Audio: Mayor Fouts allegedly mocks person with disabilities in latest leaked recording

Warren Mayor Jim Fouts mimicked a person with disabilities in a phone call with a telemarketer, according to the source of a newly released audio recording.

“I want trip now,” Fouts allegedly tells the telemarketer, speaking in a stilted voice. “I got letter. It say I get trip now.”

The source of the audio recording said Fouts made the prank phone call during a staff meeting in a conference room at city hall sometime between 2013 and 2015. By mocking a person with disabilities, Fouts was trying to get his staff to laugh, the source said.

“How much are taxes gonna be? I got no money,” says the voice in the recording, purported to be Fouts.

In the phone call, he claimed his wife is a retired janitor and their home is in foreclosure.


The source alleges Fouts “was pretending he was mentally challenged and not that smart and couldn’t understand the basic facts of this telemarketing scheme while using a voice associated with someone who is mentally challenged.”

It’s just the latest audio recording in which Fouts allegedly made racist, sexist, or ageist remarks.

In other recordings, Fouts allegedly compared Black people to “chimps” and used the N-Word called older women “hateful dried-up cunts,” mocked people with disabilities, said he wanted to have sex with “an abused woman," threatened to shoot his former chief of staff “through the fucking head,” called Rick Santorum’s daughter who has a disability a “mongoloid baby,” boasted about the ease of picking up teenage prostitutes in Amsterdam, and complained about Black people calling 911 too often.

Fouts, who didn’t return a call for comment, has repeatedly claimed the recordings are sophisticated fakes.

Audio experts have disagreed, and when under oath in an August 2019 deposition, Fouts refused to say whether the recordings were authentic.

Despite the offensive recordings, Fouts remains popular in Warren. In November 2019, Fouts won a fourth term as mayor.

Fouts’ popularity in the face of the vile recordings was the subject of a VICE story in October 2019.

In December 2016. Fouts was fired from his weekly show on 910AM Superstation after allegedly making repulsive remarks about people with disabilities.

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