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McBride remark led to apology
By WES ALLISON and LUCY MORGAN Bill McBride, the Democratic nominee for governor, made off-color remarks about a decade ago at a gathering of Holland & Knight lawyers and apologized after some listeners were offended. Three lawyers who heard McBride's attempt at humor as he introduced a longtime friend said Thursday that his words fell flat and made many listeners uncomfortable. They said he made a crude reference to a woman's breasts and indirectly referred to a man's genitals. "Everyone had a jaw hanging down," Terry McCullough, a former Holland & Knight lawyer who was there, recalled Thursday. McBride said in an interview that he does not recall details of the incident and downplayed its significance. Some details vary in the accounts of the incident offered by several lawyers, including the year it happened and the precise words that McBride used. But three lawyers who heard McBride's remarks agreed in separate interviews on this general account of the incident: McBride was speaking on a Sunday morning in the early 1990s, the last day of an annual three-day meeting of Holland & Knight lawyers at a Tampa area resort. He told an anecdote about an old friend who was at the meeting to receive an award from the law firm. As McBride recalled their bachelor days, he recounted one expedition the men made together to Daytona Beach. He told the group that the pair passed a buxom woman, and that he yelled a crude reference to the woman's breasts. His friend later married the woman. As he told the story, McBride also suggested his friend had been more successful with women because he was better endowed. Lawyers who recounted McBride's comments this week said several lawyers at the meeting found the remarks inappropriate. They said McBride later distributed a written apology. The incident occurred about the time McBride became managing partner of Holland & Knight, the nation's seventh-largest law firm, in 1992. He has resigned from the firm to run for governor. "How can you be chasing a story that is a decade old?" he asked a St. Petersburg Times reporter this week. "I am startled that anyone would bring up anything like that," McBride continued. "The women lawyers at Holland & Knight were important to me." McBride's use of coarse language came to light as his opponent, Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, finds himself under criticism for remarks he made in an unguarded moment. At a meeting last week with Panhandle lawmakers, Bush said he has "devious plans" for a citizen initiative to reduce class sizes. He also said he had some "juicy details" about two women who were supposed to be caring for Rilya Wilson, the young Miami girl missing from the state welfare system, implying they were lesbians. Bush later said he was being sarcastic about "devious plans." He said he was just passing along information shortly after the arrests of the two women who were supposed to be caring for the Miami girl. Many lawyers who were at the Holland & Knight meeting a decade or so ago declined to discuss the incident involving McBride. They said they either feared retribution or didn't want to hurt McBride politically. But several said McBride's remarks were insensitive to women. "The next morning some of the women were saying, was that dumb? Yeah," said Linda C. Kane, a Holland & Knight partner and McBride supporter who was at the meeting. "But we knew where his heart is, and he apologized as soon as he realized." Kane was later named head of the firm's Jacksonville office, one of four women picked to run local offices under McBride, and she credits him with aggressively recruiting and promoting women. She is leaving the firm soon to teach school. Several lawyers described a "shocked silence" after McBride made the remarks, but some said the buzz soon dissipated. McCullough, who now has his own firm in Orlando, said McBride apologized later the same day. McCullough said McBride then sent a written apology to lawyers a day or two later. Christine C. Whitney, an associate lawyer at the time who is now in private practice in Jacksonville, acknowledged being surprised by McBride's remarks. She said they didn't diminish her opinion of him. "It all blew over rather quickly and was not of any lasting importance," she said. This week, McBride said he didn't "have a clue" about the remarks. He said he would write notes of apology "whenever I would say anything some thought wasn't exactly consistent . . . If I said anything that offended anybody, I never intended to do it." McBride recently criticized Bush's comments and said his own remarks were not comparable. "It was my law firm," McBride said. "My audience right now is the public of the state of Florida, and I don't say anything private I wouldn't say publicly." Several women at the firm give McBride high marks for recruiting and promoting women. They said women held virtually no leadership posts when McBride became managing partner, and the firm's male-dominated culture was in flux. In 1994, the firm launched an initiative to increase the number of female associates, partners and executives. Now, women comprise about half of the associate lawyers and nearly a fourth of the partners at Holland & Knight. Two of the four department chairs are women, as are six of the firm's 24 directors.
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From the Times state desk
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