On Monday, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced that she was taking an “indefinite leave of absence,” a move that made City Council President Jack Young acting mayor. Pugh, a Democrat who is up for re-election next year, said she was taking some time off because of pneumonia. However, her move comes as scrutiny intensifies about her self-published children’s book series “Healthy Holly,” which the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) purchased from her for a total of $500,000 while she served on its board. On Tuesday, Pugh’s attorney said that the State Prosecutor’s Office was investigating the sale.
The Baltimore Sun has a rundown of this strange scandal. A little less than a decade ago, Pugh created a character named Healthy Holly who was intended to teach children about exercise and nutrition. After she showed other members of the UMMS board her prototype for her first book, which became “Healthy Holly: Exercising is Fun!,” they agreed to pay her $100,000 for 20,000 copies that were to be distributed in schools. Over the following years, UMMS paid her another $400,000 for the next four editions in the series, a total of 80,000 books and an absolutely massive amount of money in the children’s book publishing industry.
They weren’t the only ones who put down big money for this series. The healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente paid her $100,000 for 20,000 copies from 2015 to 2018 while the nonprofit Associated Black Charities raised $90,000 to buy Healthy Holly books, including from the citywide insurer CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and most of that amount went to Pugh. Wealthy businessman and political donor J.P. Grant also revealed this month that he’d paid $100,000 to “Healthy Holly LLC” to aid the distribution an unknown number of copies.
All of this began to unravel last month when state Sen. Jill Carter filed a bill to prohibit business deals between UMMS and its board members, and the Sun began looking into board members’ financial disclosures to see what agreements had already taken place. Pugh, a former state senator who was elected mayor in 2016, resigned from the board as more news came out about Healthy Holly, and she called the book deal with UMMS a “regrettable mistake.” The board’s CEO was also placed on leave as an outside firm investigates, and several other board members have resigned or gone on leave as well.
Pugh, who says she returned $100,000 to UMMS for the unpublished fifth book, claimed that, because of production and distribution costs, she had only kept $80,000 of the remaining $400,000 that they’d paid her. However, the Sun took a look at the estimated production and distribution costs and concluded that $200,000 of the money the mayor had received from UMMS was unaccounted for.
We also don’t know how much Pugh profited from sales to Kaiser, Associated Black Charities, and Grant. It’s also unclear how many copies of the Healthy Holly series were actually distributed in schools, especially since 8,700 books from a 19,500 shipment of the third part of the series, “Healthy Holly: Fruits Come in Colors Like the Rainbow,” was found in a warehouse.
This story comes to light about a year ahead of the April 2020 Democratic primary. Baltimore is a very Democratic city that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor in over 50 years and, as anyone who has seen season four of “The Wire” can attest, whomever wins the Democratic primary has very little to worry about in the general election. It only takes a simple plurality to win the nomination, but if Pugh runs again, she’ll need a lot to go right to take a second term.
Young said soon after taking over as acting mayor that he won’t run next year and will instead seek re-election as council president, but it’s far from clear at this point who actually will jump in. The Sun mentions plenty of potential candidates including Carter, the state legislator whose bill led to the unraveling of this scandal.
P.S. If you’re wondering about the actual quality of the Healthy Holly books, the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada reviews the very first in the series, and let’s just say neither he nor his three young children were impressed by the illustrations or the dialogue.
To take one example, a conversation between Healthy Holly’s mother and Healthy Holly goes “Exercising is fun,” “I will be healthy. I like having fun.” Lozada’s 11-year-old remarked, “The dialogue . . . it doesn’t sound so real,” adding, “I mean the phrase ‘I like having fun.’ Isn’t it obvious that one likes having fun? You don’t just walk up and say: ‘I like having fun! I like doing things that I like!’” The illustrations, which featured smiling trash bins and tennis balls, as well as a smiling “clock [that] doesn’t have that many teeth,” also did not go over well with their intended audience.
