Deputy Who Busted Mel Sues Cops

Promotions denied officer who wouldn't hide Gibson's anti-Semitic rant
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 8, 2010 4:39 AM CDT
Deputy Who Busted Mel Sues Cops
Mel Gibson's mugshot from 2006. The deputy's lawyers note that Gibson is a friend of Sheriff Lee Baca's.   (LA County Sheriff's Department)

The deputy who busted Mel Gibson for drunk driving in 2006 says he's been passed over for promotions because he resisted a request to remove the actor's anti-Semitic remarks from his arrest report. James Mee, who is suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, says he was ordered to remove details of Gibson's slurs—including "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world"—from his initial report and put them in a supplementary report not available to the public, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Mee—who is Jewish—says he wanted to keep the slurs in his initial report to illustrate just how drunk Gibson was. He eventually complied with the request, but was blamed and investigated when the version of the report documenting Gibson's slurs was leaked to TMZ. He is still employed by the police, but he says his career has stalled since the incident, and he has been repeatedly passed over for promotions and new positions, including one in West Hollywood where he says interviewers told him they feared he'd be too harsh on celebrities.
(More Mel Gibson stories.)

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