BACKERS, FOES BUNGLE BATTLE OF PRESS EVENTS.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Staff Writer

In a bizarre day in the San Fernando Valley secession campaign, a series of gaffes Monday by both sides led to a pair of phantom press conferences and accusations about events that never occurred.

The chain of events was set in motion last week, when a coalition of Latino secession opponents was organizing a news conference in the Northeast Valley for Monday morning to argue that cityhood would hurt minority communities.

But word of the press conference leaked to the other side when organizers with the Latino Coalition for a United Los Angeles invited two women to a planning meeting last Thursday without realizing that one supports secession and the other is neutral. After finding out, they kicked the two women, Cynthia Wilson and Betty Cooper, out of the meeting.

The outraged women took draft press releases about the upcoming event with them and immediately told the pro-secessionists how they had been kicked out of a meeting to which they had been invited.

Alerted to the event, secessionists then hastily organized their own press conference to respond to the Latino coalition, notifying the media Monday morning, and sending their own staff to the Latino press conference to direct the media to their own event.

Meanwhile, however, the Latino Coalition decided to postpone its event until Friday. The secessionists didn't find out about the canceled news conference until about half an hour before their own - hearing the news from a reporter.

Which, of course, led another set of secession opponents, the group One Los Angeles, to issue a press release criticizing secessionists for holding a press conference in response to something that never occurred.

But as it turned out, the secession campaign's new press secretary, Karen Moran - on her first day on the job - canceled the press conference when no media, besides the Daily News, showed up.

That means - for those keeping score at home - that One Los Angeles was criticizing secessionists for criticizing anti-secessionists for something that they didn't do, when in fact One Los Angeles itself was also criticizing someone for something it didn't do.

One Los Angeles co-chairman Larry Levine issued a statement that was as true of his own press release as the secessionists': ``It's clear that the Valley Independence group wrote its response before they even heard what the coalition had to say because the coalition didn't say anything.''