Tim Page, the Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic for The Washington Post, apologized for calling Washington, D.C. Council member Marion Barry a "crack addict." Barry was videotaped in 1990, during his third term as mayor, smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room during an FBI sting. He served a six-month prison sentence.
"Must we hear about it every time this crack addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new -- and typically half-witted -- political grandstanding? I'd be grateful if you would take me off your mailing list. I cannot think of anything the useless Marion Barry could do that would interest me in the slightest, up to and including overdose," Page wrote in an email Barry's aide, Andre Johnson, last week after receiving an unsolicited press release, reported the Washington Post.
Said Page in an email to TV station WUSA 9NEWS NOW: "This is the stupidest thing I've written in 30 years in journalism. I consider myself a kind and courteous person and this note was neither. I have no excuse and I couldn't take any pleasure in anything about this. Again it doesn't represent the Post or anybody who would ever write about Mister Barry."
Page was placed on leave by Post after Barry complained angrily and demanded the critic's firing along with an apology. Page plans to take a previously scheduled four-month leave starting Jan. 1.
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