Racy text messages lead to Lewis County official's fall

NAPAVINE, Lewis County — Inside a home in this town of 1,400 people, two rogues reveal themselves as the masterminds behind the "Are You Nakie?" T-shirts, which have become fashion statements in a Lewis County sex scandal.

Like the much more infamous scandals that destroyed the careers of U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., and Spokane Mayor Jim West, improper electronic text messages have been dug up to bring down public officials.

The Lewis County scandal came to light this summer, in a turf battle among county officials.

A recently fired top-level administrator in Lewis County, Patti Prouty, has gone from anonymity to infamy. As central-services director, she was in charge of hooking up police cruisers with mobile data computers. She then used that technology to send naughty instant messages to at least 10 police officers while they were on patrol.

The cops played along with Prouty, replying with their own racy messages. "Are You Nakie?" is the immortalization of a message from Napavine's police chief to Prouty.

The case is being handled as a personnel matter. There is no criminal investigation under way of either Prouty or the implicated officers, but internal police investigations have been launched.

Law-enforcement careers have been ruined. So far, a Centralia police officer and a Lewis County sheriff's deputy have resigned and other officers have been suspended or otherwise administratively disciplined, including some whose text messaging was deemed improper though not sexual.

Families have been devastated. Prouty's husband filed for divorce in September. Police wives have been left wondering, at least one mounting an investigation of her own.

Trust in Lewis County government — particularly the five implicated police agencies (Lewis County, Centralia, Chehalis, Napavine and Vader) — has been breached. Criminal cases in Lewis County could be in peril if defense attorneys try to discredit individual police officers who were part of the scandal, thus raising questions about their testimony in court.

Prouty's Seattle-based lawyer, Jon Rosen, said he and his client are not talking to the media at this time.

John Panesko, a semiretired attorney who hosts "Let's Talk About It" weekday mornings on Centralia's KELA-AM radio station, said the Prouty scandal has come up on his radio show maybe 10 times since it broke in August. He said calls are split between those who don't think it's a big deal and those who are furious.

"It has soiled our reputation around the state, and I think undeservedly so," Panesko said.

Assistant professor Gregory Gilbertson, director of a vocational criminal-justice program at Centralia College, is discussing the scandal in class with students who aspire to work in public safety. The lesson focuses on ethics.

"The message to be learned is if you take public money as your salary, then the public holds you to a higher standard of conduct," he said.

"It reinforces the point that public officials must avoid any type of unprofessional behavior because it disgraces the profession and it erodes public confidence."

County gossip

While some in Lewis County display respectful restraint when discussing "Pattigate" (the countywide nickname for the scandal), others can't stop making jokes or gossiping about salacious details.

"Prouty Mouth" is one giggle making the rounds. And the location of Prouty's dolphin tattoo, which was referenced in one exchange of messages, is a point of public conjecture.

After the state attorney general advised that Prouty's electronic exchanges with officers — 10 months worth of about 66,000 individual messages — had to be released to the public under Washington's open-records law, the Lewis County prosecutor's office created electronic discs containing the transcripts, charging $10 a pop to cover production costs.

Most of the messages are related to county business. But the few that veer into sexual explicitness have inspired about 70 people to purchase a disc.

According to the request forms, requesters include the wife of the Lewis County sheriff's deputy who resigned and a woman in Chehalis who listed her reason for wanting one as "Entertainment Ha Ha!!"

"We have created a small cottage industry in making these things and charging $10 apiece for them," Lewis County Prosecutor Jeremy Randolph quipped.

The producers of the "Are You Nakie?" T-shirts also bought a disc. The term is a takeoff on a brief exchange between Napavine Police Chief Shelby Clements and Prouty on the afternoon of March 21. Clements was on a call, waiting for a locksmith to free a 10-month-old baby locked inside a Dodge Durango. He passed the time exchanging messages with Prouty.

"so are ya nakie?" Clements typed, underscoring his question with :-P, an emoticon for a tongue hanging out of a mouth.

"top on no lower," Prouty informed him.

The "Are You Nakie?" shirts — along with beer steins, coffee mugs, baseball caps and stickers posing the same question — are selling on www.napavine.org, a Web site run by the two producers of the merchandise.

The pair say they are not in it for money, and deny they are trying to humiliate Clements.

"He humiliated himself," one of them said. "We're simply expressing that to the town so it has access to the same information we have. We want the public to have the knowledge to decide whether he is fit to be our police chief." The pair doesn't think he is, but it's clear they couldn't stand him long before the scandal broke.

They asked that their names not be published, hoping to keep their identities secret from the chief. Clements did not return messages from The Seattle Times.

Commissioners criticized

Treasurer Rose Bowman is the finger-wagger in this scandal, taking on county commissioners she thinks were too slow in firing Prouty.

In some circles, however, Bowman — first elected in 1994 — has been accused of simply trying to advance her political agenda.

She is surprising people by declaring Prouty a predator and the cops as victims, insisting that if Prouty, 36, were a man, others would be more inclined to see it her way.

"Did the officers bite when the Black Widow went out and touched them? Yes, they did. But they still are victims," she said, adding that the officers wrongly assumed Prouty was deleting the messages.

Bowman is an ally of Larry Keeton, who was chief of staff to the three-member Lewis County board of commissioners. A contentious reorganization of county government over the summer resulted in Keeton losing his job and Prouty taking on additional responsibilities. Bowman said Prouty, hired in September 2004, boasted of "empire building" and a "hostile takeover."

Bowman describes the events leading up to the scandal this way: Before Keeton cleared out his desk, he requested — but did not get — a meeting with commissioners to advise them of a tip he received from a Centralia police officer about Prouty's improper text messages.

Meanwhile, rumors of the Prouty messages had filtered down to The Chronicle, a daily newspaper in Centralia. A reporter, while interviewing Keeton about his dismissal, inquired about the messages and Keeton confirmed their existence.

"He was an inadvertent whistle-blower," Bowman said.

Bowman volunteers juicy details about the scandal, but denies taking perverse pleasure in Prouty's downfall. County commissioners canned Prouty on Oct. 31 after she had been placed on paid administrative leave. Far too late, by Bowman's count.

Randolph, the county prosecutor who is retiring after this year, expects Prouty to sue the county in a wrongful termination claim.

"In 39 years in county government, I haven't seen a more egregious case," he said of the conduct that cost Prouty her job. "I could try this case in front of a jury from Los Angeles, and she still wouldn't stand a chance of winning."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com