Milpitas city attorney under fire for offensive tweets

A Milpitas official is raising concerns about a series of offensive tweets from the city attorney, who claims his account was hacked.

Councilmember Anthony Phan said Twitter posts from City Attorney Michael Mutalipassi that were made 13 years ago are misogynistic. The tweets from 2009 and 2010 include misogynist comments on rape and female body parts, including replies to other users such as “Martinis are like boobs, one is not enough and three is two many.”

“When you have an executive level employee or official that is responsible for a lot of important decisions and is in a huge position of power, they should speak to these remarks that they made,” Phan told San José Spotlight. “The people need to know, is this how they still feel?”

Mutalipassi claims he isn’t responsible for the tweets. He said his Yahoo email account that’s linked to his Twitter account was part of a large hack some years ago. The hack likely compromised his login credentials for Twitter, he said, which he’d used mainly for following news articles before attempting to deactivate it last year.

“These are not expressions of my opinions on life,” Mutalipassi told San José Spotlight. “These are expressions of somebody else’s opinions on life.”

Mutalipassi said when he changed his passwords after the hack, he didn’t think to change his Twitter password because “it’s not something I use.”

“Somebody was having some fun at my expense,” he said.

Mutalipassi was appointed city attorney of Milpitas last April. He previously served as the assistant city attorney for Salinas for six years after graduating from the Hastings College of Law out of University of California, San Francisco in 2010.

The city attorney said the tweets do not represent his views, and that he is offended by them. Phan said it’s important to hear this type of clarification from a high-ranking city official.

“This ‘locker room talk’ is unacceptable, and it really reinforces a dangerous culture,” Phan said. “As a soon-to-be father of a girl, I don’t want my child growing up in a world where she’s subjected to this kind of misogyny in our society.”

Contact Sonya Herrera at [email protected] or follow @SMHsoftware on Twitter.