Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke came clean on May 1 after she previously disclosed that she had no criminal record. Ms. Clarke admitted that she was arrested in 2006 but chose not to divulge the information as it had been erased from her record.
Ms. Clarke testified in 2021 before a Senate committee that she had never been arrested or accused of committing a violent crime. It later emerged that she was involved in a domestic dispute with her then-husband, Reginald Avery, which led him to suffer a serious knife injury.
According to court documents cited by the Daily Signal on April 30, the incident resulted in Ms. Clarke’s arrest in Maryland in 2006.
Mr. Avery told the Daily Signal that his ex-wife cut his finger to the bone after he confessed to having been unfaithful to her.
Mr. Avery shared information with the American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones in a text message in May 2021, where he explained that he was seeing another woman but admitted he was partly to blame for what happened.
“I was seeing another woman. She (Kristen Clarke) was angry. Attacked me with a knife. I instinctively grabbed it. As I said earlier, I’m not blameless.”
“That’s the story,” he went to say. “That’s what happened. She went to jail.”
Ms. Clarke offered a statement to CNN, where she revealed that she was not required to disclose the incident, adding that she suffered many years of abuse and domestic violence by her husband.
“This was a terrorizing and traumatizing period that I have sought to put behind me to promote my personal health, healing, and well-being. The physical and emotional scars, the emotional abuse and exploitation, and the lying are things that no woman or mother should ever have to endure,” according to Ms. Clarke.
“When given the option to speak about such traumatic incidents in my life, I have chosen not to. I didn’t believe during my confirmation process and I don’t believe now that I was obligated to share a fully expunged matter from my past.”
According to records by the Prince George’s County Police Department, someone at Mr. Avery’s and Ms. Clarke’s Maryland home contacted police nine separate times between May 2003 and December 2007.
The call in which Mr. Avery allegedly reported the 2006 incident was accompanied by a 760 arrest clearance code. The other calls also related to threats and domestic violence but were not investigated further.
Despite Ms. Clarke’s claims that she was not required to disclose the incident when asked during her confirmation, she received criticism for apparently lying before the Senate.
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) argued that as a result of her lies, she should resign from her position.
“Kristen Clarke is in charge of enforcing civil rights laws. She enforces those laws aggressively against anyone who sneezes near an abortion clinic. And not at all against those who vandalize churches. She lied under oath during her confirmation proceedings, and should resign,” he wrote in a post on social media platform X.
However, Ms. Clarke has not given any indication about a possible resignation.
“As I have done at every stage of my career as a life-long public servant, I will continue working to ensure that we carry out our work in a way that centers the experiences and needs of crime victims,” she said.
NTD contacted Ms. Clarke’s office for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
