Marion Barry's lawyer is portraying Rasheeda Moore as a vengeful ex-lover who trapped the mayor in an FBI sting operation because he had abandoned her for another woman. Moore, a former model, denied the suggestion Friday at the mayor's cocaine and perjury trial, insisting, ``I was not out to get Mr. Barry.'' But she acknowledged that she had repeatedly steered the conversation around to drugs during the secretly videotaped encounter with Barry in a Washington hotel room last Jan. 18. She conceded that Barry was primarily interested that evening in having sex with her. In her second day of cross-examination by Barry's chief lawyer, R. Kenneth Mundy, Moore also acknowledged that she broke the FBI's instructions and tried to persuade the mayor to use drugs. Midway through the FBI videotape in which Barry ultimately smoked crack cocaine, Moore asked the mayor if he wants to use drugs. ``No, not tonight,'' Barry replied in the tape, which was played in court Thursday. ``You felt you were going beyond your mandate not to persuade, influence, coerce or beguile'' Barry into using drugs, Mundy asked Moore. ``I did,'' she replied. ``Why did you do that?'' the lawyer asked. ``Just in the gist of the evening,'' said Moore, who said she got ``overcarried'' in performing her duties for the FBI. ``In your zeal to get Mr. Barry,'' Mundy said accusingly. ``For all you knew, he had been off drugs since May'' 1989 when Moore moved to California. ``Not in my zeal,'' the witness insisted. ``I was not out to get Mr. Barry.'' ``What was your intent?'' Mundy asked Moore. ``Working this operation'' with the FBI, she replied. The defense lawyer suggested that Moore had been badly treated by the mayor and motivated by revenge. ``Were you mad at Mr. Barry because he didn't return your calls'' throughout an eight-month span in 1989, Mundy asked. ``No, I wasn't,'' Moore replied. She also denied that she was angry because the married mayor was involved with another woman, Maria McCarthy, or because he had slapped her when they broke up their romantic relationship. Had Moore been scorned? a reporter asked Mundy after the day's court session. ``A woman scorned,'' Mundy agreed immediately. ``Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.'' McCarthy was jailed for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury looking into the mayor's alleged drug use. She later relented and is now listed as a possible witness at Barry's trial. Barry is charged with 10 misdemeanor counts of cocaine possession charges, one misdemeanor cocaine conspiracy count and three felony counts of lying to a grand jury about drug use. One of the possession charges stems from his arrest in the sting operation. Meanwhile Friday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding in the Barry case, barred black activist clergyman George Augustus Stallings, a Barry supporter, from attending the trial. Stallings, a former Roman Catholic priest, broke with the Vatican by starting his own African-American church. Mundy and the American Civil Liberties Union said they were asking the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn Jackson's decision regarding Stallings as well as his order Thursday barring Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Jackson said Stallings' and Farrakhan's presence in the courtroom would be potentially disruptive. Barry told reporters he could ``not understand why any citizen'' who wanted to use one of the four courtroom passes provided to the defense cannot do so. ``So I think that we are in a totalitarian situation where Bishop Stallings or Minister Farrakhan (cannot attend.),'' Barry said. ``It's like in Nazi Germany.''
