It’s unclear if Silicon Valley tech exec knew about his wife’s parties for teens
A Los Gatos woman is jailed on charges of hosting boozy, sexually abusive parties for her high school freshman son and his friends at her $4.7 million home that could send her to prison for decades. But her husband walks free, though they share the home where much of the alleged debauchery took place.
Prosecutors have indicated in court papers that the accused woman, Shannon O’connor, took steps to hide the partying from her husband, Robert Amaral. Those who know the couple, who would speak only on condition they wouldn’t be identified to protect their children, say he refused to believe she was orchestrating teen delinquency under their roof.
Reached by phone this past week, Amaral, 60, a technology company executive, declined to comment.
Still, many parents whose teens are alleged victims said in interviews they find it hard to believe he didn’t know more about what was alleged to have happened under his roof. O’connor faces 39 felony and misdemeanor counts, including child endangerment and molestation and furnishing liquor to minors from June 2020 to May 2021. Fifteen boys and girls, including her son, are alleged victims. They were 14-15 years old at the time.
“We thought he was buying into her lies,” said one former friend whose son had been to parties at the house. “But the longer it went on … there’s only so much plausible deniability he can have.”
O’connor entered no plea during an Oct. 20 court appearance. She’s being held without bail with a hearing set for Dec. 17. She has declined interview requests and her lawyer, Sam Polverino, hasn’t commented on the charges. There was no indication Amaral was in the courtroom at his wife’s first hearing.
Legal expert Steven Clark, a former Santa Clara County deputy district attorney with extensive trial experience, said prosecutors would be cautious about charging Amaral absent clear evidence of his involvement.
In court papers, prosecutors indicated that in the first alleged house party in the summer of 2020, once O’connor “realized her husband was almost home, she rushed the minors out of the house to hide her actions from her husband.”
For a Halloween party last year, prosecutors alleged O’connor’s “plan was to take her husband … out of the house” and that “the children knew they had to wait for him to leave before they could begin drinking.”
For other alleged parties, whether at the couple’s Los Gatos house or places O’connor rented in the Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe areas, prosecutors did not mention her husband.
Clark said the charges against O’connor stem from her role in organizing and participating in the parties where teens allegedly drank themselves to the point of vomiting and passing out and where drunken girls were sexually assaulted while the mom was reported to be present — in some cases, right in front of her.
“It’s not just that these events went on under her watch,” Clark said. “She aided and facilitated these events. There’s a big distinction there.”
By contrast, with her husband, Clark said, “it doesn’t appear the teens were under his control.”
“Even if he should have suspected something was going on and was lackadaisical to what was going on, that wouldn’t rise to a situation where there would be willful child endangerment,” Clark said. That doesn’t mean, however, that her husband would be totally off the hook.
“From a civil standpoint, he has a lot of exposure,” Clark said. “You have a duty to maintain a safe environment and a duty of care for people on your premises.”
It’s not unusual for prosecutors to charge one parent and not the other even when parents in similar cases are charged together. That happened in the recent college admissions scandal of rich parents paying a corrupt consultant to get their kids into elite universities with fraudulent entrance exam scores, bribes and bogus athletic résumés.