ORANGE (CA)
Daily Beast [New York NY]
January 18, 2024
By Roger Sollenberger
She’s running to replace Katie Porter in Congress, touting social justice issues. But is she funding her campaign with money tainted by the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal?
EXCLUSIVE
Democratic House candidate Joanna Weiss has credited her legal experience for imbuing her with a “deep commitment to ethics.” The source of her personal campaign loans, however, is rife with controversy.
Weiss, a Democratic newcomer vying to replace Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) as she runs for Senate, has contributed a total $231,600 to her political operation as of the end of September, according to publicly available campaign filings. Of that amount, $225,000 has come in the form of loans from the “personal funds of the candidate,” the filings show.
But Weiss’ personal financial disclosure, submitted in August, reports hardly any income over the prior 18 months, only listing $2,500 in royalties from an independent music publishing company she launched in 2021. She also doesn’t list any personal bank accounts, either. All of her accounts are jointly held with her husband, with the exception of her publishing company—and corporate funds are off-limits for campaign contributions.
Weiss also doesn’t appear to have been a big earner previously, though that seems to be by choice. According to online biographies and her LinkedIn page, Weiss eschewed the high-dollar corporate track in favor of pursuing an accomplished service-oriented career: teaching, followed by pro bono work, before leaving her personal practice to launch a mid-sized nonprofit-hybrid PAC combo devoted to community and political organizing. Tax returns for the nonprofit—“Women for American Values and Ethics (WAVE)”—show that Weiss has never drawn a salary, and campaign finance records don’t show a PAC salary, either, though the committee did contribute $9,000 to her campaign in March.
That history suggests that, while Weiss has independently carved out a successful and impactful legal and advocacy career, the lion’s share of the money she’s used to fund her campaign may come from her husband, Jason Weiss, who has walked a far more lucrative—and controversial—career path.
Specifically, Jason Weiss—a specialist in labor and employment law at Los Angeles-based Sheppard Mullin LLP—has defended the Catholic Diocese of Orange County in at least four sex abuse lawsuits.
That hasn’t stopped Joanna Weiss from burnishing her legal ethics during the campaign, including in attacks against her political rival. Nor has she addressed her husband’s longtime client in the context of abortion rights.
Last summer, a HuffPost report revealed that Weiss’ primary opponent, California state senator Dave Min, had served as faculty adviser to a campus branch of the ultra-conservative, anti-abortion Federalist Society from 2014-2016. In a statement for the article, Weiss undercut Min’s ethics, citing the life lessons she’d taken from her legal practice.
“Especially my pro bono legal work with domestic violence survivors and students with special needs,” she said.
The Federalist Society connection plays to the Weiss campaign’s strengths. The HuffPost piece dropped the month after Weiss scored the endorsement from abortion rights heavyweight EMILY’s List, which provided a pro-Weiss statement for the article.
But her husband’s professional experience, as well as the income he earned that now appears to be powering Weiss’ campaign, has its own abortion angle—the Catholic Church is famously a major obstacle to abortion rights. (Last year, the Orange Diocese hosted a Q&A with anti-abortion zealot Abby Johnson.)
On paper, Jason Weiss’ work appears honorable enough. He is a longtime partner in Los Angeles-based Sheppard Mullin LLP’s labor and employment division, a title he has held for more than a decade. But that division’s innocuous name belies the nature of some of Jason Weiss’ heaviest casework—like defending the Catholic Church in a number of recent child molestation lawsuits.
According to records in California state and federal courts, the suits largely center around allegations that the Diocese of Orange helped priests move from one parish to another after accusations of child sexual misconduct, knowingly providing accused transferees with safe harbor and a balm of silence instead of taking steps to prevent future harm.
To be clear, it is of course unfair to paint an attorney or firm with a brush colored by their client’s actions. Neither Jason Weiss nor Sheppard Mullin is in any way associated with the allegations beyond providing their clients with constitutionally enshrined legal counsel. Additionally, holding Joanna Weiss accountable for who her husband has represented is even a further step removed from these tragedies.
But as Joanna Weiss dings her Democratic opponent for his distant legal affiliations, it’s fair to examine where the money came from with which Joanna Weiss is funding her campaign—especially when that source so controversially stands in the way of her campaign’s centerpiece issue: women’s rights.
When asked about the source of Weiss’ campaign funds, a campaign spokesperson repeatedly refused to say where the money came from. Of course, Weiss can claim those specific dollars come from some other source or legal work. That’s the nature of fungible dollars. But that same argument makes it difficult for Weiss to say those dollars aren’t funding her campaign. Notably, over the course of multiple conversations and statements—including from Weiss, her campaign, and a PAC supporting her—no one attempted to claim that the bulk of her $231,600 in personal campaign contributions didn’t, directly or indirectly, come from Jason Weiss’ work defending the Catholic Church in child sexual molestation lawsuits.
As far as Jason Weiss’ record defending the church goes, his results on these sex abuse lawsuits are mixed. The diocese settled two of the cases on undisclosed terms. One civil suit from 2020 is ongoing and slated for a Los Angeles jury trial next month, though the court docket indicates Sheppard Mullin at some point discontinued its representation. The fourth case ended in a partial victory for the diocese, but the plaintiff dropped the matter in 2021, opting instead to refile the suit under California’s newly passed Child Victims Act.
While Sheppard Mullin is not representing the church in that renewed matter, the practice has over the last several years served as the diocese’s go-to counsel for sex abuse suits. And the firm appears to have gone to lengths to distance itself from that work.
For instance, while Jason Weiss’ Sheppard Mullin profile page provides a summary of his legal expertise, it does not have an “experience” tab like many other partners in the Orange County office. It also does not mention his defense of the diocese or allude to that work or area of law in any clear way, despite the fact that Weiss acted as lead attorney on recent high-profile cases that garnered widespread media coverage—one of them, nominally, a victory.
In fact, the firm’s website and online resources are seemingly devoid of any references to its diocese representation. Various relevant terms entered into the firm’s internal website search tool did not return any hits (e.g., “abuse” and “diocese”, “sexual abuse”, “diocese” and “Weiss”, “Catholic” and “lawsuit”, or the names of various plaintiffs). A search for “Diocese of Orange” returned one partner biography and one area of practice—bankruptcy—both hits related to the diocese’s $57.5 million cathedral purchase in 2015.
Weiss, however, appears to have thrown himself into the work.
The attorney for one survivor—veteran trial lawyer with victims advocacy firm Anderson Associates, Michael Reck—told The Daily Beast that the Diocese of Orange exhibited a decades-long pattern of “callous coverup” in an effort to place its reputational self-interest ahead of abuse survivors.
Reck specifically cited Jason Weiss’ legal tactics on behalf of the diocese, describing them as “aggressive” and “hurtful to survivors,” in pursuit of a legal strategy that “thwarted” abuse victims seeking remedy through the courts.
“For decades, the Diocese of Orange has shown a pattern of callous coverup and valued its reputation above the safety of children and the healing of survivors of childhood sexual abuse,” Reck said. “As time has passed, the diocese and lawyers have employed shrewd and aggressive legal tactics that have been hurtful to survivors and at times thwarted the transparency and public accountability that has been sought by survivors in the justice system.”
Reck was the opposing counsel in Weiss’ one qualified win—a widely reported 2018 lawsuit accusing all California dioceses of covering for credibly accused priests by withholding information from law enforcement and shuffling them around the country, in some cases allowing priests to flee the country. His survivor-plaintiff, Thomas Emens, claims that Monsignor Thomas Mohan sexually abused him for over a year, starting at age 10. He brought the case in the interest of forcing mass public disclosure from all California Catholic dioceses about the larger, systemic cover-up.
In defense, Weiss argued that the Diocese of Orange was protected by freedom of religion, and he was partially successful. But the case—which Reck later refiled to take advantage of California’s new Child Victims Act—also saw victories for Emens.
An appellate court hammered the church repeatedly for the cover-up—allegations which, the court emphasized, none of the defendants had disputed and were accepted as true.
“The Church defendants did not, in their reply, dispute the fact that they had not disclosed the priests on these lists to law enforcement,” the ruling said in one passage. “Thus, whether it is deemed to be conceded or conclusively established, the Church defendants’ failure to report the prior crimes to the pertinent authorities is illegal as a matter of law.”
Emen’s transparency effort was generally successful—with one exception. The Los Angeles Diocese, for instance, was among the vast majority of defendants who responded by voluntarily publicizing the names of an additional 54 priests accused of child sexual abuse. In a statement at the time, L.A. Archbishop Jose Gomez said, “We owe it to the victim-survivors to be fully transparent in listing the names of those who perpetrate this abuse.”
Reck’s firm released its own report naming 72 priests with the Diocese of Orange as credibly accused sexual abusers. But that specific diocese, Reck told The Daily Beast, was the lone settlement holdout of all the defendants.
In a 2021 affidavit later included in an appendix to a Supreme Court appeal, Jason Weiss’ client, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, pointed to its $100 million global settlement sexual abuse payout from 2005. As result, the affidavit said, the diocese had “exhausted all available insurance coverage” for sexual misconduct allegations before 2004. The affidavit pointed to RCBO’s “updated list” of 18 credibly accused and disciplined priests, most recently revised in December 2020. The list has not been updated since. Monsignor Mohan died in 2002, at age 92. Emens and Reck have refiled the Diocese of Orange lawsuit, now seeking monetary damages.
“I do not believe that Orange has taken any meaningful steps toward transparency and disclosure of what they knew or when they knew it,” Reck said. “They have done zero.”
Jason Weiss also acted as lead attorney for the diocese in a widely publicized abuse case from 2017. In that lawsuit, defendant “Jane Doe” claimed that the Diocese of Orange knowingly abetted child sexual abuse and grooming, covering for a priest who was named in credible sexual misconduct allegations.
Weiss mounted a freedom of religion defense in that case as well, but the argument didn’t take. The diocese later settled with the accuser, federal court records show.
In 2019, Jason Weiss defended the Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange against more accusations of complicity and cover-up. In the complaint, according to California records, “John ML Doe” alleged the institution had engaged in a “pattern and practice of employing sexual abusers,” amounting to a “conspiracy of silence.” The diocese eventually settled this case in 2021, according to the Orange County clerk of court.
The fourth lawsuit, filed in 2020 by an anonymous “John Doe 54,” alleges that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange knowingly harbored and abetted Rev. Thomas Naughton when the church “relocated [him] to Southern California” after sexual misconduct complaints in another diocese. Naughton, the lawsuit alleges, performed “acts of childhood sexual assault” against Doe 54 for a period of seven years, including “sexual touching, humiliation, masturbation, and anal penetration.” The church allegedly had knowledge of accusations that Naughton committed previous “unlawful sexual-related conduct with minors,” but failed to take reasonable steps to prevent future abuse.
That case is slated for jury trial next month, according to the docket in L.A. Superior Court, but the docket no longer lists Weiss as an attorney for the defendant.
The Daily Beast sent detailed comment requests to spokespeople for Sheppard Mullin and Jason Weiss in his professional capacity, along with the Diocese of Orange and the Weiss campaign.
Sheppard Mullin and Jason Weiss did not answer The Daily Beast’s detailed inquiry.
In response to questions, diocese spokesperson Jarryd Gonzalez provided a statement disputing Reck’s “characterization of its conduct.”
“The fact is that the Diocese remains deeply committed to protecting children and vulnerable adults and to providing a voice and support to those who have suffered,” the statement said. “Over two decades ago, the Diocese established a comprehensive safe-environment system under its Office of Child and Youth Protection. All clergy, employees and volunteers must undergo fingerprinting, background checks and recurring safe environment training. Diocesan schools, parish religious education classes and diocesan centers also provide safe-environment education for children.”
Gonzalez provided a bulleted list of policies, claiming the diocese cooperates with authorities after any reports of childhood sexual abuse—a practice which, according to the appellate court’s decrees, appears to be a comparatively recent advancement. The diocese, he said, also maintains an independent review board, conducts “psychological screening and education for the men” who aspire to the clergy, and places educational pamphlets in conspicuous places.
The Weiss campaign spokesperson initially passed The Daily Beast’s questions to EMILY’s List, the political organization that bills itself as “the nation’s largest resource dedicated to electing Democratic pro-choice women to office.” An EMILY’s List spokesperson subsequently reached out via text message “on behalf of the campaign,” but stopped communicating when informed that the chain of communication would be documented in the article.
After the campaign committed to providing comment, the EMILY’s List spokesperson contacted The Daily Beast again to offer an on-record statement from senior communications official Christina Reynolds.
“Joanna Weiss is an accomplished lawyer, founder of a grassroots organization that helped elect pro-choice and pro-democracy candidates up and down the ballot, and mom fighting for women’s reproductive freedom across America,” Reynolds said. “To equate her campaign for Congress to her husband’s legal career is highly misogynistic. Voters in the district deserve better than these sexist attacks.”
This story categorically does not equate Joanna Weiss’ campaign with her husband’s legal career. It does note, however, that Joanna Weiss appears to be running a congressional campaign fueled by money her husband earned defending the Catholic Church from child sexual abuse lawsuits. At its core, this is a story about the source of Joanna Weiss’ campaign money—not her gender—and instead of addressing those questions, Reynolds chose to deflect by simply asserting that this story is “misogynistic.”
While the EMILY’s List spokesperson tore down a fake version of this article, the nature of her outreach—the Weiss campaign initially directing comment to an outside PAC, then appearing to work with them on complementing statements—raised a real issue.
Two campaign finance experts told The Daily Beast that it appears EMILY’s List was essentially functioning as a campaign vendor, suggestive of a potential in-kind contribution, an analysis they caveated with the fact that none of them had ever encountered such a scenario. (The Daily Beast reached out to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee about their apparent coordination, but did not immediately receive a reply.)
After EMILY’s List sent its comment, The Daily Beast also received unsolicited comments from Weiss allies in Orange County. Eventually, Weiss and her campaign manager also provided statements around 11 p.m. Wednesday night.
Over a combined 359 words, the candidate and her campaign also attacked the character of this report as “desperate,” “disgusting,” “shameful,” “shameless,” and “misogynistic.” Both statements also highlighted Weiss’ experience as a sexual assault survivor herself. But neither statement addressed the heart of this story: the source of the money fueling Weiss’ campaign.
Campaign manager Emma Weinert also erroneously blamed this report on rival Dave Min, after The Daily Beast repeatedly denied any contact with Min, his campaign, or any of his associates.
“When confronted with a strong woman, Dave Min has one response, to lean on misogyny and sexism,” Weinert’s statement said, harking back to a 2018 campaign ad.
“It’s 2024, and we are still comparing a female candidate to her husband’s career,” Weinert continued, once again ignoring questions about where the money funding Weiss’ campaign came from. “These desperate attacks are shameless and misogynistic.”
Weinert continued that “Joanna Weiss has spent her career defending those in need—students with special needs, seniors, and sexual assault survivors, like Joanna herself.”
“Joanna is proud of her work giving back to her community, and the countless hours she has put into raising her three children, like so many women across Orange County,” Weinert said.
In a separate statement, Joanna Weiss pointed to her long career as a community organizer and advocate for the vulnerable.
“Since I was 15, I have gone to work every day. As an organizer in my community working on the issues that matter to my neighbors. As an attorney protecting seniors, students with special needs, and domestic violence survivors. As a voting rights advocate building Orange County’s largest grassroots organization to protect reproductive choice. And, thankfully for the last 20 years, as a mom,” the statement said.
Weiss also called this story a “desperate and shameful” attack, adding that such reporting serves to “erase the work of all moms across the district and Orange County.”
“It is disgusting to use a tragedy to score political points,” the statement continued. “As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I am heartbroken to see this be weaponized to further one man’s political ambition.”
Again, at no point in her statement did Weiss deny funding her campaign with money that the Catholic Church used to try to deprive sexual abuse survivors of restitution.
Roger Sollenberger, Senior Political Reporter
@SollenbergerRCRoger.Sollenberger@thedailybeast.com