s reporting mechanism for personnel complaints.
“There is a break within that system where information was not made readily available until the FOIA request,” Johnson said. “Now that is something that we certainly should explore and look into. But make no mistake about it, the most important thing here is that I have no tolerance for sexism, racism, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti LGBTQ-plus.”
