San Diego mayor in sex harassment settlement talks

SAN DIEGO — Settlement talks in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Mayor Bob Filner are underway as petitions circulate to recall the former congressman who has been besieged by allegations from more than a dozen women.

Attorney Gloria Allred announced Monday evening that she and her client, Irene McCormack Jackson, spent the day in mediation at a downtown office building, where Filner was spotted by a TV crew entering earlier in the day.

Allred wouldn't say whether Filner's resignation was discussed nor whether the mayor was present. She said the mediator, former federal judge J. Lawrence Irving, asked that no one make comments while talks continued.

Filner is facing a recall effort prompted by the cascade of sexual harassment allegations that also led the entire City Council and many leading Democrats to call for him to step down, including U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Filner has vowed to remain the leader of the nation's eighth-largest city and said he would return to work Monday after completing an intensive two-week therapy program. His lawyers said he also spent one week in outpatient counseling.

Before going into therapy, Filner vowed when he returned that his "focus will be on making sure that I am doing right by the city in terms of being the best mayor I can be."

But he wasn't seen Monday at City Hall, where a few dozen Filner supporters rallied outside, engaging in heated arguments with opponents.

"The mayor coming back to City Hall is the wrong message," Councilman Kevin Faulconer said Monday. "There is no way that he is able to move any type of agenda forward."

Faulconer said the mayor needs to "quit dragging the city of San Diego through this. He needs to resign. He needs to go get the help that he clearly and desperately needs."

Faulconer was later seen entering the building where Filner was spotted by KFMB-TV in San Diego. The councilman referred questions to the city attorney's office, which declined to comment.

Allred said she and her client would not be returning Tuesday.

Steve Erie, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, said Filner's resignation must be part of the settlement discussions. Filner would benefit from waiting it out, Erie said, since his pension would spike after serving a year, which would be in December. He also may be trying to shed financial responsibility for the lawsuit.

"As long as he doesn't resign, he has leverage," Erie said. "So stay tuned."

McCormack was the first to go public with harassment allegations. Since then, his accusers have included a university dean to a retired Navy rear admiral. Some contend he cornered, groped and forcibly kissed them.

Filner, 70, served 10 terms in Congress before being elected mayor in November. The feisty liberal has long had a reputation for berating employees and has been dogged by rumors of inappropriate behavior toward women. But nothing in his past approaches what has surfaced in the past six weeks.

Questions also have risen over his spending and a trip to Paris. At least four agencies are investigating Filner: the city attorney's office, the state attorney general's office, the Sheriff's Department and the U.S. attorney.

City Council President Todd Gloria said the city's daily operations have been running fine without Filner but the city needs a leader to set policy.

"Those of us who have called on the mayor to resign know he is not being effective at this time," Gloria said.

Filner's spokeswoman Lena Lewis and lawyer James Payne did not respond to calls.

If Filner should resign, Gloria would step in as acting mayor.

The recall petition drive started Sunday. Organizers must collect 101,597 signatures of registered San Diego voters by Sept. 26. If the petition has fewer than that, the recall campaign will have 30 more days to circulate a supplemental petition to gather additional valid signatures.

If enough signatures are validated by the city clerk, the petition will be presented to the City Council, which must schedule an election within 60 to 90 days.

Sex charges against teacher stun students, parents

Students and parents at Corona's Centennial High School reacted with surprise and disbelief after prosecutors charged a female special education teacher with having sex with five teenage boys over the last year.

Summer Michelle Hansen, 31, was charged Tuesday with 16 felony counts involving sex acts with five teenagers younger than 18, none of whom were students in her life skills class.

“I really hope it’s not true, because that would be really sad,” Marrisa Byers, a student at the high school, told KTLA-TV. “Especially since it’s a special ed teacher, that hits a little bit harder.”

Riverside County prosecutors allege that from May 2012 to May 2013, Hansen committed sexual acts with the teenagers — who were as young as 16 — in her classroom, in a campus utility room, in her vehicle parked near a teenager's home and at the home of another teenager.

Hansen, who has taught at Centennial for nearly five years, was arrested in June after Corona police conducted an initial investigation. Detectives allege that the teacher rewarded one of the boys with sex for winning a baseball game.

She has been on administrative leave.

“I’ve seen her around and heard she was a really nice lady. And just to hear something like that is almost heartbreaking,” student Austin Farris told KTLA.

Parents and friends, though, have rallied around Hansen and questioned the accusers' motives. Some have even claimed Hansen’s Facebook page was hacked to make it appear that she “liked” the movie “Bad Teacher.”

Prosecutors could seek up to 13 years in prison for Hansen if she is convicted of all the charges. Hansen's attorney, David Cohn, denied that Hansen broke any laws.

Hansen was scheduled to be arraigned on the charges Thursday.

Meanwhile, Shanda Barnett told KCAL-TV she intends to use the Hansen allegation to talk to her 15-year-old son, who attends the school, about the issue.

“I really think that this is too close to home,” she said.

America's First Sex Manual Has Some 'Interesting' Thoughts On Virginity, Same-Sex Marriage And Female Pleasure

On the internet, there are seemingly endless resources for information about sex -- for better and for worse. But where did Americans get their sex education way, way back in the day? It turns out they read Aristotle's Complete Master-Piece, In Three Parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man, a sex manual published in Boston in 1766.

via Internet Archive

This "sexy" book was originally published in England in 1684 and then reprinted in the United States 82 years later. A copy of the guide, which Open Culture reports was written by William Salmon (not, in fact, Aristotle), a self-proclaimed English "Professor of Physk," was put up for auction in January of this year after a 200-year-long ban in England.

According to Open Source, the book was one of the most widely circulated publications regarding sex and reproduction in North America at the time, but it certainly lacked scientific basis for many of its claims. For instance, Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull's book specialist, Cathy Marsden, told HuffPost UK in April that the book warned readers that if a woman became pregnant out of wedlock, she might give birth to an infant covered in hair or Siamese twins.

via Internet Archive

The manual's stance on topics like virginity and marriage also reflects the Puritanical era in which it was written. According to Booktryst, Aristotle's Complete Master-Piececontends that virginity is, "the boast and pride of the fair sex," that marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman, and that any sex outside of this context fills "the world with confusion and debauchery, has brought diseases on the body, consumptions on estates, and eternal ruin to the soul, if not repented of."

Interestingly, some parts of the book are shockingly progressive. Marsden told Open Culture:

24 Sex Secrets to Avoid Tiger Woods-Level Disaster

Are people who marry their first sexual partners more likely to cheat?

Actually, they are less likely to cheat, but they are getting harder to find. According to Edward O. Laumann, author of The Sexual Organization of the City, as time goes by, "the more likely you're not going to have people who did not have multiple sexual experiences before they finally married." Laumann guesses that more sex partners before marriage is related to more and better cheating later on, and that those, how do you say, fidel couples, "tend to be married, somewhat more religious, and... have somewhat less likelihood of infidelity because of the normative beliefs that they have."

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