Mel Gibson’s 2006 arrest by a Jewish sheriff’s deputy on drunk driving charges is back in the news, on top of domestic violence allegations against the 54-year-old actor.
The deputy, James Mee, filed a law suit last year against his employer, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, claiming that he had been repeatedly passed over for promotion and endured harassment for reporting Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant during the arrest.
Sheriff Lee Baca’s office asked that the suit be dismissed, but on Tuesday (2/22) a judge refused to do so and the trial is now set for September.
More than four years ago, when Gibson was stopped in Malibu on suspicion of driving under the influence, he asked Mee “Are you a Jew?” and then spouted that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
Mee included these remarks in his initial report, to illustrate how drunk the actor was, but said his superiors told him to put the Gibson slurs in a separate report, locked away from public scrutiny.
The deputy, who still works for the sheriff’s office, agreed to the separate report, but a Hollywood celebrity web site quickly made its content public.
Mee was suspected of leaking the report, “because he is Jewish,” said his attorney, Yael Trock.
A sheriff’s spokesman denied Mee’s allegations of retaliation and ethnic discrimination.
In the meanwhile, tabloids are having a field day with a case involving Gibson and his voluptuous Russian ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, mother of their year-old daughter Lucia.
District attorney’s prosecutors are now weighing whether to charge Gibson with domestic violence or Grigorieva with extortion, or both.
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