Porn charges effectively end work in politics for consultant

For Enrique Pearce, a top-tier San Francisco political consultant facing felony charges for possession of child pornography, the rule of “innocent until proven guilty” applies only in the courtroom.

Although Pearce was arraigned Wednesday and won’t face a jury for months, his career in politics effectively ended May 7, when police raided his Tenderloin apartment and seized computers that court records say held sordid, gut-wrenching pictures and videos of children being sexually abused by adults.

Within days, his clients abandoned him and political allies began to suggest they hadn’t really been that close to him. Phone calls went unanswered at both his downtown law office and his consulting company, Left Coast Communica-

tions. Pearce’s websites were scrubbed from the Internet. He has been released on $400,000 bail.

“Guys like Enrique Pearce disappear from the (political) map and are never heard from again,” said Sam Singer, a public relations veteran with experience in both political work and crisis communication.

Any sympathy remaining for the consultant likely vanished Wednesday, when a court hearing disclosed that some of the images found on Pearce’s computers showed infants and young boys being held down and raped. Court records also show that a man police identified as Pearce had a sexually oriented online chat in which he told a Walnut Creek man that “sharing a boy with another man is really hot to me.”

San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim was one of Pearce’s top clients, paying him more than $136,000 for work on her successful 2010 election campaign and her re-election effort last year.

When Pearce was arrested, Kim expressed concern for the consultant, saying in an interview that he was very likely under stress caused by attacks from political opponents. But that pity disappeared instantly when details of the child pornography case emerged.

“Supervisor Kim is utterly sickened,” her aide, Ivy Lee, said in an e-mail Thursday. “Her only thoughts are with these poor children. She hopes that he is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Scrambling for cover

The charges have sent many of Pearce’s former political clients scrambling for cover. While they may owe their careers to Pearce’s efforts, nothing good now can come from having their names linked to him.

Supervisor Norman Yee “is not interested in commenting” on Pearce, said Jen Lee, one of his aides, before abruptly slamming down the phone.

Yee, a former school board member, eked out a 131-vote victory over labor leader F.X. Crowley in his 2012 run for the Board of Supervisors. He paid Pearce $76,000 in consulting fees in that narrow win.

Then there’s Mayor Ed Lee. In 2011, Pearce helped put together the independent “Run, Ed, Run,” campaign to persuade the appointed mayor to seek a full term in office. He even wrote a campaign biography of Lee and raised $88,000 to publish it and send it out to voters.

After that election, he remained on Lee’s political team, with a $5,000-a-month consulting contract. He also reported collecting more than $150,000 from the campaign for the mayor’s 2014 Proposition A transportation bond.

When news of Pearce’s arrest came out last week, the mayor’s re-election campaign released a brief — very brief — statement.

“At the direction of the mayor, the campaign terminated Left Coast Communication’s contract.”

While Pearce, a 41-year-old attorney, had a long-running reputation for testing the limits of the city’s political rules, the sex charges shocked people who had worked with him.

“If karma was going to catch up with him, I always thought it would be on ethical issues,” said former Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who in 1999 brought Pearce in to work as an unpaid aide in his City Hall office. “But I never, ever thought of something like this.”

Hydra Mendoza, who paid Pearce more than $34,000 for his work on her successful school board campaigns in 2010 and 2014, was one of many who were blindsided when Pearce was arrested.

“I am still reeling from these very serious charges and deeply shocked as both a mother of two teens and as a school board member,” Mendoza said in an e-mail. “I never could have imagined he might be engaged in something so horrible.”

Pearce didn’t go out of his way to inspire loyalty, getting a reputation as a man on the make, someone willing to cut corners and do whatever it took to advance his career.

“He wasn’t someone I felt warm and fuzzy toward,” said Ammiano, who noted that the consultant went by the name John Henry Pearce when he worked in the supervisor’s office.

Considered law school

Pearce, a native of Allentown, Pa., and a 1996 graduate of Northwestern University in Illinois, was working as a waiter and looking to enter law school when he first worked at City Hall, the former supervisor said.

“He seemed very bright, very well-versed ... and handled (his job) well,” Ammiano recalled. “When he left, I assumed he was going to law school, but instead he did campaign work for Matt Gonzalez, who was my opponent (for mayor in 2003). That didn’t sit well.”

Pearce was campaign manager for Gonzalez, who lost a surprisingly close runoff to then-Supervisor Gavin Newsom. After graduating from the UC Berkeley School of Law in 2005, Pearce joined Gonzalez’s new law firm before striking out on his own two years later.

While Pearce’s association with progressive politicians like Ammiano and Gonzalez made him seem a man of the left, that perception changed abruptly when he began to work for Lee and the more moderate ballot measures sponsored by the mayor.

“When he was writing hit pieces it certainly didn’t feel progressive,” Ammiano said. “From 1999 to now, he’s changed his politics.”

What didn’t change was Pearce’s apparent willingness to skate a narrow ethical line.

In 2003, for example, he was accused of failing to register as a political consultant when he was running Gonzalez’s campaign. While Pearce argued that he didn’t receive any money, finance statements showed he was owed $8,000 for his work.

In Kim’s 2010 campaign for supervisor, an independent expenditure committee for the candidate, funded largely by former Mayor Willie Brown, was found to be working out of Pearce’s office in violation of campaign rules.

When Lee ran for mayor in 2011, there were questions about the source of the money for Pearce’s independent expenditure committees, as well as complaints about the consultant’s efforts to “help” Chinatown voters fill out their vote-by-mail ballots.

More recently, Pearce was accused of posting illegal campaign flyers against Supervisor David Campos, who was running against fellow Supervisor David Chiu in a 2014 race for state Assembly. Pearce ran an independent expenditure committee backing Chiu, who won the seat.

Big-name clients

None of the accusations stuck, and Pearce, whom the S.F. Weekly named as the city’s “Most Effective Political Consultant” in 2012, kept gathering big-name clients.

But while politicians and power-brokers are willing to hire a consultant who may skirt campaign rules — especially if he wins — an arrest for child pornography is another thing altogether.

“Even if he was released next week, it wouldn’t change much,” said Singer, who has handled plenty of problematic situations in his public relations practice. “In politics, it’s like a Miranda warning: ‘Anything you do may be used against you.’ If someone hired Pearce, another campaign would use it against them.

“It’s a third rail and no one wants to touch it.” John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@jfwildermuth

“Guys like Enrique Pearce disappear from the (political) map and are never heard from again.” Sam Singer, public relations veteran