BERNIE BLASTS 'LOWLIFE' ACCUSER
By STEVE DUNLEAVY, NY POST, December 28, 2004

December 28, 2004 -- EMBATTLED Bernie Kerik won't complain and won't explain about the step down from Homeland Security - but he will come out swinging with both karate hands against a man he calls "a lowlife."

The man he is talking about is Terrence Skinner, 43, a former Department of Correction official, who claims Kerik turned the agency into "the Department of Corruption."

"This man is truly a lowlife, who I truly had to reprimand and suspend on the most serious of charges," Kerik told me.

"Published reports say I promoted him. While I was there my administration might have, but suspension was just about the worst I could do to him, and I allege he committed some fairly bad cases of judgment.

"Whatever the truth is, there is a paralyzed woman who shot herself in the head in a wheelchair today in Florida whose parents claim [whose plight is] a direct result of Mr. Skinner's action."

Kerik was referring to claims made in a promotion review that Skinner raped a Correction Department officer. Skinner has denied the allegation, made by a friend of the woman, and was never charged.

Skinner told The Post earlier that a Correction Department lawyer apologized to him after the allegation was aired during the review.

Kerik also said with some incredulity that Skinner once held a "mock" emergency in a jail in Brooklyn and gave inmates batons to re-enact a real-life riot.

"He actually gave clubs to inmates? I didn't know this until after the fact. Outrageous."

Kerik, over an espresso at Langan's, was insistent:

"Look, I don't cry, I don't whine. Let everything take its course and a pile-on is normal. I'm not going to embarrass (Skinner's) family with what I allege. Let him come forward and explain to all the reporters why I suspended him. Let him tell his family and say the allegations were false."

Kerik is adamant in his demand to know why Skinner has surfaced with these allegations at this time.

"Why didn't Skinner come forth when I was commissioner of correction, why didn't he come forth when I was police commissioner, why didn't he come forth after 9/11?" Kerik asked.

"I have this terrible feeling that nobody wants to hurt me, but wants to try and hurt Rudy Giuliani, one of the most decent, most loyal, most brave, most honest men in this city. I'm a nobody. A humble nobody."

Now what about allegations that Kerik fiddled with statistics as correction commissioner to show that jail violence was down under his watch?

"The violence reduction study from 1998-2000 was analyzed by the Manhattan Institute and the JFK School of Government at Harvard for months. Let Mr. Skinner answer them."