Warrenville alderman says MySpace comments are fraud
Warrenville alderman says comments on MySpace site are a fraud.
Did he make an inappropriate joke that made light of his duties as an elected official, or is a 24-year-old Warrenville alderman the victim of a dirty tricks campaign?
A Web page depicts city council member Christopher Halley as bragging, "Yes I'm the Alderman, favors don't come cheap." But Halley says someone else put up the page, which included his photo, on the popular MySpace.com site -- and it's all a hoax aimed at discrediting him. The page has since been taken down.
An anonymous e-mail sent last month to Warrenville Mayor David Brummel and the city council alerted them to the page. Halley said officials brought printouts of it to him the next day.
"People set up phony MySpace accounts all the time," Halley said Wednesday. "That's not my page. … I would never take bribes. If that was my page, why would I want to make myself look bad?"
Halley said the page was down by the time he looked for it. He said he now believes the person who sent the e-mails created the page.
An e-mail to the source of the original message went unanswered.
Brummel said there's no way to verify if the MySpace page was Halley's.
"If it was, indeed, his MySpace page, it was inappropriate, in my opinion," Brummel said. But, "we're in a position where there's nothing we can do at this point."
Halley said he had a MySpace page that he created in college. But that page was taken was taken down by January 2006 -- long before the most recent page surfaced.
Halley still posts photographs on www.photobucket.com -- among them a picture of him drinking at a college friend's March wedding in Arizona.
He said he believes someone made a copy of that photo and used it to help create the new MySpace page.
The city offered to investigate who did it, but Halley declined the offer, Brummel said.
Instead, Halley said, he hired his own private investigator because you can "find more out" that way.
The alleged prankster is taking advantage of the fact that Halley is the youngest member of the city council, he said.
"They want people to think I'm not a mature person, not an adult, that I can't handle it," said Halley, who also is a Winfield Township Republican precinct committeeman. "If I'm not mature, why would I be an alderman?
"I think some people were very unhappy with the last election because they have a problem with the word 'change,' " he said. "They would do anything and everything to make me look bad."
In this year's local election, Halley upset incumbent George Safford, who said Wednesday there was nothing bitter about the campaign, and he would have no reason to retaliate.
"I've never been on MySpace in my life," Safford said. "I don't know how to get on there."