To What Length Will Chicago’s Fawning Media Go to Protect Kim Foxx?

Chaos reigns in Cook County prosecutor’s office

Under fire for her administration’s refusal to charge offenders in two murders, Chicago media appears to be trying desperately, and failing, to protect one of the most radical and depraved prosecutors in the country.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx earned the ire of the general public and Chicago police when she refused to charge an offender in connection with the August murder of seven-year-old of Serenity Broughton. Detectives, many of them with decades of experience putting together murder cases that stood up in court and resulted in convictions, were unable to get prosecutors under Foxx to approve felony charges against a suspect in Broughton's death. At the time police investigators brought charges, Foxx’s prosecutors put police through a gauntlet of ever-increasing demands and harassment under the guise of evidence gathering in what most detectives believe is now standard operating procedure for Foxx’s office.  

And so it wasn’t such a surprise that Foxx declined to approve felony charges in another chilling incident in Chicago’s gang-infested Austin neighborhood. On October 1, a carload of Four Corner Hustlers confronted and opened fire on a rival faction on the 1200 block of North Mason. Caught on film, the brief gun battle between members of the two competing wings of the gang ended with one the attackers dead and two others injured. This exchange of gunfire unfolded right in front of Chicago police officers.

As immune as Foxx is from shame as she is accountability, Foxx responded to the legitimate outrage of police, the public, and even, incredibly, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, in typical fashion. Foxx went on the offensive, holding a press conference and issuing statements in which she employed what is by now a common mix of legal mumbo jumbo, self-righteous pandering and progressive jargon.

Oh, in what appeared to be a feigning attempt at actually expressing concern about violent crime, Foxx called for a meeting with Mayor Lightfoot.

What for? Mayor Lightfoot cannot prosecute crimes. One wonders if the meeting was geared for Foxx to remind the mayor of a central law governing Chicago, that both Foxx and Lightfoot are both progressives and progressives stick together above any pesky obligations to sworn duty?

By now it is apparent to anyone above the fifth grade and a modicum of honesty that Foxx is not only one of the most ideologically driven prosecutors in the country but also woefully incompetent for even the simplest duties within her office. Foxx’s only strength lies outside herself: The utter culpability and collusion of the Chicago media machine.

Deflection is one common method the media employs to protect Foxx. The failure to impose charges in both murder cases revealed this tactic. Chicago media aided Foxx by “covering” the pathetic war of words that have arisen between Foxx and Lightfoot, who finally stood up and called out Foxx for not prosecuting criminals. In doing so, the ever-tweeting but never investigating “reporters” avoided the more dire evidence that Foxx’s refusal to press charges in the two murder cases is the tip of her proverbial iceberg of corruption.

A strict code of silence by Chicago’s media is also employed to protect Foxx. There are several other cases of far worse conduct by Foxx than these two murder cases. Of them, one stands out above a host of others, the 1994 rape and murder of Antwinica Bridgeman. A gruesome crime, Bridgeman’s badly decomposed body was found in the basement of a South Side home with a metal pole impaled in her vagina. Bridgeman had been beaten so badly, remnants of a cinder block used to strike her head were discovered in her stomach.

Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton were convicted the of the heinous murder, but they jumped on bandwagon of activists, attorneys, and the media who claimed the men were the victim of abuse and that he had been coerced into confessing to the crime. Their claims were purportedly bolstered by DNA tests that revealed the semen taken from Bridgeman’s undergarments belonged to another man, a serial rapist.

More than anything, it was the one-sided media coverage of Coleman’s case that gave his exoneration claims momentum. Among the loudest media voices, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn and reporter Greg Pratt stood out. In a 2017 column, Zorn claimed there was “overwhelming” evidence of Coleman and Fulton’s innocence and that he should be freed from prison.

Writing in November 2017, Zorn declared:

"Yet you’re [Foxx] allowing Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton to continue to rot in prison in the face of overwhelming new evidence that they are innocent of a 1994 rape and murder in the Englewood neighborhood."‍

‍

Overwhelming evidence?

In May, attorneys representing the detectives in a federal lawsuit by Coleman demanding compensation for his “wrongful conviction” made a shocking claim in a motion. They said that even Foxx’s top prosecutors didn’t believe Coleman was innocent, that the top prosecutors initially wanted to retry him for the murder, and that they didn’t believe the detectives did anything nefarious in their investigation. They discounted the DNA from another man as evidence that Coleman and Fulton were innocent.

In their motion, attorneys representing detectives wrote:‍

"In fact,  the  CCSAO  has  made  it  abundantly  clear it  did  not conclude Plaintiffs [Coleman and Fulton] were innocent.  During discovery, the parties were given access to the decision-making process that occurred among the highest-ranking members of the CCSAO. The consensus among them was that Plaintiffs are in fact guilty of the crime…Not only did [prosecutors]  conclude that Plaintiffs [Coleman and Fulton] are likely guilty, but they and the same group with whom they discussed the case also concluded the confessions were not the result of coercion or misconduct."

‍

‍Well how ‘bout that? Looks like the top prosecutors in the city, the ones who painstakingly reviewed the entire case, did not get Eric Zorn’s memo about “overwhelming evidence.” In a city with a vibrant, independent media, such a motion in federal court would set off an investigative frenzy trying to figure out why Kim Foxx released two men for the rape and murder of a young woman when even her top staff members concluded the men were not only guilty but that the detectives did nothing wrong.

Someone in the media aside from Contrarian might also have confronted Eric Zorn with his claims about “overwhelming evidence” in light of the city attorneys’ motion in federal court.

Be that as it may, Eric Zorn did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the motion.

This, however, is not the end of the story. The motion was filed in federal court in May. Just a month earlier, Zorn appeared on Fox 32's “Flannery Fired Up” hosted by Mike Flannery. During the broadcast, Zorn bemoaned the criticism he has received for his controversial writing about another infamous wrongful conviction case, the exoneration of Anthony Porter in 1999. Zorn was one of the most vocal media figures supporting the release of Porter for a 1982 double murder on the South Side.

Since Porter was released, the case has been turned upside down, former top prosecutor Anita Alvarez assailing the manner by which Porter’s advocates garnered his release and obtained the confession from another man, Alstory Simon. Alvarez released Simon from prison in 2014.

In the Flannery broadcast, Zorn claimed he was interested in getting to the truth of the case:

“I’ve been personally attacked…I am interested in the truth coming out too. I’m not afraid of it. I’d like to hear it, and, again I think it is important for the final record to be written.”

‍

Zorn made these comments on the Porter case in April. A month later, city attorneys file a motion based on depositions from Foxx’s top prosecutors, who, the city attorneys allege, admitted they thought Coleman and Fulton were guilty and the detectives did nothing wrong.

Zorn, Pratt, and the Tribune have not printed a word about this motion so categorically rejecting the paper’s narrative about the murder case, based, the attorneys say, on the statements of the prosecutors themselves. Where then is the drive to get to the truth out in the Coleman-Fulton murder case Zorn claims he wants so badly in the Porter case?

And how powerfully does the media silence about the stunning allegations in the Nevest Coleman-Darrel Fulton federal lawsuit go to protect Kim Foxx and prevent her from facing the media investigations she so richly deserves?

To these seminal questions, the Chicago media maintains a powerful silence, not even a “no comment.”