Chicago Tea Party Leader Skips Convention After 2010 Prostitution Arrest Revealed

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Chicago Tea Party Director Stevan Stevlic decided to skip TeaCon 2011 in Schaumburg this weekend after Gawker dug up evidence of his June 2010 arrest for soliciting prostitution. The charges were dropped because he agreed to participate in a rehabilitation program, but the mugshot endures. Stevlic released a statement, via the Sun-Times:

“My family and I dealt with this matter and we’ve successfully moved forward in our relationship,” the statement said. “The charges surrounding this incident were dropped against me over a year ago and with all the issues we are facing in our country right now, I’m not sure why this deserves a headline. I hope everyone can respect my family’s privacy and I apologize for unnecessary pain this has caused my wife and family.”

Tea Party rival Catherina Wojtowicz is calling for Stevlic to resign. She splintered off from Stevlic's Tea Party group to create the Chicago Tea Party Patriots on the Southwest side. She denies being the one to tip off Gawker. In 2009 Keith Olbermann named Wojtowicz the "Worst Person in the World" after she and other tea partiers heckled a woman whose daughter had died as a result of not having health insurance.

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By Samantha Abernethy in News on October 2, 2011 2:00 PM

Comments [rss]

John

I was at TeaCon...there was no hate there.

Bruno_Behrend

I presented at TeaCon. It was packed with somewhere between 6-700 people, and there were over 175 in my breakout session. There wasn't any "hate" on display. Just a bunch of conservative citizens who have just as much of right to congregate as anyone else.

All the talk of how hateful the Tea Party is blather. I've seen more hate displayed by protesting teachers than anything I've seen at any Tea Party.

But then, that's "good hate" because it hates the right, so it's OK, huh?.

Grow up. Engage in debate.

jkenttt

Did anyone even go to Tea Con? You are reporting on who didn't go to Tea Con, so who else didn't go?

jongraef

I know I'm late to the party here, but I realized that I interviewed this dude about a year ago for a school project. Weird...

tomdarch

How long until the commercial media stops with the BS narrative that the Tea Party brand of the Republican party is "small government" or vaguely Libertarian? They may be "small government" when it comes to other people's government services and safety net, but they're very, very big government when it comes to a punitive approach to social conservative and immigration issues. They're just the same rotten core of the Republican party that's been there since the party decided to adopt the "Southern Strategy" in the late 60s to attract racists and to bring in the fundamentalists in the late 70s through the 80s, thinking that they could control the "snake-handling, bible-thumping rubes." The country club and Wall Street types have lost control, and now you've got these imbeciles in power claiming that a Federal debt default would be a good thing...

I can only hope that we're seeing a national repeat of what happened here in Illinois when the moderate wing of the Republican party imploded (George Ryan going to jail and Rack Ryan dropping out of the senate race) the proto-Tea Party wing took over bringing in Alan Keyes and they failed miserably across the state. On the down side, that era brought us Governor Blago, but if a national repeat of that pattern avoids a President Bachmann or a President Perry, it will be worth the side-effects.