As stated in a lawsuit put forth by a former Chicago Park District deputy general counsel who took part in a deal with an Italian American group to get permission to install a Christopher Columbus statue that would be used in a parade, Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Mayor of Chicago, exclaimed to the man, “My d*** is bigger than yours and the Italians. I have the biggest d*** in Chicago.”
The event that led to the alleged comments from Lightfoot concerned a 2020 order from the mayor, in the wake of the death of George Floyd prompting nationwide protests, to take down a pair of Christopher Columbus statues which had been in Grant Park and Little Italy’s Arrigo Park for multiple decades. “This step is about an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols,” stated Lightfoot.
Officially the statues were taken down and placed into a government storage facility owned by the city.
However, just before Columbus Day back in October of 2021, Italian-American groups from the city requested permission to display the Columbus statue on a temporary basis for the purposes of their Columbus Day parade and thought to place it last in the parade and keep it covered until the very end, read the lawsuit. The person who slammed Lightfoot and the city with the lawsuit, George Smyrniotis, and his superiors over at the Park District had agreed to the compromise, with the idea that the Park District thought it would create goodwill with groups of Italian Americans.
Lightfoot then immediately threw up a threat of pulling the permit for the entire parade.
At the meeting that took place between Park District lawyers and Lightfoot, the Mayor allegedly warned them that they would have to submit their actions to the city’s legal department for possible approval, going on to say not “to do a f***ing thing with that statute without my approval.”
“Get that f***ing statue back before noon tomorrow or I am going to have you fired. … What the f*** were you thinking? … You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians,” stated Lightfoot, as read in the lawsuit. “My d*** is bigger than yours and the Italians. I have the biggest d*** in Chicago.” The suit also alleges that Lightfoot also snapped, “You are out there stroking your d*** over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot.”
Chicago’s Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans also took time to file their own lawsuit which alleged that Park District violated a deal from 1973 when it took down the Columbus statue displayed in Little Italy. The representative for the group, Enrico Mirabelli, stated to the Chicago Tribune, “Presuming the mayor has been accurately quoted, her comments give proof to the claim that she has wrongfully interfered with my client’s contract with the Chicago Park District in a degree that is unprecedented.”
Ron Onesti, the president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, parroted that he was “literally outraged that someone in her position would ever use words like that to refer to any group of individuals. When will it end with the disrespect?”