The Brief

In an exclusive interview with LAist Studios, former Los Angeles City Council president Nury Martinez speaks publicly for the first time since she resigned nearly a year ago over a leaked audio recording that captured her making racist and disparaging remarks.

“I've thought about that particular day, God, a thousand times, if not more,” Martinez says in an interview with Antonia Cereijido, host of LAist Studios’ Imperfect Paradise. The new season of the award-winning podcast, “Nury and the Secret Tapes," begins on Wednesday, Sept. 27, and the trailer is available now.

What the podcast covers

Martinez spoke to Cereijido in a wide-ranging interview for a four-part story that looks back at the scandal and examines the political context leading up to the leaked audio tapes. She also addresses the specific language that she used about former L.A. city council member Mike Bonin’s son and her hurtful comments directed at the Black and Oaxacan communities.

The first episode will focus on the scandal itself — what was said in the room where it all happened, and how did key players in the scandal react to the tape? In the second episode, listeners will get a deep dive into Martinez’s upbringing in the San Fernando Valley and her rise to becoming one of the most powerful women in Los Angeles politics. In the third episode, Cereijido asks Martinez to answer for the comments that she made in that room.

The series features a frank conversation between Martinez and Cereijido about how her comments are connected to anti-Black racism and colorism in Latino communities. Martinez says she has not commented on the scandal since resigning as council president in October 2022 because she has been afraid that she may say something wrong and face further criticism.

“I'm not gonna lie, I am nervous,” she said in the interview. “I don't want my words to get misinterpreted.”

A complex picture

Martinez describes what her life is like now, and speaks about the other council members heard on the leaked tapes, Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León.

Bonin is also featured in the series. He shares how he felt when he first learned about the contents of the secret tapes and in particular her disparaging comments about his young son.

“I was livid that she talked about beating him down. And I was beside myself when I heard, you know, the specific comments …” Bonin says in the first episode, referring in part to Martinez’s description of his son, who is Black, as a changuito — Spanish for “little monkey.”

Throughout the series, Cereijido delves into the complex picture of what was happening behind closed doors in the Los Angeles city council leading up to the now infamous meeting, including deep divisions on the council over homelessness and the economic response to the pandemic.

The series features experts like Tanya Hernández, a Fordham University Law School professor who has written extensively about anti-Blackness among some Latinos. Hernández analyzes why Martinez’s words had the powerful effect that they did in Los Angeles.

“What the audio tapes opened up now was just how systemic and much of a pattern across the communities that this actually is,” Hernandez says. “That is the message that Latinos, Latine, Latinx can also harbor anti-Black bias and sentiment.

Listeners will also hear from Odilia Romero, the executive director of Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an Indigenous-women-led human rights nonprofit in L.A., who said the tape, “shows what we've always known as Indigenous people, that the other Mexicans have always discriminated against us.”

Cereijido also spoke with current L.A. city councilmembers Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez, and other crucial figures in Los Angeles politics who were deeply intertwined in the scandal.

“I hadn't heard the jealousy and resentment of Black people,” Harris-Dawson said of the discussion on the tapes. “That's something that they wouldn't talk about in front of me.”

About the series

Cereijido was previously the executive producer of LAist Studios, and also hosted The Barbie Tapes with MG Lord and Norco 80. Before that, she was a producer on NPR’s Latino USA. Senior producer Emily Guerin, who hosted California City, previously produced the Imperfect Paradise season focused on former L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

New episodes of “Nury and the Secret Tapes” will be available every Wednesday, starting Sept. 27, and will also be broadcast on-air at LAist 89.3 on Sundays at 7 p.m. Pacific.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
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Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.