More Meryl Lies
The infamous Highland Park rumor mill continues to circulate lies that almost certainly originate with Meryl Frank. While I prefer this blog focus on our town and not on myself, the latest untruth demands a response.
That lie, apparently circulating around town for several months, is that I have been officially banned from attending Borough Council meetings after having supposedly made "threats" against Frank and her family.
Yes, it is true, I have taken a much needed vacation from attending Borough Council meetings. There are many reasons for this, but the above is most certainly not one of them. I am not now and never have been banned or prohibited from attending any meetings of the Borough Council.
Most importantly, I never made any threats against the mayor or her family except for the "threat" of dealing her political defeat and fighting on for as many years as it takes to bring regime change to Highland Park and resist the part of her 2020 plan that calls for higher density development in town.
Politically, I have taken issue with Frank's touting of motherhood as a qualification for being mayor and her insular recruitment of PTO parents to fill Borough Council and Democratic Party positions. The center of her support has always been a demographically homogeneous sector of the PTO parents who use children as pawns and politicize their being school parents to portray themselves as more qualified or more representative of this borough as a whole.
I am a strong supporter of education and have personally contributed to the Highland Park Education Foundation. Yet Frank and her supporters have consistently used the fact that I am not a parent against me, to the point that in 2002, they conducted a phone chain the night before my council primary telling people that I was "anti-children" because I opposed the building of 24 four-bedroom homes in environmentally sensitive Buck Woods as proposed by developer Jack Morris.
And Frank and her supporters have for nine years acted as though Highland Park's other, non-public school parent populations either don't exist or are at best second class citizens who should sublimate their needs to those of her group of supporters.
What I object to is the politicizing of children, education, and the PTOs. The mayor's repeated attempts to twist my statements into something sinister--and utter fiction--are downright despicable.
In a previous post, I mentioned having to spend $1,500 on a lawyer to defend myself against these false charges. Thankfully, the court in Milltown (the case was moved there due to conflict of interest) rightfully saw through this sham, and on January 10, 2008, cleared me of any charges other than violation of a noise ordinance during a shouting match.
I believe Mayor Frank has known all along that I am not a threat to anyone except in the political arena. These tactics are the sort of dirty politics happening all over New Jersey, where politicians use the police to intimidate opponents from challenging them, whether in elections or at public meetings. Such was done to the Halper family at the direction of the mayor of Piscataway.
However, I emphasize that I never was and never will be intimidated from political participation and seeking of public office. Mayor Frank, your efforts are a resounding failure.
My involvement with the 2007 mayoral campaign led to several amazing opportunities for me as a writer, including an invitation to write a play, on which I spent most of the past year working. These writing projects have been my personal priorities since the election. My absence from council meetings has been solely my own choice and not due to any legal edicts. Anyone who doubts this is free to investigate the issue with the Highland Park Police Department, whose members will confirm that there never has been any prohibition against my attending Borough Council meetings.
As a "political animal," I fight my battles with words and words alone. I have not stopped fighting this administration, and I never will. At this point, I believe the opposition has already won its most important victory, in that we blocked the implementation of any use of eminent domain to force business or home owners to sell their properties to private developers.
At some point, hopefully this summer, I intend to once more attend Borough Council meetings and ask the tough questions.
Meanwhile, I reiterate again in the strongest possible terms that any attempt to criminalize or demonize me with false accusations of threatening any human being with harm other than political defeat are nothing but lies and, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
That lie, apparently circulating around town for several months, is that I have been officially banned from attending Borough Council meetings after having supposedly made "threats" against Frank and her family.
Yes, it is true, I have taken a much needed vacation from attending Borough Council meetings. There are many reasons for this, but the above is most certainly not one of them. I am not now and never have been banned or prohibited from attending any meetings of the Borough Council.
Most importantly, I never made any threats against the mayor or her family except for the "threat" of dealing her political defeat and fighting on for as many years as it takes to bring regime change to Highland Park and resist the part of her 2020 plan that calls for higher density development in town.
Politically, I have taken issue with Frank's touting of motherhood as a qualification for being mayor and her insular recruitment of PTO parents to fill Borough Council and Democratic Party positions. The center of her support has always been a demographically homogeneous sector of the PTO parents who use children as pawns and politicize their being school parents to portray themselves as more qualified or more representative of this borough as a whole.
I am a strong supporter of education and have personally contributed to the Highland Park Education Foundation. Yet Frank and her supporters have consistently used the fact that I am not a parent against me, to the point that in 2002, they conducted a phone chain the night before my council primary telling people that I was "anti-children" because I opposed the building of 24 four-bedroom homes in environmentally sensitive Buck Woods as proposed by developer Jack Morris.
And Frank and her supporters have for nine years acted as though Highland Park's other, non-public school parent populations either don't exist or are at best second class citizens who should sublimate their needs to those of her group of supporters.
What I object to is the politicizing of children, education, and the PTOs. The mayor's repeated attempts to twist my statements into something sinister--and utter fiction--are downright despicable.
In a previous post, I mentioned having to spend $1,500 on a lawyer to defend myself against these false charges. Thankfully, the court in Milltown (the case was moved there due to conflict of interest) rightfully saw through this sham, and on January 10, 2008, cleared me of any charges other than violation of a noise ordinance during a shouting match.
I believe Mayor Frank has known all along that I am not a threat to anyone except in the political arena. These tactics are the sort of dirty politics happening all over New Jersey, where politicians use the police to intimidate opponents from challenging them, whether in elections or at public meetings. Such was done to the Halper family at the direction of the mayor of Piscataway.
However, I emphasize that I never was and never will be intimidated from political participation and seeking of public office. Mayor Frank, your efforts are a resounding failure.
My involvement with the 2007 mayoral campaign led to several amazing opportunities for me as a writer, including an invitation to write a play, on which I spent most of the past year working. These writing projects have been my personal priorities since the election. My absence from council meetings has been solely my own choice and not due to any legal edicts. Anyone who doubts this is free to investigate the issue with the Highland Park Police Department, whose members will confirm that there never has been any prohibition against my attending Borough Council meetings.
As a "political animal," I fight my battles with words and words alone. I have not stopped fighting this administration, and I never will. At this point, I believe the opposition has already won its most important victory, in that we blocked the implementation of any use of eminent domain to force business or home owners to sell their properties to private developers.
At some point, hopefully this summer, I intend to once more attend Borough Council meetings and ask the tough questions.
Meanwhile, I reiterate again in the strongest possible terms that any attempt to criminalize or demonize me with false accusations of threatening any human being with harm other than political defeat are nothing but lies and, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
posted by Laurel Kornfeld | 5:27 PM
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