Goodness, now he's lost the Stranger.

Serious question here, though: don't sexual predators continue doing what they do? So if Murray preyed on young victims 30 years ago, wouldn't there be more recent cases?

I didn't vote for him the first time but I was seriously considering voting for him this time. I think his policies have been pretty good, nefarious activities in the 80's or not. Sad story all around.

@2

And by recent, I mean cases that could be prosecuted.

Well said.

He needs to do more than get out of the race. He needs to resign. He can't do his job effectively anymore. If he ever could.

"bringing developers and affordable housing advocates"

HALA was almost all developers and affordable housing developers. The only affordable housing advocate on the committee was Jon Grant, and he thinks the HALA "bargain" was a bad deal.

Resign tomorrow, Ed.

He's being "Anthony Weiner'd". This smear tactic works on Democrats. But, if you're a "grab them by the pussy" Republican, you are rewarded with the Presidency. Shame The Stranger's smear campaign is based on allegations and no proven facts before the courts have decided.
Stay in the race Murray, and let the voters decide.
That said, Go McGinn!

@4, who knows? Cases only become cases when someone puts their hand up and makes charges.

If you don't want to be attacked for sucking as journalists then practice better journalism. It's simple.

I'm kind of curious as to how The Stranger would have preferred the Mayor to go about proclaiming his innocence.

What would that have looked like, exactly, if it hadn't included the questioning of anyone's stories of sexual abuse?

I'm still voting for Murray because I don't like the vibes...this ganging up on a wounded animal.

There are a few decent people here, commenting.

As to the Stranger staff, fuck you.

What courage, Stranger writers! Post your op/ed HOURS after the rumors started flying that Murray will announce he's pulling out of the race. Cowards. This is just one more reason why your sad paper is dying this slow painful death.

My deepest annoyance with the Stranger is the knee-jerk tendency of its editorial staff. You will attack your own kind with alacrity while mediating any response to those you ostensibly oppose.

You attacked Cindy Sheehan as a traitor while offering Bush deference on the issue of the Iraq invasion. You were wrong, and while you recanted years later, it was not until thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians died in a conflict you were all too eager to cheer on from the sidelines.

In the 2016 election, more than half of registered, eligible voters declined to vote in the general election. Fewer than 1% supported Jill Stein, whom you targeted (you also targeted the voters, which is a strange way to convince them to support your position) for abuse. Rather than attack the uninspiring candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties, you decided to blame the fourth place finisher and the electorate. Incidentally, Stein's policies more closely approximate the very things your editorials regularly call for. Again, you reserve your most bitter poisons not for your enemies, but your friends.

Now here we see you calling for the sack of a gay man accused of sexually predatory behavior by people who have no evidence to substantiate their claims. Half of your editorial staff are gay, and no doubt have some experience with being labelled a sexual predator, which is an old trope that has been used to attack gay men across this country since before we even were a country. You could take a courageous stand against this stereotype, the way we counter the perception of all Black men as violent or criminal, or all women as idiotic or deceptive. Instead, you gleefully turn your guns on your own kind. Yet again.

Please stop.

The gay community's worst enemies are not the openly bigoted. They make no pretense as to who they are, and everyone can see them coming. Our worst enemies are our own people, who have a bizarre need to turn on one another at the first hint of trouble.

With friends like the Stranger staff, who needs enemies?

Circular firing squad. Not that we don't deserve it!

I'm stumped why any sane person would even want to be mayor of Seattle, since it's an open invitation to character assassination and a political lynching.

No one has done more or worked harder to advance LGBT rights legislatively in this state than Ed Murray, and this is the thanks he gets. Oh, Jeezuth Chrith.

The Connellys win again. This time hiding behind Lincoln Beauregard. Sickening.

Remember the days when you were innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? Yeah, apparently those days are gone.

Fuck you Stranger...you are beyond hope and the reason the left is rapidly becoming as pathetic as the extreme right.

Just to add to the dog pile of criticism against the Stranger here:

Although Mr. Beauregard himself has no documented history of homophobic activism before now, he is an associate at a firm that does have a history of homophobia. As an associate at the firm, he takes whatever work the firm assigns him or he resigns. If the work assignment includes a homophobic hit job, Mr. Beauregard must either take the hit job or resign. This time, he has chosen to take the hit job, as evinced by his lurid court filings aimed at humiliating Mayor Murray, conduct for which Mr. Beauregard was just disciplined by the court. The Stranger lets him off the hook too easily. He may not personally be a homophobe, but he is willing to engage in homophobic conduct on orders from his boss.

Also, although the Stranger raises an important point about not holding people's criminal records against them unfairly, this particular accuser's criminal record includes instances of fraud, identity theft, forgery, and false reporting—all crimes that involve lying to advance the liar's own interests. The Stranger is right that merely having a criminal history doesn't necessarily indicate that a person is a liar, but having a criminal history OF LYING probably does indicate that a person may be willing to fabricate when it suits his purposes.

RIP, The Stranger.
Bad enough that what was once a ballsy alternative newspaper has become an endless dribble of ten-bests and television recaps.
Bad enough that you've suffered a major exodus of great writers over the last couple of years.
But now, with this editorial, you've placed yourselves below the level even of the Seattle Times.
To be clear: I have no beef for or against Mayor Murray, but have been astonished at this whole witch hunt, and at the way the local press has appointed itself judge, jury, and executioner. You say you're not judging as to guilt or innocence? That's pure bullshit.
Did Murray once pay for blow jobs? I have no idea. The point is, neither do you.
#20 has it on the nail: this is pathetic.
I was proud of my genius award. It meant a lot to me. Now? Not so much.
Who do I hand it back to?

One other thing: your advertisers are a great guide for businesses NOT to patronize.

I have no opinion if he has been a good mayor or not. However he looks like a creeper and these accusations aint going away so he needs to go. Its sad that your career can be ended if you are unattractive and a few people accuse you of some shit that may or may not have happened but its reality. This wouldn't be an issue for Gavin Newsome.

@22 "Bad enough that what was once a ballsy alternative newspaper has become an endless dribble of ten-bests and television recaps."

This. It's been a sad decline, but I guess that is what the new tech overlords of "Cap Hill" want.

@24 makes the best and most applicable points.

@16: You state the accusers have "no evidence whatsoever" to substantiate their claims. What, in the context of a sexual assault allegation, does that statement even mean? The fact that they did not preserve a sample of the mayor's semen? I'll have you know that, in every court in the land, four people going under oath to tell roughly the same story is evidence that the story is true.

Any chance of the Stranger updating this to reflect the fact that Murray has dropped out? Actually, I guess the bigger question is whether the Stranger editors are aware that Murray has dropped out.

Murray was a very mediocre at best mayor. He compares disfavorably to Paul Schell. Even before the scandal broke, he was the worst Mayor of Seattle that I can remember (Starting w/ Norm Rice). Hopefully The Stranger will learn from their mistakes that led them to endorse Murray as well as someone like Erin Jones (essentially, ignoring policy in leiu of ticking off some identity checkbox - an ideology that the Stranger has traditionally shared with Trump voters)

@33 but SJW's, the radical right and radical left certainly take it seriously.

Remember the days when you were innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? Yeah, apparently those days are gone.

I'm sorry, when was that?

@35 "innocent until proven guilty" is referring to criminal charges, which could result in jail time. For criminal cases the standard for the jury is "beyond a reasonable doubt."

For a civil case like this, where a win by the plaintiff bringing the suit would result in some kind of money award which the defendant would be ordered to pay, the standard of proof for a jury is "preponderance of the evidence," basically "more likely than not", or "over 50%" likely to be true. Before hand the plaintiff has to satisfy the court that they could win based on the evidence they will present at trial. At some point (I haven't been following the litigation status of the suit against Murray) Murray's attorney will make a motion to the court that the plaintif cannot win based on the evidence the plaintiff says he will offer in court. At that point the judge could dismiss the suit.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is not a legal issue here. But it is a political one. Clearly a lot of political operatives and moneymen have told Murray he's lost enough of the "public jury's" support that he can't win, so they too have withdrawn their support.

When it comes to witnesses, that is to say "anyone who will testify in court", the issue is not the motives of their attorney, but whether the witness has a motive to lie. In a suit for money, the plaintiff who gives evidence can always be painted as not credible based on their money objective. The problem for Murray here in the public arena is that those old accusers have no obvious reason to lie right now, or at least no reason to put themselves in the public eye. Speaking up is likely to cause them way more hassles in their current lives than having it not come up at all. If they had been dishonest in their previous stories, one could suppose that they are speaking out just to be consistent, but absent a money motive now, it seems just as likely that something really did happen to them and it is important to them to simply tell their story, which, if true, was not believed under the conditions that existed when they first told it many years ago.

I don't like Murray so I'm biased, and also don't have to come to any conclusions about these accusations as they relate to how I would vote. But there is ample information for a fence sitter to conclude the stories are "more likely than not" truthful. I guess the problem from a political perspective is that lots of Democratic voters won't apply a standard that rigid and, instead, to vote for someone they would apply a standard requiring that the stories be "more likely than not" unbelievable. Juries can often be cajoled into applying the standard the court tells them to apply, but in our ordinary lives we get to apply whatever standard of truth or acceptable levels of risk we want to. If this were a Republican city and Murray was accused of abusing young women when he was younger, it might not matter because Republicans as we now know often respond favorably to evidence of dominance and abuse, especially of women, but Seattle isn't a Republican city, so Murray doesn't have so much wiggle room.

@9: Except Weiner was so obviously guilty of everything he did, and was creeping on 15 year olds.

I seem to remember Bill Clinton accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and he seems to be doing OK, even though by the logic displayed here he MUST be a rapist since multiple people accused him of it.

@37 I think people put the pieces together: Clinton was a powerful, charismatic man who slept with adult women. There is a scale to the amount of "power dynamic". A teenager might not feel they have a reasonable choice; I suspect most of us, on some level, assume that the women Bill Clinton was with at least had a right to make their own decision, even if it was a bad one.