Sex Scandal Roundup

Left: Andrew Frey courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Right: Chris Carney, Bend Police.

People having sex isn’t “news.” Sex is how our species survives, after all. Sex scandals make the headlines when the sex is had in awkward places, with ill-chosen or inappropriate people, including, as it turns out, one’s own self. That’s when sex makes the pages of not just tabloid news but the rarified newsprint (and websites, for endless sharing) of The Oregonian and The Register-Guard.

Finding sex in EW, however, is a weekly occurrence for readers of our back pages, but that’s not scandal; that’s dating and advice.

Oregon’s top sex scandal this year is, hands down, the man we like to call the “Tasered masturbator.” It would seem that Andrew Frey of Beaverton, after doing a little meth, headed on over to Iggy’s Bar & Grill in Salem where, The O reports, “A bartender told authorities that Frey exposed his genitals and started masturbating at the bar.” By the time a sheriff’s deputy arrived on scene, “Frey had moved from the bar to the bathroom, but reportedly had not stopped pleasuring himself.”

Not only did Frey not stop “pleasuring himself,” it took 15 more deputies to arrest him after multiple zaps from a Taser had no effect. Frey later said he had no memory of what happened.

Less electric in nature, was the downfall of now-former Multnomah County chair Jeff Cogen, whose extramarital affair was doggedly reported on by both The Oregonian and Willamette Week. Cogen was, until that point, a rising political star. But these days a little sex and drugs is not career-ending. The O reports that Cogen’s paramour Sonia Manhas said, “Cogen was a near-daily marijuana user who also used ecstasy and cocaine.” The alleged pot use occurred before parades, according to a Department of Justice report, which also quotes Manhas as calling Cogen a “dead head.”

Adding to the drama of taking a puff before watching parades was the news that, apparently with Cogen’s help, Manhas, who worked in the Multnomah County Health Department, was able to push her own dreadful agenda: things like “calorie counts on large chain restaurant menus and a countywide ban on Sippy cups and other items made with the chemical compound BPA.”

On Oregon’s east side, January’s most newsworthy sex scandal was the Bend cop who quit after an investigation began into his alleged sex with a journalist and three city of Bend employees, according to the Bend Bulletin. Sadly, the wire report the R-G ran contained only the dry details, while readers of the original story in the Bulletin were treated to descriptions of the antics of Bend Police public information officer Lt. Chris Carney, such as, “he was insubordinate, untruthful, and he had sexual relationships on duty, in various locations in the police station, the east substation and in public areas.”

The Bulletin further reported that an investigator found “Carney admitted to having sex in his office at the police department and in a hotel at a training conference funded by the department.”

Lane County is last but not least when it comes to hooking up at conferences and sordid love lives hitting headlines. After Lane County Administrator Liane Richardson was fired for playing with her pay, it was alleged that there might have been some other playing around as well while she was working for the county.

As the R-G put it, Richardson may have “formed an unusual relationship with a Eugene police officer,” and the paper wrote that Richardson’s husband alleged that while she was administrator she went on a ride-along with the officer in “his city-owned police vehicle and having sex with him during his work hours in a county-owned building.”

The R-G again left out the details in its reporting, so EW felt compelled to reveal in our own story that according to the ex, the officer and Richardson “had sex on the floor of the armory on his sweatshirt.”

The scandal, like the devil, is often in the details. ™

A Note From the Publisher

Dear Readers,

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