Dem Mayor’s Husband Begs Town for Forgiveness After ‘Meltdown’

The husband of Northampton’s Democrat mayor is doing damage control after a very public meltdown in the grocery store turned into the talk of the town.

Bill Scher, husband of Northampton, Massachusetts Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, showed up at a Northampton School Committee meeting on Thursday to deliver a groveling apology after he was caught screaming at a local man inside a Stop & Shop.

“I was the weak link in our local democracy,” Scher admitted, after his wife introduced him so he could apologize directly to her constituents.

“What did I accomplish with this? I didn’t persuade anybody. I couldn’t hear well. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t find common ground.”

The outburst happened the day before, when Scher confronted school committee member Michael Stein in the grocery store. Stein has been one of the mayor’s loudest critics, repeatedly blasting Sciarra’s handling of the school budget in columns for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Scher admitted that Stein’s criticism of his wife finally got under his skin, and he approached him in the store hoping to make him “adopt a different tact in his public advocacy.” Instead, he said, his emotions took over.

“When he responded with points I didn’t agree with, I let my emotions get the better of me. I lost my temper, and I raised my voice,” Scher told the crowd.

A 77-year-old shopper who witnessed the clash told the Boston Globe she saw two men talking when one suddenly started shouting.

“I stayed my distance but spoke up and told the shouter that he was frightening me,” she later wrote on Facebook. “The shouter told me that ‘he can do and say what he wants’ — that it was a free country… I was frightened enough to wonder if he was a danger.”

Scher isn’t just any local spouse. He’s a national political commentator, a left-leaning pundit who serves as politics editor for Washington Monthly and has freelanced for Politico. He’s also the author of “Wait, Don’t Move To Canada: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy To Win Back America,” and is reportedly known for fiercely backing his wife’s political career.

That made his meltdown even more awkward for City Hall. His Stop & Shop tantrum touched off local backlash, with a former city councilor mocking him in a Facebook meme portraying herself as a talking toilet paper roll and slamming him as “unhinged.”

Others piled on in comments. Local resident Jose Adastra wrote on Facebook: “All that civility talk and you can’t stop yourself from yelling at a hardworking man at the grocery store…. Absolutely deplorable behavior and on top of it to think a pathetic apology like that would make up for it.”

Stein himself also weighed in online, saying that “Bill, a passionate defender of civility and civil discourse, menaced me in a hostile and unproductive manner.”

Gwen Agna, a former school principal and ex–vice chair of the School Committee, suggested the blow-up is part of a bigger mood in town and across the country. She told the Globe that tensions around politics and Donald Trump have seeped into everyday life, and that people’s anxiety is making them act in ways they normally wouldn’t.

At the school committee meeting, Scher said he was deeply embarrassed and didn’t want anyone else to copy his behavior.

“If there’s any saving grace to this episode, it is that my shame and regret will be a cautionary tale for others to avoid,” he said.

Mayor Sciarra tried to put a lid on the drama in a brief statement, saying she was “sorry that this happened” and that she appreciated her husband’s public apology.

For now, Northampton’s political soap opera has moved from the opinion pages to the produce aisle — with one very chastened mayor’s husband hoping voters will eventually forgive his Stop & Shop screamfest.