Brockton Mayor Moises Rodrigues pleaded not guilty to a single charge of assault and battery in Hingham District Court Friday.
Speaking to the media afterward, Rodrigues said the charge against him — which involves allegedly touching a then-high school student on her shoulder and waist during a May parade in a manner that she found deeply distressing — is wholly unfounded.
“I’m being charged for participating in a parade with 1,500 people or so, for a case that I don’t even remember what exactly took place,” Rodrigues said. “But as an American I’m going to abide by whatever the courts decide.”
Rodrigues also implied that political and racial animus may be behind his prosecution.
“There’s some that believe that this whole thing is politically motivated,” Rodrigues said. “We can’t forget that I’m the first minority mayor ever elected in the city of Brockton.
”I haven’t seen anybody go through this nonsense. And I say nonsense because when you’ve got a flimsy — the flimsiest of cases — to me, it’s nonsense.“
Asked to elaborate on his suggestion that his prosecution is politically and racially motivated, Rodrigues seemed to partially backtrack, saying: ”I didn’t say racially. I said I am the first minority mayor in that city.“ Pressed on how that might be connected to the case against him, Rodrigues replied, ”I’m not going to get into that.“
However, Rodrigues stood by his suggestion that political forces are at play behind the scenes.
”We know that we have political people who ran for office who ran for mayor in the city involved in this particular case, and that’s why I said that it’s politically motivated,“ he said.
Asked who those people are, Rodrigues replied, ”I can’t talk about it.“
Judge Francis Kenneally ordered Rodriguez to stay away from the alleged victim and witnesses listed in the police report on the case; have no unsupervised contact with minors other than family members; and stay away from Brockton High School.
Under Brockton’s governance structure, Rodrigues automatically chairs the school committee as mayor.
GBH News is not naming the alleged victim because she was a minor when the alleged crime occurred.
Rodrigues’ plea was the latest development in a story that burst into public view at Brockton High School’s graduation in June. While the mayor spoke from a podium, a woman approached the stage and yelled, “You have to [expletive] get out of here. You know what you did to my daughter.”
GBH News subsequently reported that a Brockton schools assistant superintendent had told Rodrigues to stay away from the graduation in the wake of the alleged incident, which occurred as the student played in the Brockton High School marching band during a parade in May.
Despite being asked not to attend the graduation, Rodrigues, who also chairs Brockton’s school committee, participated in the event anyway. However, he said he opted not to give out diplomas to avoid inadvertently interacting with his accuser, whose identity he claimed not to know at the time.
After the graduation ceremony, the student obtained a temporary harassment prevention order requiring that Rodrigues maintain a distance of at least 100 yards from her for two weeks. Her subsequent efforts to extend that restraining order were unsuccessful, though the judge who ruled on those efforts called Rodrigues’s behavior at the parade “unwelcome, offensive, and certainly unprofessional.”
At a show-cause hearing in August, Rodrigues and his legal team argued that the assault and battery charge, which had been recommended by State Police after an investigation, was unwarranted.
“Politicians are usually all over the crowd, responding to people that attend this parade,” Rodrigues said. “And you’re out there taking pictures with young kids, taking pictures with parents, people putting their arms around you, you putting your arms around people, because that’s what people do usually at a celebration.”
Despite Rodrigues’s objections, however, the court’s clerk-magistrate found probable cause to bring the charge in question, a step that was formally taken earlier this month.
The family in question recently sent a letter to the city requesting a payment of $150,000, a move Rodrigues’ attorney Mark Lawton characterized Friday as a “shakedown.”
The family’s attorney, however, said the family is preparing to bring a civil lawsuit against the city of Brockton, and that state law requires that a formal notice be delivered when such a suit is pending.
A second Brockton High School student also accused the mayor of touching her in an inappropriate manner at a school event earlier this year. In a photo from the event that was widely circulated online, Rodrigues can be seen standing behind this student in a large group, holding her left arm just above the elbow with one hand and her right midriff with the other. This second alleged incident was reported to the Brockton Public Schools and is currently being investigated.
Rodrigues discussed the second incident in an interview with the Brockton Enterprise, saying: “Coming from the child protection world that I came from, one of the things that we always tell people is that if you’re standing behind a young person, you always grab them by the arm to make sure that there’s distance between you. So if you see my hand grabbing somebody’s arm, it usually is to maintain distance.”
Rodrigues previously worked as a child protection specialist for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.
Rodrigues, who is Cape Verdean, also told the Enterprise he comes from a culture that is highly tactile.
“We don’t shy away from shaking hands and saying hello to people, and I’m going to continue to do that,” he said.
Rodrigues will return to court on Nov. 6 for a pretrial hearing.
Material from previous GBH News stories was used in this report.
