A mayor barely old enough to buy his own beer has been removed from office after just 10 months following a string of scandals.
Jayden Williams was just 22 years old when he became mayor of Stockbridge, Georgia, back in January, reportedly making him the youngest mayor in Georgia history.
‘You knew he was 18, you knew he was in high school, you’d offered to be his mentor, and you’d floated the possibility of hiring him for a job.’
But his term did not last long.
On Saturday, the Stockbridge City Council held a 10-hour hearing about Williams’ alleged misconduct. By Sunday, the city announced that he had been “removed from office.”
His ouster likely came as no surprise. Back in July, the city council voted to suspend his access to city-owned credit cards, vehicles, and nonpublic buildings as well as to restrict his coordination of city communications, “pending the outcome of an independent investigation previously authorized by the Council.”
That investigation involved allegations that Williams had misused city funds, damaged a city vehicle, and exchanged explicit messages and nude photos with a high school student.
He has not been charged with any crime.
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Williams, now 23, claimed he accidentally used a city credit card for making a personal purchase because the two cards looked similar. “It’s also a purple card,” he said.
Williams claimed he reimbursed the city when appropriate, Atlanta News First reported.
Williams also engaged in explicit text messages with a male high school student he had met on Instagram, according to an attorney at the hearing. Williams confirmed during his testimony that he knew the student was 18 years old at the time.
Screenshots of conversations between the young man and Williams were shared during the hearing. According to those screenshots:
- The student pledged to be Williams’ “mentee as well as friend with benefits,” to which Williams replied: “We can possibly become something more over time … for now you can just be my lil short king.”
- The student told Williams, “U had turned me overly On,” and after some back and forth, Williams said, “THIS BETTER STAY BETWEEN US TOO [sic].”
- Williams told the young man, “I want you boy.”
- Williams once joked, “I am The mayor but you didn’t care bout that last night lol.”
The two also exchanged videos and photos on Instagram. In the early morning hours of December 1, the student said in reply to a video sent by Williams, “Uu was rii[.] I prob can’t handle all dat,” with two weary or frustrated emojis.
A short time later, the young man then tells Williams, “Yo p***y lookin good asf.”
The attorney then summarized the problem with these conversations:
At the point he’s sending you a nude that afternoon and you’re … sending him sweat emojis and telling him you loved getting that nude picture, you knew he was 18, you knew he was in high school, you’d offered to be his mentor, and you’d floated the possibility of hiring him for a job.
Williams replied, “Correct.”
Williams claimed he never had “intercourse” with the young man, just one kiss, and that their “sexual” relationship was “sexual as in text-messages sexual, not physical sexual.”
Ultimately, Williams’ denials and attempts at nuance did not work. The city council voted 3-0 to remove him from office with one council member not voting and one council member excluded from voting.
Robert Kenner, Williams’ attorney, called the process a “witch hunt” and claimed everyone had already prejudged the case before it started. “I don’t think that it was based on the evidence at all,” Kenner said.
Elton Alexander, who is now serving as mayor pro tem, described removing Williams from office as a “tough decision” that brought “a fair and equitable close to multiple troubling accusations that were investigated and verified” by an independent investigator.
Williams did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
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