Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

As Patty Smith looked over the hundreds of toys piled up in her office at City Hall last week, the Aurora City Council member couldn’t help but smile at the overwhelming response she got from her 8th Ward constituents for this holiday toy drive to benefit the children at Mutual Ground, a domestic violence shelter in Aurora.

Still, that joy was shadowed by stirrings of long-ago pain from her own childhood in a household marked by trauma, poverty and abuse, she said.

It’s a side of this successful career woman, mother and city leader few are aware of, including those who referred to her “white privilege” at a heated City Council meeting last month.

But Smith has decided to go public with those toxic early years, not so much because of a phrase

See Full Page