There were harsh words from one of Mayor Richard Daley's top aides on Tuesday, after a news report last week accused her of owning a drug house.
Press secretary Jacquelyn Heard and her husband own a West Side building that was targeted earlier this year by the Chicago Police as a drug and gang house, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week.
Heard called the article "ludicrous and unfair," and said it insinuated that she and her husband were harboring drug dealers or were dealing drugs themselves.
The article said officers raided the house last May, arrested two people and seized marijuana and heroin.
Neighbors said the suspected the drug-dealing back in June and confronted Heard's husband. She said she and her husband did do a background check on the tenant, who lived there with her two sons, and said the tenant "seemed to be an upstanding individual."
Heard, a former reporter, called the article a piece of "vendetta journalism," and said the newspaper printed "a total retraction of the story" three days later.
"Where is the fairness in that? There is something really wrong and deeply flawed with a system that would allow that," she said.
The Chicago Sun-Times says the follow-up article wasn't a retraction, but rather an editorial.
