Let’s start this thing off properly, Jane Dueker is dumber than a pile of bricks. Last week, after assuming she found the Mother Lode, Dueker started firing off inaccurate tweets like she was Donald Trump at 3 a.m. Dueker believed she had discovered that Action St. Louis Power Project was in violation of federal law for supporting the election campaign of newly elected Mayor Tishaura Jones, only to discover that she was dead wrong.
Rather than coming to her senses and apologizing, the real Jane Dueker doubled down. Dueker, a paid representative of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, sent out a series of vicious tweets accusing Action St. Louis Power Project of money laundering. In addition to these false claims, she also tweeted out the home address of Kayla Reed, the founder of the project.
Dueker may not be able to tell the difference between Action St. Louis and Action Network or a 501(c3) and a 501(c4), but she damn sure knew what she was doing by tweeting out an activist’s address in the city of St. Louis. This blatant disregard for Reed’s life is reminiscent of former Mayor Lyda Krewson’s crude act of releasing the addresses of activists last summer.
This article won’t be spent defending the track record of Action St. Louis leader Kayla Reed or the organizations that she founded. The work speaks for itself. Dueker’s work, however, speaks volumes for her lack of integrity. During the height of the pandemic, Dueker pandered to the public about her “kooky” hobbies; decorating cakes, pressing rhinestones, and learning calligraphy while people were fighting to pay their rent and attending zoom funerals.
While accusing Black political figures like Reed, ArchCity Defenders’ Blake Strode, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, Congresswoman Cori Bush, and Mayor Tishaura Jones of raising “dark money,” Dueker literally makes her livelihood off of blood money. Dueker works for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the union that proudly and defiantly represents the most murderous police department in the United States. This is the same person who openly boasted about the 2012 Missouri Supreme Court case that she won on behalf of the blood-sucking title loan industry, which fleeces working-class and poor Missourians for millions of dollars every year.
By 2016, Dueker was pretending that she couldn’t remember the case, but there are not enough pressed rhinestones in the world to cover up Dueker’s own past, or the stench that leads back to the payday loaners and the police. Dueker has no chill, she also spent a portion of her legal career defending the proven unconstitutional uses of red light cameras such as profiling and surveilling pedestrians. She did not do this because she believed the cameras stopped crime or made the streets of St. Louis any safer, but because the technology company selling and leasing the cameras to the state of Missouri, American Traffic Solutions (ATS), paid her to represent them.
Oddly enough, in trial she defended the invasive use of red light cameras by claiming the police were guilty of racial profiling and not her client, ATS. And then in a strange twist of events, she was hired to represent the same police unions which she previously threw under the bus. According to public records, Jane Dueker represents three police organizations, including two local unions, as well as a trade group for the state’s cable industry. Dueker also moonlights in the media as a lobbyist and a talk radio host.
Regardless of your views, it’s difficult to take anyone seriously who once used their political platform to give even more exposure to O.J. Simpson’s former roommate Kato Kaelin (who Dueker is seen with in the above photo). Apparently, Dueker has a thing for using head shots from 10 years ago and tweeting inaccuracies about Black led political organizations. Instead of wasting her energy attacking Action St. Louis and the Close the Workhouse campaign, we want to know what Dueker has to say about her very public relationship with Steve Stenger, the former St. Louis County executive turned felon after being indicted by the feds and sentenced to 46 months in prison. (In the photo below you see Dueker, Stenger, and St. Louis City former Mayor Lyda Krewson).
Her buddy Stenger, also known as prisoner #48972-044, is currently serving time in FPC Yankton after being convicted of three counts of corruption charges for a pay-to-play scheme, exchanging county contracts for campaign donations. Since Jane Dueker wants to talk about money laundering, we wonder what she has to say about the $250,000 fine Stenger is ordered to pay the state upon his release from prison. Instead of addressing the disparities our communities are facing, Dueker panders for support from a democratically defeated base of voters. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen is loaded with cowards who throw rocks as they hide behind uninformed pundits like Dueker and her unhinged twitter rants.
As a former member of Bob Holden’s office, Jane Dueker was the first woman to serve as chief legal counsel to the governor of Missouri. Clearly she’s made history before as a political figure, but upon closer observation one could argue the real Jane Dueker simply does not trust the local leadership of Black women and their vision for the future of St. Louis. Dueker’s rebuttal to this claim will be “Nice try, I represented Penny Hubbard against Bruce Franks Jr. during the 78th District Primary!” Ours will be of course she did, but after years of representing the most exploitative corporate entities in the state of Missouri, her counter argument is not very convincing.
Tef Poe
Tef Poe is an emcee and educator from St. Louis, who serves as the Executive Director of The Boycott Times. He co-founded the Hands Up United movement and is an advocate for grassroots movements in radical justice around the world. He has garnered two prestigious fellowships from Harvard University, the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship and the American Democracy Fellowship. Tef is an award-winning journalist who has written for Time Magazine, NewsOne, BBC, and is currently finishing his memoir, Rebel to America.