News of Mayor Megan Barry’s affair with her head of security, police Sgt. Rob Forrest, seemed to break fast. And the story kept growing. From the start, NewsChannel 5’s chief investigative reporter Phil Williams hit hard, landing an on-camera interview with the mayor just hours before her press conference Jan. 31, the day she admitted to the affair.

Williams had gotten a tip just a few days before Barry’s admission. He immediately started putting in records requests to the city and the Metro Nashville Police Department. He’d been tipped off that he would find something if he requested overtime records, travel records or emails and texts between the mayor and her security detail — particularly Forrest. In addition to the records requests, Williams told the mayor’s office that he wanted an interview with Barry.

“The early part of that week before the admission came, I started hearing, ‘OK, she knows what you’re after, she has decided to come clean,’ ” Williams tells the Scene. “And that was the rumor mill that I started hearing — that there had been a calculated decision that she was going to come clean at some point.”

Scene contributor Steve Cavendish and staff writer Amanda Haggard sat down with Williams to digest the news around Barry’s affair and subsequent resignation. Visit nashvillescene.com/podcast to hear our full interview with Williams, and read an excerpt below.

How did you go about securing that initial interview?

Number 1, I sent the public records requests, and then I just communicated with her staff that I knew what was going on. They knew why I was asking. And I thought it would be important for her to sit down with us and just come clean and tell us what the story was.

When did you first think there might be misappropriation of funds? Was that part of the tip?

It certainly was part of the tip — they were traveling a lot together, that he was spending a lot of time with her. Here’s the real interesting thing: I didn’t have any evidence of an affair. I had a tip. And I don’t know that I ever would have had any evidence of an affair. So had she not come clean and admitted to it, I don’t think we would be where we are today. Perhaps there might have been a divorce down the road when some of those allegations came out, but there was no smoking gun that I had, and I don’t think there’s a smoking gun today that reporters had. If she had not come clean, I just wonder where we would have been.

Did you have to put a lot of pressure on the mayor’s office for that initial interview? It was so quick it seemed like it came more easily than some others.

It certainly was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. And one of the backstories I don’t fully understand at this point is there was very much a political calculation with her and her advisers. I know she was working with people who specialize in crisis communications, and I can presume that they made a calculated decision that you don’t want to be running from this. You don’t want to deny something that may be proven later, so it’s best to get out of ahead of the story.

So the press conference that night, there was a very apparent strategy to sort of run out the clock on questions, to exhaust all available questions. I mean, she sat there and took questions until there were no more.

I would say that a lot of the journalists, including myself, were handicapped, because the public records I had requested, I did not receive until a couple hours before the interview with her. So I really didn’t have the chance to digest what was in those records, and certainly that was the same for the other journalists that were involved in that news conference that evening. Their strategy, I was initially told, was that she would sit down and do an interview with me, it would run that night on our newscast, and then she would hold a press conference that next day. Apparently the intense media interest, the rumors, just got so intense that they felt like they had to move up that schedule.

She was very candid in that interview. Were you surprised by that candor?

Sitting there, on one hand I thought, “There’s a lot more candor here than I expected,” and yet there was also a sense that she had done a lot of prep so that occasionally it seemed stilted, it seemed practiced. So sitting there, I couldn’t decide whether it was unusual candor or extreme calculation. Clearly she had been working with her crisis communications team. And in what she said to me in an interview at 1 or 2 in the afternoon was very similar to what she said at 7 o’clock that night in the news conference. Clearly she had practiced what she wanted to say.

There was a drumbeat of stories over the next week as everybody started analyzing the overtime records. How did you pursue the story from after the interview?

We started going through the overtime records, the travel records. There were other releases of information, there was a Friday afternoon news dump about 4 o’clock as I recall — maybe earlier, 2 — where they released a bunch of documents. And again, trying to get on air very quickly that night, the thing that jumped out at me is that there were travel authorizations that Police Chief Steve Anderson had approved Rob Forrest’s travel. And I knew the chief had told me he had never approved it, and that’s when I called the police department to say, “OK, who’s telling the truth here?” And that’s when they produced a memo from the head of Metro IT that there had been this glitch where the mayor’s chief of staff was approving the travel, but it registered as being an approval from the police chief. So that was one of the examples of the continuing nature of our coverage.

You had a story about the mayor going to the Nashville City Cemetery in the mornings. How did that story come forward? Was that a tip? A hunch?

Here’s the strange thing about that: I was doing one of our call-in shows on NewsChannel 5+, and somebody called in and said they were spending a lot of time in the mornings at the city cemetery, and the host of the show, Nick Beres, said, “Why don’t we get her phone number and let her call you back?” At that point, I was just hearing so many crazy rumors that someone wrote down the phone number for me and then I lost it. A few days later I was like, “Where is that number?” and I couldn’t find it. We tried going back into our phone system to see if we could find the number she was calling from. And so finally, I just went over to the [Nashville] City Cemetery and started knocking on doors [in the neighborhood] and asking people if they had seen the white SUV, asking if they might have security video, and actually found one company that had a number of cameras trained on the front of the city cemetery. And they allowed us to sit there in their office for two or three days and go through footage, and we found a number of occasions where the SUV was going in and out of the cemetery.

From ’86 to ’92, you were at the The Tennessean, which means you were there for the Bill Boner scandal. Absolutely. Yeah. There were lots of reminders of that scandal over the last five or six weeks.

People have drawn a lot of comparisons between the two scandals. Is that fair? Are these the same thing? Not the same thing?

Well. Most people remember that Bill Boner had an affair with a nightclub singer, Traci Peele. What a lot of people forget is that he [also] had an affair with the head of his security detail. And so, they were seen around town quite a bit together. There’s a pretty strong parallel there — obviously the times are different.

Something interesting about the Barry plea: This is the difference between a plea and an indictment. It’s a lot squishier exactly what has been agreed to. Essentially, the DA gives a set of facts, defendants agree to this set of facts, and then the judge gives a sentence. It closes off the investigation. Were you surprised that it played out this way?

Frankly, I was a bit stunned, because there had been all sorts of rumors that there might be a deal for her to resign in exchange for there being no criminal charges. I had heard that that deal was imminent, and then suddenly had been yanked off the table. … Another thing that surprised me was that right after this story broke, Chief Steve Anderson sat down and said: “I did not approve this overtime. I did not approve this travel. But I would have.” Because he felt she needed security, that security was warranted. So in my mind, and in the minds of some of the attorneys I was talking to, that was almost a get-out-of-jail-free card. Because he had said: “This is money that I would’ve approved. This was not a waste of taxpayer money.” So I think, based on what I know — we don’t know what the TBI had — that would’ve been a plausible defense if there had been an indictment.

Where does this story rank in Nashville news over the past 20 years?

Oh gosh. I’m not very good at ranking, because my brain, I just kind of flush things after I deal with them. It certainly is one of the bigger ones because of the historic nature of it — the first female [mayor’s tenure] ending in such a tragic way. I’ve been very up-front about this during our live coverage. Megan Barry is someone I like on a personal level. After our first interview, the cameras were turned off and she reached out and gave me a hug. Later that night she sent me a text thanking me for being fair with her, even as I was asking the questions that needed to be asked. I know what it’s like to go through the kind of tragedy she’s been through — to lose a family member to addiction. [Barry’s son Max died from an overdose in July.] So I have not lost the sense of humanity as I view her. And so, did she mess up? Absolutely. Is it a tragedy on a personal, human level? No doubt about it.