Bernard Parks Called Me Dumb

Earlier in my career as an attorney, I represented three high-level management personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department. They were suing the LAPD because, essentially, they had been screwed over by then Chief of Police Bernard Parks. (Parks was elected to the Los Angeles City Council shortly after the same entity refused to extend his contract with the LAPD.) I was taking Parks' deposition at City Hall under time constraints, of course. Parks was not exactly fond of testifying under oath and he often placed time and location restrictions on depositions of him. This was not my first time taking his deposition, and certainly my office had questioned him on numerous occasions previously. I had been warned that he was neither forthcoming nor friendly. Big deal. In the three or four years of practicing law, I had learned that almost no one is forthcoming or completely honest during a deposition. The oath administered at the outset of each deposition is comprised, after all, only of words. Rarely does anyone ever follow through with the threat of perjury charges and all. (Tell that to former President Bill Clinton, right!) I arrived at the deposition early (I am notoriously burdened with punctuality), met my clients in the waiting room, and began the deposition with my usual script. Blah, blah, blah. A captain and a commander at my side, I asked Parks all about his propensity for retaliating against those who disagree with him. I asked him about my clients and their dedication to the department and why Parks had refused to promote them despite their obvious qualifications. I was almost half way through my outline of questions when I began to ask Parks about certain aspects of the Civil Service promotion process, a complicated set of bureaucratic rules purportedly established to protect against favoritism and cronism in government assignments. Parks answered my question as methodically as possible. The details aren't important except that I didn't understand what he was saying. I'm a fairly intelligent person and a hell of a listener but I didn't get it. I repeated the question, asked him to explain again the complicated details of the promotion process and he did so in the most condescending voice he could muster. I still didn't understand. I looked over to my client who whispered an explanation in my left ear that I couldn't really hear. Parks leaned over to speak to his New York- born attorney, a brash woman who nobody at my office liked but who appealed to the ball buster in me. She asked him to repeat his answer as a courtesy to me. He raised his hands in frustration and said something that I did not hear. My client, however, did and informed me in the kindest of manners that Parks said I was too dumb to understand and there was no point in repeating his answer. We went back on the record and I asked Parks whether my client had accurately represented his comment about me. The attorney objected on the ground that the comment made by Parks was protected by the attorney client privilege. I changed the subject and moved on. There was no need to belabor the issue. There was no need for confirmation. We all knew it to be true. Parks had called me dumb and I was thrown by it.