OC WATCH EXCLUSIVE: Orange County DA Todd Spitzer Faces Ethics Complaint Over ‘Scary Gary’ Sexual Harassment Scandal
For embattled Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, the fallout from “Scary Gary” LoGalbo’s alleged sexual misconduct has turned from steady rain to tidal wave, hammering the scandal-ridden prosecutor just as he hemorrhages political support over a separate scandal involving racist statements.
First, an independent investigation found that Spitzer was “not credible” when he denied retaliating against a woman who accused LoGalbo, an office supervisor and self-professed “walking HR violation,” of repeated harassment.
Then a second investigation said that Spitzer “flagrantly” violated anti-harassment rules and engaged in “abusive conduct” toward the witnesses who risked their careers to report LoGalbo’s misconduct. That report included damning testimony describing how Spitzer’s efforts to deflect blame—including by releasing confidential information about victims—“overshadowed the harassment itself.”
Now OC Watch has obtained an explosive filing with the State Bar of California that says these findings amount to professional misconduct, and calls for discipline that could include disbarment, experts say.
The filing further fans the already blue-hot flames of scandal engulfing Spitzer, who also faces calls to resign and mounting criticism from fellow prosecutors, law enforcement officials, and civil rights leaders over racist statements that he allegedly made in the course of a death penalty case, and then fought to conceal from defense lawyers and the public.
The new ethics complaint points to Spitzer’s role in enabling sexual harassment and fostering a hostile work environment. “Spitzer empowered a predator to engage in rampant sexual misconduct,” the complaint says, “and then allegedly embarked on a campaign of retaliation and deceit to deflect his own responsibility for the scandal. At each step, Spitzer apparently prioritized personal loyalties and his own reputation over the administration of justice and the interests of victims.”
Ada Briceño, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Orange County, has been among those demanding Spitzer’s resignation. After reviewing the complaint, she told OC Watch that she is “grieving for the women who work for him,” and is “concerned overall for women in Orange County and what this means for us.” Spitzer’s “actions and attitudes toward women are not what I want to see from someone responsible as a district attorney,” she said. “I would support discipline from the bar, including disbarment, which would force him to resign.”
OC Watch previously covered the investigations into LoGalbo and Spitzer here and here. Citing three separate incidents confirmed by those investigations, the new complaint alleges that Spitzer violated various ethics rules that prohibit “dishonesty” or “deceit,” and that require office managers like Spitzer to provide a safe working environment free of harassment and discrimination. State Bar discipline is necessary, the complaint says, to protect “the integrity of the legal profession, and to preserve public trust in the profession.”
“Through his callous and self-serving actions, Spitzer has violated the public’s trust, jeopardized the work of prosecutors and public safety in Orange County, and traumatized lawyers in his charge,” the complaint says.
Law professor and ethics expert Lara Bazelon explained to OC Watch that “prosecutors are held to the highest ethical standards, and part of that is because they have the power to take people’s liberty, which is the most consequential thing an attorney can do. And for that reason we expect them to be highly ethical and law abiding themselves.”
“I’m surprised that it took the alleged racist statements for DAs to start disavowing Spitzer . . . despite all this egregious misconduct and his reaction to it,” she added. “But yes, I do think this is unethical, and that he can and should be disciplined.”
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The complaint’s first claim involves Spitzer’s “not credible” denial that he tried to retaliate against a victim through a negative performance review.
One of LoGalbo’s victims, referred to in court filings as Jane Doe 1, endured harassment while she was still in the probationary period for new hires. “Any sexual harassment in the workplace is an awful thing to endure,” she later told the county investigator, but “when it comes from a manager, who literally has the power to fire, or prevent me from being hired full time for the position I have worked my entire life to achieve, it is exponentially worse.”
Worse still, she said, LoGalbo’s close personal ties to Spitzer raised the specter of retaliation. “The man visiting this harassment upon us is not only a friend of the elected District Attorney,” she said, “but was actually the ‘Best Man’ at this wedding. Imagine how stressed the female prosecutors in this office must be.”
After Jane Doe 1 reported sexual harassment, Spitzer remarked to his senior staff that the woman “had lied and was untruthful in her email.” He then asked her supervisor to “write up” a negative performance evaluation for “lying” about LoGalbo. Spitzer backed down from this demand only after the supervisor and another senior prosecutor objected, citing contrary instruction from Human Resources and warning that an unwarranted negative review could be unlawful retaliation.
When Spitzer denied this to the county investigator, she found his explanation “not credible.”
The ethics complaint says that in this case “‘not credible’ is simply a softer term for ‘dishonest,’” and while the “investigator could have found that Spitzer merely failed to recall the incident or was mistaken about the events in question,” she instead “found that the evidence showed that his testimony was dishonest.”
The complaint also alleges that Spitzer violated ethics rules by disseminating confidential information about LoGalbo’s victims.
In one instance, Spitzer told a journalist that Jane Doe 1 had been untruthful before she complained of harassment, and that her probationary period had been extended. The county investigator concluded that Spitzer’s disclosure “was beyond inappropriate” and “can be reasonably interpreted to be derogatory, insulting, threatening, intimidating, or humiliating because it described the witness as being untruthful.” She also found that Spitzer’s intent was “to deflect the negative evidence about his own actions during the LoGalbo investigation.”
In a separate incident, Spitzer sent the full investigative report detailing LoGalbo’s misconduct to the entire district attorney’s office. Without removing names or identifying information, Spitzer sent the report to “every single person who works in an OCDA building including the clerical staff, the IT personnel and facilities employees[.]” Spitzer apparently wanted everyone to see that the report did not include a formal finding of retaliation—though it did say that Spitzer was “not credible” when denying that he intended, but ultimately failed, to retaliate against Jane Doe 1. In so doing, Spitzer shattered the well-guarded anonymity of LoGalbo’s accusers.
According to the county investigator, Spitzer’s wide release “exposed the attorney witnesses to gawking and humiliation, and had the effect of gratuitous sabotage or undermining of those attorneys’ work performance.” During the investigation, witness after witness recalled the trauma that flowed from Spitzer sharing the report. One woman said that it “felt like an attempt to out us” because it “made no effort to hide our identities or release just a summary or redact our genders, ages, workplaces, anything like that” and that “to have it put out there in front of everybody without any control from me has been devastating.”
The ethics complaint alleges that Spitzer’s “self-serving decision” to disclose confidential information “violates the professional rules that prohibit lawyers from committing acts of moral turpitude or other misconduct that puts the public and the integrity of the legal profession at risk.” It also alleges that, as the top office supervisor, Spitzer violated his obligation to “ensure that the [DA’s office] has in effect measures giving reasonable assurance that all lawyers in the [office] comply with” state ethical rules, including those prohibiting unlawful harassment and discrimination. Instead, the complaint says, “Spitzer’s decision to release the LoGalbo report in effect dismantled such measures, by creating a ‘chilling effect’ for future victims of misconduct.” Now, “thanks to Spitzer, victims of harassment and abuse will be less likely to come forward, and professional misconduct of OCDA supervisors will more likely persist unchecked.”
According to Bazelon, the ethics expert, “when you knowingly allow an environment that allows this kind of sexual harassment to run rampant, and then when confronted with it you are not honest, then you are not living up to the ethical obligations as a prosecutor.”
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The ethics violations alleged against Spitzer stem from LoGalbo’s reign of abuse and harassment that is thoroughly documented in multiple lawsuits, in addition to the county investigations. According to at least four women prosecutors, LoGalbo—whom the women referred to as “Scary Gary”—routinely tormented them with lewd remarks and unwanted touching (pointing at a woman’s rear-end while she bent over to plug-in a phone charger, taking a photo, and saying, “this one is for the spank bank,” is just one example). Last year, in the report that Spitzer later released, an independent county investigator confirmed that “derogatory comments made by LoGalbo” could be considered “intimidating, hostile, or offensive,” and that some were “motivated by racial, ethnic or national origin animus and bias, and also constituted harassing conduct as defined by” County policy.
Spitzer is also mired in a separate, still-unfolding scandal involving claims that he fired a senior prosecutor to prevent the release of racist statements that Spitzer made while discussing whether a Black man should face the death penalty. According to recently leaked memos prepared by one of Spitzer’s most senior prosecutors, Spitzer allegedly announced 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—which, again, was convened to decide whether the state should seek execution—have characterized these comments as “racist.”
Spitzer has said that he fired the prosecutor, Ebrahim Baytieh, because of conduct related to an ongoing jail informant scandal. But sources close to the district attorney’s office have been suggesting a more nefarious intent—namely, that Spitzer got rid of Baytieh because he was leading an effort among senior prosecutors to disclose Spitzer’s statements to defense lawyers, the court, and the public.
This latest scandal has already damaged Spitzer’s political ambitions (at least four elected prosecutors have withdrawn their endorsement of Spitzer), and may doom his chances for re-election this year. But with an ethics complaint that could bring disbarment and growing calls for Spitzer’s resignation, perhaps the more pressing question is whether his tenure will even last to election day.