Leaked Memos Quote DA Todd Spitzer On Why Black Men Date White Women
OC Watch has obtained three memos describing a high-level meeting that took place between Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer and some of his most senior prosecutors. In the meeting, which took place in the context of deciding whether to seek the death penalty against a Black man, one of Spitzer’s most senior prosecutors summarized that Spitzer allegedly said that “he knows many black people who get themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations by only dating ‘white women’” and that while in college, Spitzer “knew for sure that this black student did so on purpose to get himself out of this bad circumstances and situations.” People who attended the meeting have characterized these comments as “racist”.
The existence of the internal memos documenting these events are the oxygen for a whisper network that has grown steadily in volume over the past week. OC Watch has now viewed these three memos in their entirety.
The memos memorialize a meeting that Todd Spitzer and his senior prosecutors held to discuss details of the case against Jamon Buggs, a Black personal trainer accused of murder which sparked a larger conversation about the prospects of the use of the death penalty against Buggs.
The documents are the first to emerge from a meeting that has been the subject of intense speculation in and around Orange County political circles since the firing of senior prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh first broke last week. According to Todd Spitzer, Baytieh was fired for alleged misconduct related to an ongoing jail informant scandal. Nothing to see here, Spitzer barked to anyone who would listen, the firing of Baytieh was nothing other than Todd Spitzer fulfilling a pledge that he would not “tolerate the ‘win at all costs’ mentality of the prior administration.”
The firing of Ebrahim Baytieh struck a discordant note with observers in the legal community given that Spitzer had personally promoted Baytieh within the office, describing him as his “North Star”, “someone you look up to and guide you” and a person that “I listen to a lot”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, sources close to the Orange County District Attorney’s office have been whispering for days of a more nefarious theory of what actually led to Baytieh’s firing – that Baytieh was fired because he helped lead an effort within the OCDA to make public allegedly racist statements that Todd Spitzer made during a meeting with senior prosecutors in the office. Multiple sources with knowledge of the inner workings of the OCDA told OC Watch the belief that the statements were improper was widely shared among senior prosecutors in the office, and that a mutiny began to rise inside the OCDA, as some of the prosecutors who attended the now infamous meeting pushed Spitzer to make the statements known to the defense, the victim family members, the police, the judge, and other lawyers and investigators connected to the Buggs murder case.
The context in which Todd Spitzer made these statements is a discussion about which kinds of factors aggravate a murder and can be used to justify a death penalty prosecution. One such set of factors are the existence of prior crimes of violence that the defendant had committed. When discussing this evidence, Spitzer asked to know the race of the defendant's prior girlfriends and victims. Multiple prosecutors pushed back on Spitzer’s request for that information, noting that race is an improper factor when determining whether or not to seek the death penalty. Spitzer allegedly disagreed, and in the context of that disagreement, allegedly made the statement summarized above: “he knows many black people who get themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations by only dating ‘white women’” and that while in college he “knew for sure that this black student did so on purpose to get himself out of this bad circumstances and situations.”
In a December 22, 2021 memo, a senior prosecutor inside the OCDA built out the legal and ethical case for the author’s “legal conclusion that our office has a discovery obligation relating to the information.” The memo also quotes the conclusions of another senior prosecutor, who came to the conclusion that “the racial justice act” required disclosure of the information, a conclusion the prosecutor arrived at after relying “heavily on the language of the act itself, traditional Brady analysis cases, as well as, Judge Couzens AB 2542 bench guide.” A third senior prosecutor quoted in the memo wrote, “based upon the broad language of the Racial Justice Act”, he agreed that the information should be submitted to the trial court. The memos author then reiterates that “we are obligated to discover the information in the attached memo to the defense attorneys” and writes, “guided by the very broad language of the Racial Justice Act and the teachings of the United States Supreme Court: ‘the prudent prosecutor will resolve doubtful questions in favor of disclosure.’”
In response to the first memo, on January 26, Spitzer drafted his own memo recusing himself and all of the prosecutors who were in the meeting where Spitzer allegedly made the racist comments. Spitzer’s memo reassigned the case to a new prosecutor, David Porter, who was not present at the meeting and therefore not privy to Spitzer’s comments.
One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that Todd Spitzer decided whether or not to seek to execute a Black man based on his political calculation about how damaging it would be for his own political career to have these racially insensitive statements released publicly.
“The chief law enforcement officer for the 6th most populous county in the United States made his racist beliefs clear to a group of senior prosecutors while deliberating the death penalty for a black man,” said Democratic Party of Orange County Chairwoman Ada Briceño, regarding the alleged statements by Spitzer. “This is one of many examples why Spitzer is unfit to serve in our halls of justice. Racism must stop. Retaliation must stop. Spitzer must resign.”
This racism scandal undoubtedly throws more gasoline on the flames of the sexual harassment scandal that is already engulfing the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. An independent county investigation recently concluded that Todd Spitzer engaged in “abusive” conduct related to allegations of long-standing sexual harassment perpetrated by the best man at his wedding and one time roommate, Gary LoGalbo, a former senior prosecutor in the office who Spitzer twice promoted. Women in the office called LoGalbo “Scary Gary”, an appropriate nickname given the allegations rendered against him. For example, one female prosecutor recounted in an employment discrimination lawsuit against the county that while she bent over to plug in a phone charger, LoGalbo pointed at her rear-end, snapped a picture with his cell phone, and said out-loud, “This one is for the spank bank. I’ll use it later.” In a separate incident, after the DA’s office installed a new room for mothers to nurse their children, LoGalbo looked over at a female prosecutor and in front of a number of people said, “Hey, you know what you and I should do? We should go upstairs, lock the door and bang one out in the mommy milk room.” In a third incident, LoGalbo asked a female subordinate for a ride, and when she told him her car was messy, LoGalbo said: “Are your panties in the car? Because if they are, I’ll wear them on top of my head like a hat.”
These are just two examples of dozens of allegations made by four female prosecutors within the OCDA accusing LoGalbo of physical and oral sexual harassment–other examples include hanging a “sperm” replica in another prosecutor’s office, asking at least one woman to sit on his lap, and saying to several women about to be on maternity leave: “You ladies need to duct tape it up.” When these allegations came to light, Spitzer told the supervisor of one of the women who filed a complaint against LaGalbo to provide her with a negative performance evaluation. Spitzer, challenging the version of events of multiple senior prosecutors in the office, said he did no such thing. A second independent investigator found Spitzer’s version of events “not credible.”
OC Watch has reached out to Spitzer for a comment, both directly and through his spokesperson Kimberly Edds, and so far neither have responded. In response to a Voice of OC report about the allegations, Edds dismissed the claims around Baytieh’s firing and added that “Spitzer did not utter any racist statements.”
Spitzer’s comments about Black men and white women also add another layer of evidence to prosecutors who claim the he runs an organization rife with sexual harassment and racial hostility. Indeed, the county is also facing a claim of racial discrimination based on further inappropriate behavior by Gary LoGalbo, including telling a Muslim prosecutor whom he supervised that he was happy to learn that her father was not “a terrorist,” calling a defense attorney who is Muslim a “terrorist”, and publicly ruminating on why an Asian prosecutor should be responsible for prosecuting an Asian defendant.
For Spitzer, the scandal inside the OCDA is just another speed bump in a career filled with erratic behavior that would cost nearly any other politician their career. The most infamous incident, which involved a preacher, fish tacos, and a handgun, happened on a Good Friday back when Spitzer was on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. When a preacher started talking to Spitzer about Jesus and quoting from The Bible at a Wahoo’s Fish Taco restaurant, Spitzer walked out to his car, retrieved a gun and handcuffs, walked back into the restaurant, and made a “citizen’s arrest.”
Orange County later had to pay out a six-figure settlement related to the case. Spitzer, however, maintained that he was “incredibly proud of how [he] handled the situation”, that he “would do it again,” and that he would have been justified in using “deadly force” against the preacher. When pushed as to why deadly force would have been reasonable to use, Spitzer said the preacher looked at a serrated steak knife on the table. A sheriff’s deputy later clarified that the knife in question was actually a butter knife. Moreover, the restaurant’s manager said that the preacher “was very solid, very calm, and at no point did [he] see him being threatening or anything.” The manager also said that Spitzer handcuffed the preacher simply because the man kept looking at Spitzer.
In another incident that occurred during the time he served on the County Board of Supervisors, Spitzer was the lone dissenting vote on a proposal to use county funds to help people experiencing homelessness obtain shelter. An enraged Spitzer proceeded to travel from city to city across Orange County, lamenting how the homeless are “sex offenders and drug addicts” with “terrible, terrible problems.” One of Spitzer’s colleagues on the Board of Supervisors called his behavior “outrageous” and “totally inappropriate.” A state senator who represents one of the cities on Spitzer’s anti-homeless road trip called him “polarizing” and accused him of “creating wedges between communities and leaders.”
Spitzer’s mercurial approach has spurred wrongful termination lawsuits from multiple former employees. In one case, a former aide who sued and won $150,000 after Spitzer fired her said that he has a “raging temper.” “No one leaves Spitzer unless they’re fired,” Spitzer allegedly said before firing the aide. The former aide, Christine Richters, said that Spitzer used “fear and aggression” as his primary tools of management. As part of the lawsuit, Richters produced a memo that Spitzer wrote which, as the Orange County Register characterized it, “threatened to dock workers’ pay if they failed to respond to a text message within 15 minutes.”
Last year, Melanie Eustice, who served as Spitzer’s chief public affairs officer at the District Attorney’s office, filed a claim against Spitzer which included an allegation that Spitzer ran an abusive workplace. Ultimately, the county paid $75,000 to settle the claim in addition to a $65,000 severance payment.
Like a magnet, Spitzer attracted controversy from the moment he decided to run for Orange County District Attorney. In the weeks before Spitzer’s name was formally put on the ballot, he used his county budget as an Orange County Commissioner to send 768,000 promotional mailers to constituents, something that he had not done a single time in the previous five years in office. A government ethics expert called Spitzer’s behavior, “thumbing his nose at the law” and said it’s “legal but it’s not ethical.”
During his campaign, Spitzer touted that he had a “100% conviction rate” as a prosecutor. But then a victim’s rights advocate sued him, accusing him of fabricating that record. Spitzer later downgraded his conviction rate to “92%” in future retellings. Spitzer also boasted about being “voted” Orange County’s “top prosecutor.” But the Orange County Prosecutors Association pushed back publicly saying that the only potentially relevant award was when he was voted “prosecutor of the year” over a quarter-century earlier in 1992.
Spitzer faces re-election again this year. Will this be the year that a lifetime of outrageous behavior finally sticks to Teflon Todd?