Oct 17
2024
Mayoral hopeful enlists advisor with checkered past
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Six years ago Kevin O’Brien’s career as a sought-after Democratic political strategist appeared to be over, consumed by a sexual harassment scandal that cost him his job as a top aide to then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Today O’Brien, 42, is in Buffalo. He’s advising Garnell Whitfield, the former fire commissioner who is expected to announce his candidacy for Buffalo mayor sometime after next month’s general election.
“He’s nationally experienced,” Whitfield told Investigative Post. “He’s not from here. He’s not part of the status quo here. He brings fresh eyes to the problems of this city.”
Garnell Whitfield. Photo provided by WKBW.
He also brings his troubled past.
In February 2018 O’Brien was quietly forced to resign as de Blasio’s acting chief of staff, after an internal investigation substantiated allegations by two women on the mayor’s staff that he’d sexually harassed them at an after-work event.
When, a year later, the reason for his departure was made public by the New York Times, he was fired from the consulting firm where he’d landed. Past allegations surfaced.
In a written statement to the Times, he confessed to wrongdoing and blamed a history of alcohol abuse: “There’s no excuse for what I’ve done; I’m embarrassed and ashamed … My use of alcohol has led me to make horrible decisions.”
O’Brien grew up on Chicago’s South Side. His wife is from Western New York. They met working on Democratic campaigns, a career that took him to Montana, Washington, D.C., and eventually New York City, where he helped de Blasio win a second term in 2017.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomAfter his disgrace, he retreated to Buffalo to get sober and raise a family. He’s helping a friend run a home improvement business. He coaches youth baseball. He’s mostly stayed away from politics.
Until now.
A mutual friend introduced O’Brien to Whitfield, who retired from the fire department in 2017, then reemerged as a local and national advocate against gun violence and white supremacy after his mother, Ruth Whitfield, was killed in the May 2022 Tops massacre.
“He explained to me, the first moments after his mother was murdered, this almost immediate magnetic pull he had to continue his service,” O’Brien told Investigative Post, when asked how Whitfield drew him back into politics.
“I felt a very real, tangible connection to him, to his story and his family’s story, to the way he thinks about the future of Buffalo.”
Advising Whitfield is O’Brien’s first political job since leaving New York City. He was once a bright light among the itinerant class of political operatives. In 2013 he helped elect Democrat Steve Bullock governor of usually Republican Montana. Bullock sent O’Brien as his representative to the Democratic Governors Association in D.C. He was fired from that job for sexual harassment, too.
Whitfield hasn’t announced his candidacy for mayor. Neither have other likely candidates, including Acting Mayor Christopher Scanlon and state Sen. Sean Ryan. But all three have been recruiting support, and Whitfield registered a fundraising committee — Friends of Garnell Whitfield — with the state elections board on Oct. 8.
Scanlon, by dint of being Common Council president, became acting mayor on Tuesday, when Byron Brown resigned to take a job as head of Western Regional Off-Track Betting. Scanlon will serve as acting mayor through the end of next year. Voters will elect a new mayor next November.
Asked if he’s concerned that his past will reflect poorly on Whitfield, O’Brien said he worried more about political optics before he quit drinking. Now, he said, his past is an open book.
“There were times along the way where I was drunk and hurtful and inappropriate to people I worked with, people I had incredible respect for. I am and will forever be profoundly and deeply sorry and ashamed for that,” he said.
“I wake up every day trying to be the best person that I can be … and just thankful for the second and third and fourth chances that I’ve been afforded.”
Whitfield said he considers O’Brien’s honesty about this past and his efforts “to try to grow beyond that” a sign of strength.
“Call it forgiveness, call it redemption. I want to be a part of that,” he said.
