Todd Spitzer Has A Long, Documented History Of Problematic Behavior. Now He Faces A New Lawsuit Alleging Illegal Workplace Retaliation.
When Todd Spitzer was elected District Attorney, he promoted Gary LoGalbo, his one-time roommate and the best man at his wedding into senior leadership, raising serious questions about his fitness to lead.
LoGalbo is a self-professed “walking HR violation” whom women in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office refer to as “Scary Gary”.
Before LoGalbo abruptly resigned last year, four women accused him of both physical and verbal sexual harrassment, including by 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.”
In addition to the sexual harrassment, an independent audit by a law firm investigating the allegations also found that “derogatory comments made by LoGalbo were motivated by racial, ethnic or national origin animus and bias, and also constituted harassing conduct as defined by” the county’s policy. These remarks included, for example:
Joking that he would put a men’s porno magazine on the desk of another male prosecutor, whom he apparently believed to be homosexual;
Calling an attorney who is Muslim a “terrorist”; and
Publicly ruminating on why an Asian prosecutor should be responsible for prosecuting an Asian defendant.
The Gary LoGalbo scandal is only the latest in a long string of head-scratchingly bizarre behavior from Spitzer.
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.
As the Gary LoGalbo scandal demonstrates, there’s been no less controversy around Spitzer’s relationship with the truth since he took the helm of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office in 2019. Despite Spitzer’s insistence that his friendship with LoGalbo played no role in his managerial decision-making, Orange County is staring down yet another Spitzer-related lawsuit.
A deputy district attorney who still works in Spitzer’s office claims that after she endured LoGalbo’s race and sex discrimination, her boss, Todd Spitzer, “embarked on a campaign of retaliation against [her] and others for blowing the whistle on his ‘best’ friend.” The prosecutor, who is Muslim and an Afghan-American war refugee, alleges that LoGalbo made inappropriate ethnic and religious comments about her father and repeatedly referred to another Muslim attorney as a “terrorist”.
The lawsuit also describes how one evening, as she was walking to her car after work, she saw “a car approaching slowly from behind” and then heard a voice call out--“Hey baby how much do you charge?” When she looked toward the voice, she saw it was LoGalbo who, “blew several kisses to her in an exaggerated fashion and drove away.” In another incident, LoGalbo stared directly at the woman’s legs while chastising her over a minor mistake, saying “If you do that again I’ll have to spank you.” On yet another occasion, LoGalbo asked the woman 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.”
LoGalbo said and did all of these things, the lawsuit alleges, while repeatedly boasting to anyone in the office that would listen that he was “Todd’s best friend.”
“It's appalling that Todd Spitzer, who has a responsibility to protect victims, would endanger them,” Ada F. Briceño, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Orange County, told OC Watch. “Spitzer's actions have proven he is incapable of providing the leadership the office demands,” Briceño said. “In turning a blind eye to his best friend's indefensible behavior, Spitzer knowingly empowered this person” and allowed him to interfere “with the minds and lives of women merely trying to do their jobs.”
In a statement to OC Watch, Spitzer said that he was “disturbed” by LoGalbo’s behavior which he claimed was “perpetrated unbeknownst” to him and his executive management team. “We fully support the victims of harassment by this manager. The behavior he engaged in at the workplace is nothing short of vile. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office does not tolerate harassment of any kind in the workplace. We have and will continue to support anyone who believes he or she has been harassed.” Spitzer also told OC Watch that he “took immediate action as soon as [he] was made aware of these accusations and the breakdown in the system that resulted in this behavior going unreported.”
There are reasons to doubt Spitzer’s attempt to deflect responsibility, however.
Rather than express remorse or deny the allegations, LoGalbo said: “Oh, well, whatever. I’m not going to change. I’ll just retire.” More damning for Todd Spitzer, LoGalbo sent a text message that read: “I am who I am. Todd knew that going in.”
Indeed, one of the women who filed a sexual harrassment complaint against LoGalbo, later told the independent auditor, that Spitzer acknowledged to her in a phone conversation that LoGalbo was his “best friend” and that he “knew Gary was a pervert in his personal life but did not know he was one in his professional life.”
Spitzer admitted to the auditor that he did call the women, but he claimed “I don’t know what I said” but also that he would have said that his personal relationship with LoGalbo would not have impacted his decision-making and if he had known that LoGalbo was a pervert in the office, he would “have been put on admin[istrative] leave or been out of here in two seconds.”
Spitzer also allegedly protected LoGalbo from these allegations, and floated the idea of retaliating against the victims who made them. The supervisor of one of the women who filed a complaint against LoGalbo told an independent auditor that Spitzer told her to “write up” the woman for a negative performance evaluation. Both that supervisor and another prosecutor in Spitzer’s office sent the evaluation over to Spitzer with a Post-it note making clear that they “both disagree[d]” with that decision.
Spitzer offered a different version of events, but the independent auditor found Spitzer’s version “not credible”. Spitzer told OC Watch that “the independent investigation flatly rejected any allegation of retaliation by me or any of my executive managers” and “cleared everyone of any wrongdoing with the exception of Mr. LoGalbo[.]”
Spitzer’s statement is technically correct. The independent audit found the retaliation claim related to this incident to be “unsubstantiated.” But it’s a little more complicated than that.
The auditor could not substantiate the claim not because she believed Spitzer’s version of events (indeed, she found them “not credible”), but because establishing the claim requires a “formal adverse employment action”. Spitzer said he wanted the negative evaluation, but he did not “order” it on the spot. Instead, he left the door open for further discussion. Ultimately, after the pushback from others in senior leadership within the office, Spitzer approved a positive evaluation. In other words, the auditor believed that Spitzer intended for the woman to receive a negative evaluation and that he made the request to the woman’s supervisor, but because he was talked-out of his bad behavior before making a final decision about it, no “formal adverse employment action” occurred.
More broadly, it’s hard to imagine Spitzer didn’t know what was happening. Spitzer told the independent auditor that he has known Gary LoGalbo for 25 years. Spitzer even met his wife, Jamie Morris Spitzer, through LoGalbo, at LoGalbo’s first wedding. Jamie and Gary have been friends since they attended the same middle-school. Todd and Gary barbequed together. They went to the river together. They fished together.
Ask yourself, how likely is it that a man who allegedly greeted a female subordinate at the Orange County District Attorney’s Office by knocking on her office door and asking--“Knock, knock, are you naked in there? Are you clothed or are you naked?”--didn’t make similarly inappropriate remarks over the course of years of friendship and spending time together at weddings, dinner parties, and hanging out at the river?
That’s why Briceño, the Democratic Party Chairwoman, requested an independent audit by the County Board of Supervisors and the California Attorney General. She also urged the Orange County Office of Independent Review to perform an audit fully independent of the OCDA “in order to root out any and all possible harassing behavior under District Attorney Todd Spitzer.”
Elected prosecutors are entrusted with unmatched power and discretion to decide the fate of people’s lives. Each day brings with it life or death decisions about whether and when to bring criminal charges, to seek long prison terms, or to demand that people sit in jail — separated from their home, job, and family — while they wait for their day in court. It’s a job that requires sound, rational judgment, a sober temperament, and unimpeachable character.
Briceño said that through a pattern of perpetuating and permitting abusive behavior, “Spitzer has proven that he is not fit to hold office.” She also said that the District Attorney’s “attempts to condemn his best friend's behavior can not take away from the fact that Spitzer hired a man who he knew would harm women, and who did.”