Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has threatened former mayoral candidate Mary Norwood with legal action if she doesn’t apologize for statements she made earlier this year.

In June, Norwood told a group of young Republicans in Buckhead that she lost the mayor’s race to Reed in 2009 because he used confidential lists obtained from Atlanta’s Housing Authority to locate voters who no longer lived in the city, but were still registered to vote there. Norwood said Reed’s campaign approached these voters and convinced them to cast ballots for him.

In a letter dated Friday, an attorney for Reed told Norwood that her comments had damaged the mayor and that she needed to perserve all records related to her statements and publicly retract them.

Norwood said Reed was trying to harras and intimidate her, in a statement on Monday. She added that he “apparently is having a difficult time relinquishing his job as mayor.”

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