Look, no one wants to have family time interrupted. But a St. Louis sheriff used the occasion of a disrupting phone call during a home screening of Mulan to unload about a deputy he considered disloyal.
Sheriff Vernon Betts was already angry, apparently, at Deputy Sheriff Steve Chalmers, who failed to put up yard signs for the sheriff when he was running for the position. Betts demoted Chalmers from the Civil Process Servers Unit to Security Unit in 2020, which caused Chalmers to work nights and weekends; Chalmers filed a lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, Betts "regularly referred to Chalmers using the racial slurs 'n****r,' 'ni**a,' 'negro,' 'boy' and 'Black ass,' " The Riverfront Times reports.
A mutual connection to the sheriff and the deputy sheriff called Betts to talk about his action. However, he had the misfortune of calling during Mulan. Three minutes of the conversation were made publicly available by Riverfront Times. You can hear it below. Warning: It obviously contains racial slurs and dirty language.
In the audio, Betts says, "I’m going to do his ass worse than that when I see him on Monday. Running around the city telling everyone what done happened to his Black ass when I should have fired his Black ass." The caller asks Betts for what. "For f**king with me," he replies.
Betts has been in office since 2017. His office isn't commenting on the litigation.
No word on whether Mulan was the live-action remake or the animated original and whether that distinction would have changed the contents of the phone rant.
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