Mayor Rich Dupree is pictured on Thursday, September 19, 2024, at his office in Pineville, Louisiana.
Brittany Poston Meschell is pictured Thursday, September 19, 2024, in Pineville, Louisiana.
Mayor Rich Dupree is pictured on Thursday, September 19, 2024, at his office in Pineville, Louisiana.
Brittany Poston Meschell is pictured Thursday, September 19, 2024, in Pineville, Louisiana.
In August, an anonymous person on Facebook posted a report by Pineville’s city attorney in which the mayor and his chief of staff acknowledged they had affairs with the same underling.
In September, Rich Dupree announced he would resign as Pineville’s mayor the following month.
Now, city officials appear to have reached closure in the sex scandal that has roiled the heavily Christian town in central Louisiana.
This week the Pineville City Council agreed to pay $188,500 to the former city employee, Brittany Poston Meshell, to settle her workplace complaint.
“In exchange for payment of this amount, Ms. Meshell will release all claims of any type against the city and its current and former employees,” wrote Mark Vilar, a Pineville lawyer who serves as the city’s attorney.
Joe Bishop, who took office in November, said the agreement allows the city to move forward and close a difficult chapter in its history.
“I’m not about to waste the taxpayers’ money in paying attorneys when Rich Dupree and Doug Gann both admitted guilt,” Bishop said Thursday. Gann was Dupree’s chief of staff.
Poston Meshell, 34, told her story to The Times-Picayune | The Advocate in September.
She said she was married at 15, pregnant at 16 and divorced at 18. She was 25 when she received her high school degree from online studies.
Supported by student loans, she obtained an undergraduate degree from LSU-Alexandria in psychology in 2021 when she was 31. She’s now halfway through getting a masters in counseling from an online university, she added, and works for a private company now. She recently remarried.
Her Baton Rouge-based attorney, Robert Landry, said Brittany can’t comment on the settlement until it has been finalized.
The shocking story shattered the image that Pineville had been cultivating in recent years as a safe, homey place to live across the Red River from Alexandria.
According to Poston Meshell, she was working as a low-level employee when first Gann — and then Dupree — pressured her into having sex over several months in 2023. Poston Meshell quit her city job in March 2024 and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May.
Three months passed before it became public thanks to a Facebook page called Recall Dupree.
Dupree apologized at the next city council meeting for his “personal indiscretion” and tried to hang on to his job, saying he would work hard to regain the public’s trust.
But 13 days later, facing a public outcry, Dupree announced he would resign on Oct. 6. He then changed the resignation to Oct. 20 to ensure that the five-member city council would choose his successor rather than having an election in March to do so.
The city council selected Bishop as the next mayor.
Kevin Dorn, a veteran city council member, said Pineville suffered a setback in 2024 but remains a good place to work and raise a family.
Dorn said that Bishop and the city council are working hard “to make Pineville whole again, to regain trust and to remove any ill will that the city has brought upon itself. I think we’ve made some gains, but we have a ways to go.”
The $188,500 settlement with Poston Meshell is not Pineville’s only expense. The city also has been paying the legal bills of Vilar’s law firm, which had reached nearly $13,000 three months ago. Vilar did not return a phone call.
Meanwhile, the troubles for Pineville during Dupree’s tenure may not be over.
An outside accountant hired by the city said an audit found that $25,524 in transactions while Dupree was mayor “did not have a clear business purpose, involved multiple parties without any benefit to the city, or were for transactions explicitly forbidden by Louisiana Revised Statutes.”
The city has referred the transactions to the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Department, Bishop said.
Dupree did not return a phone call.
Email Tyler Bridges at tbridges@theadvocate.com.
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