Wayne Matewsky resigned from the Everett City Council on May 26. He said it was his health. He did not mention that Everett police had interviewed him five days earlier about an allegation that he sexually abused a child who lived in his house.
He denies that allegation, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence in any courtroom. This is not a courtroom. The question for Everett voters is a different one: has this man earned the trust that public office requires? Forty years of his own conduct answer it.
Start with how he treats people who cannot fight back. In 2013, two weeks before he won a State House seat, he berated a family in a restaurant because their child, a child with special needs celebrating a seventh birthday, was noisy. He cursed at the staff and threatened to walk out on a $60 check. He denied it, called it politics, then apologized to the staff anyway. His own colleagues on the Common Council, people who had sat beside him for decades, voted unanimously to investigate and then reprimanded him for abuse of his official position. The Globe called it appalling. It was.
Then look at how he treats people who work for him. The sign maker and the videographer who helped put him in the State House had to sue him in small claims court to get paid. The man who was promised a job as his aide did not get it. When a judgment was entered and he still did not pay the last $446, a court sent officers to his door and arrested him. He called that a smear campaign. The people he owed called it getting paid.
Then look at who was living on his property. In 2019, federal agents hunting a Brazilian gang charged with trafficking, robbery and kidnapping found one of its members living in Matewsky’s garage. He had been there a week. Matewsky said he had no idea. Maybe so. But a city councilor is paid to know what is going on in his ward. He did not know what was going on in his own yard.
Then look at how he treats the hardest questions. When the first Black woman ever elected to the Everett council asked for a committee on racism in the summer of 2020, Matewsky’s contribution was that he personally had not experienced racism in Everett, that he was a Polish-American minority himself, and that he hoped to move on. Everett is a majority-minority city. He had represented it for 39 years.
And now look at what we know about Lewis Street. We do not know whether Scott Merchant is telling the truth. We know that he was a boy of about 10 when Matewsky brought him into his life through a children’s Halloween party. We know he was a troubled kid from an abusive home who ended up spending years at a grown councilor’s house, and that he hid there for three months after running from foster care. We know that Matewsky’s own friend and boss at the time thought it was odd enough to ask the boy whether he was all right. We know a second man says he was offered beer and cocaine in that house at 15 and pressed to expose himself. We know Matewsky admits the boy lived with him. And we know that when the police came with questions, he did not fight to clear his name. He quit.
None of that is a conviction. All of it is a pattern: a public man who bullied the weak, stiffed the people who served him, did not know who was sleeping in his garage, waved away the city’s hardest conversation, and kept a vulnerable child in his home in a way that unsettled even his friends. Any one of these might be forgiven. Together they describe someone who should never again be handed the authority of public office in this city.
Matewsky has said he is retiring for his health. Everett should hold him to it. If his name appears on a ballot again, voters should remember all of it, and the people who have stood beside him for four decades should find the courage to say what they already know.
Everett MA News is continuing to report on this story. Anyone with information can contact the newsroom at editor@everettmanews.com. We do not publish the names of people who report sexual abuse without their consent.