Lana Negrete isn’t hiding from her traumatic past.
Santa Monica’s newest City Council member says she was given a soda laced with acid in middle school and was the victim of ‘molestation’ during a sleepover at age 11.
Negrete — owner of Santa Monica Music Center, which was all but destroyed during the 2020 riots— was officially sworn into office on Tuesday night.
She beat out 34 other applicants vying to fill the position vacated by Kevin McKeown.
Negrete is a lifelong Santa Monica resident and the current council’s only renter.
She ushers in a new era of local politics. For the first time ever, the majority of lawmakers are not beholden to the City’s two major factions: Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR) and Santa Monica Forward.
“I want our city to be safe for my children and for the many children who come to my business to take music lessons and whom are harassed by the homeless that sit in front of our store,” the mother of two, who grew up receiving free and reduced lunch in Santa Monica public schools, wrote in her application.
Negrette, 41, knows the city well.
In a revealing interview with the HoneyDew Podcast last year, she discussed her many personal struggles growing up here.
As a child of West Indian descent (her mom was from Trinidad), Negrete recalls being mocked by a class mate for having darker skin.
“She told me, ‘Your knees get so dark in the summer. They look dirty all the time,” Negrete explained.
“She’s like ‘Well you could bleach them.’ And I remember getting a quarter cup of bleach and scrubbing basically the skin off my knees.”
Negrete also opened up about the same 5th grade classmate — who resided in the city’s wealthier neighborhood north of Montana Avenue — pressuring her to perform sex acts with a hot dog during a sleepover.
“We were in the bath together,” Negrete remembered. “We had our bathing suits on…and she’s discussing her private parts. So she goes, ‘Go to the kitchen and get a hot dog and a sandwich bag’…I’m thinking, ‘Are we making hot dogs in the bath?’
“So I come back in and she puts (the hot dog) in the sandwich bag… She starts to put it inside her and it’s like halfway hanging out and she’s like, ‘Look, look…’ And I was like, ‘That is so fucking bizarre… Why would you insert anything in there let alone a hot dog and a sandwich bag?’
“I was so uncomfortable and I felt sick to my stomach. I knew there was something wrong but I couldn’t figure it out. I slept with my eyes open that whole night.”
Negrete says it took almost two years before she spoke to a middle school counselor about the encounter.
“I was like, ‘Let me tell you why I don’t like her. It’s not because she did this at lunch. She tried to stick a hot dog in my vagina!’”
Police eventually got involved and the girl transferred to another school.
“Even to this day it feels weird to say (I was) molested,” Negrete admits. “But they are like, ‘That’s what it was.’”
Negrete also shared the shocking story of being drugged during a nutrition break in a Santa Monica public middle school a few years later.
She says she asked a male classmate for a sip of his beverage only to discover it had been laced with acid.
“I don’t know why he did it,” Negrete said. “But it ruined his life after that. He put so many tabs that it could have been attempted murder! They had to pump my stomach.”
Here’s what else we learned about Negrete and her family during the two hour confessional:
- Her mother grew up poor and came to the United States from Trinidad. She briefly lived with her parents and four siblings in a motel near Rose Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard. She met Negrete’s father when she was 17 and he was 30.
- Her grandmother was a teen mom. “Back then, you had your period, you were ready to have kids.”
- Her father, Chico, was born and raised in Toronto, although he was of Spanish descent. He married four times and had a son at age 15 that was quietly put up for adoption. The mother of the girl he got pregnant ran a home for pregnant teens.
- Her father was a drummer who came to America from Toronto and once worked in strip clubs. “(He was) the black sheep of the family. The rock and roll kid of the family. (He) played on the stage when they used to have live drums for strippers to go out. My dad played the titty swing beat or whatever…”
- Her father ended up having children (her half brother, Paul, and half sister, Rhonda) with one of the strippers from the club he worked at. She eventually left him. “He was stuck with two kids. He said he was changing their diapers on the side of the 60 Freeway on my the hood of a car. She left him for one of the other guys at the strip club.”
- Her brother developed a dependency on drugs and eventually drifted apart from the family.
Growing up, Negrete supported herself with jobs at Vons, the Warehouse record store and Footlocker. She moved out of her parents home at 18. She “never wanted to work at the family business,” but bought out her uncle’s share of Santa Monica Music Center in late 2018.
She arrived at the store on Santa Monica Boulevard and 19th Street on May 31, 2020 as looters began tearing apart everything her family had built over half a century.
“I got really emotional,” she told Fox News days later. I started honking and screaming at them saying, ‘Please don’t. This is my family business.’”
Negrete’s appointment saves the City more than $500,000 in expenses that would have been associated with a general election to fill the position.
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