Mudslinging lingers as state Dems decide on next party leader
California Democrats will replace their disgraced former chair this weekend, but if the campaign for the post is any indication, the election will do little to end more than a year of internal turmoil.
Complaints of personal financial failings, the party’s lack of fiscal controls and fallout from former party chair Eric Bauman’s resignation in the face of sexual harassment complaints swirl around this Saturday’s vote at the California Democratic convention in San Francisco to decide who will lead the party.
One of the leading candidates for party chair is Kimberly Ellis of Richmond, a progressive activist who lost to Bauman by 62 votes in a rancorous 2017 election. Even after the results were announced, she refused to concede, charging that party leaders had conspired against her.
She lost that battle, but got
another shot at the job when Bauman, a longtime party leader from Los Angeles, was forced out of office in November after complaints that he sexually harassed male party workers. At least three lawsuits have been filed against Bauman and the party.
But Saturday’s election redo, which features seven candidates, will be anything but a walkover for Ellis. She has found herself the target of attacks on her personal financial history, which includes a home foreclosure, a judgment against her for an unpaid college loan and eight straight years of unpaid federal taxes.
“We can’t have someone running the party who doesn’t know a dime from a dollar,” said Lenore Albert of Orange County, who is also running for party chair. “We’re taking in millions of dollars and if we put someone in office with those (financial) problems, who knows what will happen?”
Albert, however, has resume problems of her own. Her license to practice law was suspended by the California State Bar over her refusal to cooperate in an investigation into her work as an attorney.
She released public records of Ellis’ tangled finances, arguing that delegates to the convention in San Francisco this weekend need to have that information. Documents from the Contra Costa County recorder’s office show that Ellis has a long history of financial woes.
The Internal Revenue Service has filed more than $46,000 in liens against her, seeking unpaid taxes for every year from 2009 through 2016. In 2009, Jacksonville University, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1996, filed a judgment against Ellis for $28,614 in unpaid student loans. There is no indication that any of these debts have been repaid.
Ellis also lost her Richmond home to a July 2015 trustee foreclosure sale. The home was sold for $498,628, less than the $626,543 that Ellis and her former husband owed on the house they purchased in 2005.
The home had been in foreclosure off and on since 2007, the height of the national home mortgage debacle, when California home prices plummeted and foreclosures soared.
“Those records say first and foremost that like the majority of Californians, I’m struggling not just to survive, but to thrive,” Ellis said in an interview. “I can relate to how people struggle.”
Family tragedies quickly led to unsolvable financial problems, she said. “Most Americans can relate to this.”
When her mother took off work to care for her brother, who was dying of cancer, Ellis helped support the family. Add that to what she described as a “predatory” home loan and the failure of her marriage, and the bills kept piling up.
Party leaders knew about Ellis’ financial problems, but never used them during the 2017 chair election, said Sandra Lowe, who worked on Bauman’s campaign.
Bauman “knew those (financial) records existed, but Eric made the decision that, no, we’re not going to do that” and make Ellis’ finances a campaign issue, Lowe said. “This year it’s the same thing, but now they’re made public.”
Ellis said that she is in a program to repay her unpaid taxes, and is upset at what she sees as an attempt to “debt-shame” her.
“This type of politics is really damaging to the party,” she said. “We’re a party that isn’t willing to win at all costs, especially by trying to divide people.”
The attacks against Ellis have prompted other candidates to complain about what they see as a lack of transparency in a wide range of party operations, including its elections. Unlike people running for public office, candidates for party posts don’t have to say how much money they raised, whom they got it from and how they spent it. They also don’t have to reveal any personal financial data.
“The party can be more transparent,” said Rusty Hicks, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and a candidate for party chair. In party officer elections, candidates raising more than $25,000 should be required to disclose all contributions and expenditures, he said, which he and some of the other candidates have done.
Ellis isn’t the only candidate taking campaign hits. Daraka Larimore-Hall, the party vice chairman who first accused Bauman of harassing staffers, is being attacked regularly for that decision.
“The thing about being a whistle-blower is it makes you a target for both sides,” the Santa Barbara resident said. Ellis’ supporters “say that I knew (about the harassment) all along and should have said something before the (2017) chair vote. But Bauman’s people complain that I made the charges at all.”
Lawsuits filed against Bauman not only accused the former chair of harassment, but also claimed that party leaders, including Larimore-Hall, knew about the problems but did little or nothing about them. In a March 26 post on the online site Medium, Kate Earley, former digital director for the party, said Larimore-Hall did nothing when she asked for help and “he lashed out and engaged in witness intimidation” when he was named in a suit.
Larimore-Hall denied pushing back against the accusers, saying in a lengthy Facebook post that “I never encouraged anybody to drop their lawsuit, I never threatened anybody, and I never sent ‘surrogates’ to threaten or intimidate anyone.”
Larimore-Hall, who along with Ellis and Hicks is considered a front-runner in the contest for party chair, said his campaign for the office has been an eye-opener.
“It’s sickening that the race for party chair has turned into any other type of election,” he said.