Update on one-time Fuentes/GOP golden boy Jeffrey Ray Nielsen

Both gay and anti-gay

     This morning, OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley updates his story about one-time GOP golden boy—and sexual predator—Jeffrey Ray Nielsen: Ex-Rohrabacher Aide Can't Stay Clean Even After Prison:

     There was a time in Orange County when Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the son of a Fountain Valley Republican mayor, seemed destined for a lofty perch. Nielsen got into USC Law School based, in part, on the personal recommendation of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, the man who'd repeatedly take him to the nation's capital as a trusted aide. ... Before his downfall, the self-styled Christian conservative—a junior Rush Limbaugh in training—liked to berate liberals and gays for destroying the nation.
     The ironic Nielsen collapse began in the 1990s when he used his connections to win an internship inside the Orange County District Attorney's office. Police caught him urinating in public during a date….
     We may never be able to reconcile how Nielsen, who hobnobbed with Orange County's most powerful political leaders like Tom Fuentes and Scott Baugh, breathlessly targeted 7th, 8th and 9th grade boys for romance and sex while simultaneously quoting Biblical passages and hailing Ronald Reagan.
     After his 2003 arrest for the lewd, determined pursuit of a troubled Westminster High School student, Nielsen told friends that his political connections would help him quietly make the case against him go away. I made sure that didn't happen…. [My research] lead me to another victim, who as a 7th grader found himself used for two years as a sexual object by Nielsen, who'd been prowling a church youth group while working for Rohrabacher.
     In March 2008, Nielsen—then a Ladera Ranch resident who attempted to claim he was the victim of a liberal media plot run from the Weekly offices—dropped the pretense of innocence, pleaded guilty and earned himself a 36-month stint in a California prison….
     In Dec. 2009, we reported that Nielsen had been released from prison and was living in Laguna Beach.
. . .
…We've learned that in April 2010—just four month after his prison departure, Nielsen got drunk in Laguna Beach, crashed his car into a parked car and found himself under arrest again, according to court records.
. . .
     [Superior Court Judge Robert] Gannon sentenced Nielsen to serve 90 days in jail, attend another alcohol diversion program and live under probation supervision for three years.
     Worse for Nielsen, Gannon…decided in December 2010 to also send him back to prison for four more months.
     He's now free again and we're wondering what's next for the man who turns 41 years old next month.

A weak smile, the persistence of the Moon

• OFF TO POKEY. A miserable closing chapter to the Nielsen case: Sex-Abuse Victim Confronts Ex-Rohrabacher Aide Jeffrey Ray Nielsen at His Sentencing (R. Scott Moxley in the OC Weekly)

...This façade had served the 37-year-old Ladera Ranch man well, helping him get a job as a Washington, D.C., congressional aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, win close friendships with political heavyweights such as Orange County Republican Party bosses Scott Baugh and Tom Fuentes—oh, and lure impressionable seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade boys into sexual relationships....

• From this afternoon's What's New: ASSHOLE FEARS BLACK HOLE

Technology has changed in the 400 years since Cervantes first told the story of Don Quixote. Windmills are now particle accelerators and the knight’s lance is a federal court injunction, but the plot is the same. It begins with a befuddled lawyer in Hawaii named Walter Wagner. Having read far too much science fiction as a youth, Wagner fantasizes that he is a physicist by virtue of an undergraduate biology degree with a minor in physics. Accompanied by Sancho, his loyal TA, Wagner embarks on an adventure to slay the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a doomsday machine that he believes is poised to destroy the world by creating a black hole. He seems to have forgotten the last time he tried this. In 1999 Wagner warned that RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, must be slain lest it create a black hole. The then BNL director, Jack Marburger, named a distinguished panel of physicists to investigate. Their report noted that nature has been conducting the relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic rays with the moon. It concluded that creation of a black hole is "effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon."

Nielsen Schmielsen!

.....The OC Weekly and OC Register are reporting that Tom Fuentes’ old sauna mate, Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, was sentenced today to three years in prison for molesting two boys.
.....No word yet on whether Jeff's been asked to return that swell suit Tom bought 'im at Macy's.

SEE GOP's Nielsen headed for the pokey

I don't get it

.  

  .....Gosh, it’s been a tough week for one member of our Board of Trustees—namely, fading OC rightwing guru and Prince of Darkness Tom Fuentes. That’s mostly ‘cause it’s been a tough week for some of his mentees.
.....MIKE CARONA. Take pious family man Mike Carona. You shoulda heard Fuentes’ introduction of the Sheriff at IVC’s 9-11 ceremony back in September. I covered the event for Dissent, thinking, “How come all these people are so respectful of this manifest rat bastard? What’s the matter with ‘em?”
.....I know, these are silly questions. Somehow, I never seem to stop asking them. I must have a screw loose, a hole in my head. Something.
.....Not long after the ceremony, the excrement hit the fan, what with federal indictments, etc.
.....Carona and crew (Schroeder, et al.) did what they always do: they nakedly pursued their interests, the public interest be damned. So, natch, Carona did not step down but instead took a leave only to return to work this week. He’s getting paid, but, essentially, he’s leaving the actual work of Sheriff to an underling.
.....How very righteous. Er, not. But he’s still got that flag pinned to his shirt. He still goes around praying and rolling his eyes.
.....That’s when the LA Times called for a recall (Recall Mike Carona) of the fellow, arguing

Carona has every right to his day in court, to fight the charges that he traded access to his office and power for gifts and money. But he and his department never would have reached this day, never would have come under scrutiny in the first place, had he run his department with an ethical hand. Instead, from his first day in office, Carona has been selling out the title of sheriff, providing supporters and others close to him with extraordinary favors. Just one example: hiring two top political supporters as his chief assistants even though they were patently unqualified for the jobs, so much so that Carona needed special dispensation to make the hires legal.

.....Um, those two guys are now in jail. Eventually, if there is any justice (silly me), Carona will join them there. But his unsavory (incompetent, reckless, hypocritical, etc.) character was manifest long before the indictments.
.....That didn’t prevent Fuentes from praising him to the heavens four months ago.
.....I just don’t get it. How come the people who go out of their way to stand for piety, rectitude, and patriotism are so often the least pious, the least righteous, the least other-regarding? Why are they so often the ones who cause the biggest headaches for those who actually do the good works that need doing? Tell me that!

.....CHRISS STREET. Yet another Pal o’ Fuentes is OC Treasurer Chriss Street, yet another manifestly ratular Rat Bastard. Fuentes advised him during his successful run for that office.
.....According to today’s Times (Public agencies withdraw from O.C. investment pool), things are going from bad to worse for Street:

Four of the seven public agencies that voluntarily participate in Orange County's investment portfolio have withdrawn almost all their cash in recent months amid concerns over Treasurer Chriss Street, and others are reviewing whether to keep their money in the pool, according to public finance managers. …Since becoming treasurer more than a year ago, Street has been beset by investigations into his private business dealings before entering office and questions about his handling of county business. …Street came into the treasurer's office as the hand-picked successor to now-Supervisor John Moorlach, whose management of the office for 12 years after the bankruptcy was largely admired. But Street ran into trouble even before he was elected. Questions emerged about whether he engaged in self-dealing while overseeing the affairs of a bankrupt trucking firm, which has since become the subject of a federal investigation. Local prosecutors are examining whether he sought to steer contracts for county work to friends and business associates….

.....Let’s face it: those close to Street must’ve been pretty clear about what kind of guy he was/is before he took office (in fact, the unpleasant facts about Street’s “business dealings” were reported long before the election).
.....But that was OK with them. How come?
.....Again, I don’t get it. The people I know—admittedly, many of them are progressives, atheists, skeptics and the like—would never dream of doing the nasty and corrupt things that Fuentes’ friends do as a matter of course. Nor would they support someone who would consider doing these things.
.....How come, when the Fuentes crowd lay claim to righteousness whilst dismissing my crowd as wicked and benighted, nobody calls ‘em on it? I be stupefied.
.....It’s like the President. He’s obviously a loutish and base kinda guy. So what’s with all the endless respectfulness? How come Brian Williams doesn’t just say, “Well, here he is again, embarrassing us with his cluelessness and naked cynicism and dishonesty. Um, he was in Israel today pretending to give a shit. It’ll be a great day when someone half-way intelligent and decent takes over the Presidency.”
.....So what’s with Brian? It’s as if it would be less-than-objective to state an obvious fact. Is Brian less-than-objective when he takes a side in the shape-of-earth “controversy” (it’s round)? Don’t think so. So why is it different noting the obvious facts re Bush?
.....How does that work exactly?
.....Sometimes, I think it goes like this: if one makes a great show of one’s “faith” and patriotism—not by actually doing anything, but mostly by wearing little flags, pledging at big flags, praying in hushed halls, engaging in eye-rolling whilst facing the heavens—one is ipso facto a soldier of the Right and the Good.
.....Even if, notoriously, one has a very hard time living up to the “values” of official rightness/goodness (that’s Fuentes all over), the fact that one loudly aligns oneself with respectable religion (Christianity or Judaism, not some silly “sect”) and a kind of unreflective and uncritical love of country common among Kohlbergian ten-year-olds, then, no matter how far one strays from the path of virtue, one is fundamentally one of the good guys, and no amount of intelligence and decency achieved by a “secularist” or “humanist” can ever compete with those credentials.
.....It’s a kind of Moronic Logic for a Moron Age. If that’s the thinking, then I may as well go back into that cave over there.

.....JEFF NIELSEN. Another member of Fuentes’ team of pious rat bastards is Jeff Nielsen, who was again in the news this week.
.....Yesterday, the OC Weekly (BOY, OH, BOY!) reported that

Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the once-cocky Orange County political activist who espoused conservative principles while molesting underaged boys, will enter a pre-prison program in the coming weeks with one more headache: One of his victims has filed a civil lawsuit seeking $1.35 million. …The plaintiff, whom we'll call John Doe, filed the suit in late December in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was there, in the city of Falls Church, in 1994 and 1995, that Nielsen used his positions as an aide to Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and a church youth counselor to rent a room from a Virginia family with a 13-year-old son, Doe. The family had no clue that Nielsen, a Bible thumper with friends in high places, was a clever sexual predator interested in sleeping with middle-school and high-school boys. …The Weekly first reported Doe's tale in September 2006. Nielsen—who, at the time, faced criminal charges for repeatedly molesting a Westminster High School freshman—angrily denied any pedophile conduct. Indeed, the man who keeps stuffed animals on his bed called the allegations "delusional" and the Weekly part of a liberal conspiracy to frame him because of his friendship with Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. Last March, a Newport Beach jury deadlocked after Nielsen's lawyer, Paul S. Meyer, savagely attacked the teenage victim on the witness stand while Nielsen posed as a generous, caring Christian with lofty ideals about mentoring troubled youth. …In December, after four years of angry denials, Nielsen finally admitted to molesting both youngsters. In exchange, he won a reduced prison sentence of three years, though he will have to register as a sex offender for the remainder of his life….

.....RAGHU MATHUR. This reminds me of a moment during the Chancellor’s Opening Session on Wednesday. The Chancellor hates Rich McCullough and is responsible for M’s retirement as President of Saddleback College (Rich is slated to retire in June).
.....But that fact didn’t prevent Mathur from singing Rich’s praises on Wednesday and handing him a big plaque. Listening to the Chancellor, you’d swear that Rich had no greater friend in this world than Raghu P. Mathur.
.....Now, see, I’d never do that. I’d be thinking, “I hold this fellow in low regard, cuz he refused to be a team player [i.e., helping me to screw my enemies, micromanage the shit outa things, etc.], and so, I’m willing, I guess, to brush up against the endless tributes to him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna join in them, cuz that would be seriously dishonest and cynical and fundamentally corrupt. It would be a kind of gross hypocrisy, and I ain’t goin’ there, nope.”
.....But that’s just me. And my friends. You know: all those nasty atheists and progressives and godless America-bashers, the "liberals" who do all the work in this goddam district whilst enduring endless attack from Mathur (“faculty leaders” seek to “control” the district), Fuentes (over-paid faculty work a “36-hour week”), and all their equally corrupt and appalling rightwing, church-going, flag-wearing friends.
.....I don’t get it.

Those wacky Orange County Republicans!

.
1. TRUSTEE Tom Fuentes’ pal Chriss Street sure is turning out to be a corrupt rat bastard. Imagine that! 

Two county workers placed on leave: Two were involved in contract sought by Treasurer-Tax Collector Chriss Street for work on county building (OC Reg)

2. Tom used to mentor this guy, remember?

Ex-GOP activist faces new molestation charges: Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, a former aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach, abused the boy at his Fountain Valley home, prosecutors say. (OC Reg)

Trustee Fuentes must be mighty disappointed in this young man. But at least Jeff is good to wet puppies!

3. Undoing an undoing?

UCI reportedly working on a deal to rehire Chemerinsky. (Times)

What? You think OC Repubs weren't up to their eyeballs in the unhire? We'll see, I guess.

See also:

●Rohrabacher, Baugh GOP Operative Charged in Another Man-Boy Sex Case
●NYT editorial: a bad beginning in Irvine
●Jeff Nielsen is a conservative guy
●Street under wider investigation

Jeff Nielsen is a conservative guy

CORRUPTION sure is a drag.

In Orange County, we’ve got lots of corruption. All kinds.

For instance, we’ve got a Republican Mafia, a secretive group of Karl Rovian thugs who make life difficult for decent Republicans. These mafiosi pretty much do as they please around here.

And when things get hot, they sure know how to cool off, boy. They're amazing!

You remember our big OC priest scandal. GOP names—Tom Fuentes, et al.—kept popping up in that one. It looked bad, and, as litigation moved forward, it seemed that it could only get worse, much worse.

Well, no. It took $100 million, but "they" (the Diocese, I suppose, which has long had very close ties with the OC GOP) definitely put a lid on it. The truth is in there, under that lid, but we’re never gonna see it, that's for darned sure. (See Gustavo Arellano's Boy-buggering bingo.)

Recently, the Sheriff’s ex-best pal, former Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo, was convicted of various corrupt deeds. (See County of lights, county of magic.) He didn't seem to get much of a sentence: one year. That seemed odd.

Years ago, at the beginning of that case, it sure looked like Jaramillo was gonna spill the beans—about his corrupt boss and who-knows-who-else. But, in the end, no beans.

The OC Republican mafia’s got a farm system, you know. They find young men and put their patrician hands on those young shoulders. “Let me help,” they say.

“Really? You wanna help little ol’ me?”

“Why, yes, young man! Let’s go to the spa and talk about it!”


Jeffrey Nielsen was such a young man. According to the OC Weekly (R. Scott Moxley's Boy crazy), back in 1996, then-25-year-old Nielsen was being mentored by some local GOPers. That, at any rate, is the impression left by letters printed by the Weekly and allegedly written at the time by Nielsen to a young boy in Virginia. (The boy, now an adult, reportedly asserts that, when he was in 7th and 8th grade, Nielsen had sex with him.)

In a letter dated October, Nielsen reportedly wrote the boy:

It was really nice to get a letter from you and for you to call me….

So, here’s what’s going on with me. On Friday, Tom Fuentes (the chairman of the OC Republican Party) called me and wanted me to meet him at Macy’s at South Coast Plaza. I got there and he bought me a suit. Then he took me to dinner and the sauna at the ritzy Balboa Bay Club. [Name deleted] told me he likes to reward hard-working young Republicans that he likes and he knows are going to go far. It was really rewarding.

As you know, I’ve been working really hard on the Scott Baugh campaign…. [Baugh is the current OC GOP chairman.] The only time I’m not working is when I’m watching a USC game, at church, asleep or writing you . . . or trying to get my law school applications together. I’ve got both my USC and Chapman applications typed. I’m working on getting all of my Letters of Recommendation together now. I’ve got Rohrabacher, Flanagan and Fuentes done. Today I found out that this guy who is the state chair of the Republican Party, Mike Schroeder (a friend of Rohrabacher) [Schroeder is the current kingpin of the Republican mafia], would also write me a letter of rec. It’s really good that he does because he’s on the board of trustees at USC Law School.

—Wait a minute. Tom Fuentes? Is that the same Tom Fuentes who, these days, serves on the SOCCCD board of trustees? Our Tom Fuentes? The pious and Spain-hating Tom Fuentes?

Why, yes it is. But Tom likes to mentor. Does it all the time. Apparently, Tom’s mentoring of young Jeff later blossomed into friendship or something. According to a Moxley article from late ’05 (Nambla fantasy), “More than once, Fuentes…visited Casa de Nielsen for parties.”

Eventually, Scott Baugh got Nielsen a job with fancy Irvine law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Then (says the Weekly), in 2003, “Nielsen was arrested…for allegedly molesting a Westminster High School freshman boy and possessing a huge, illegal cache of man-boy pornography.”

That can’t be good.

After several (suspicious) delays, the trial finally got under way a few days ago. 'Bout time!

The first to report on it was—who else?—the OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley (Imaginary teen sex?, Feb. 22):

A frowning Paul Meyer, defense lawyer for accused child molester Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, stood before the jury during opening statements this week…His client—a onetime congressional intern and aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher—is not just innocent but a victim, he said. Meyer pounded his finger on the podium and railed about the “audacity” of the prosecutor introducing a small sampling of the hundreds of man-boy sex pictures Nielsen possessed at his home.

“Those pictures have nothing to do with this case,” said Meyer, who fought to keep the jury from seeing the child pornography by arguing there is a “dissimilarity” between possessing kiddie porn and molesting youngsters.

Besides, said Meyer, Nielsen is no freak. “Don’t be misled,” he told the jury. “Jeff Nielsen is a conservative guy, responsible, caring and very family-oriented. He cares about people.”

…Deputy District Attorney Dan Hess began the Feb. 22 trial by explaining that Nielsen, 36, “actively sought out a boy, pursued this boy to carry out his own sexual perversion” on a 14-year-old freshman at Westminster High School…“The defendant is free to do what he wants, but not with a 14-year-old boy,” said Hess, who noted that a minor cannot legally consent to have sex with an adult in California.

…The defense version is that Nielsen was startled at the boy’s age when they met, resisted the boy’s sexual passes and chose instead to mentor him because, as Meyer claimed, “he’s a kid who is out of control . . . wanting to run away from home . . . suicidal . . . hating his life.”….

Nielsen is a “successful lawyer,” USC graduate, home owner and BMW driver who loves his dog “Page,” Meyer often noted for the Newport Beach jury. What, he asked, would he see in a boy who “lives in a Westminster trailer park”?....

—A day later (Friday), the LA Times weighed in (Molestation trial begins for lawyer with ties to O.C. power):

Accused of molesting a 14-year-old boy he met over the Internet, a former aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and onetime intern at the Orange County district attorney's office was portrayed Thursday by a prosecutor as a man who repeatedly preyed on a minor for sex.

…Nielsen's trial opened in a Newport Beach courtroom nearly four years after he was arrested…The case might have received little attention if not for Nielsen's connections to Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and other influential members of the local Republican Party.

As first reported by the OC Weekly, Nielsen was an aide at Rohrabacher's Washington, D.C., office in the mid-1990s, a period during which the congressman and GOP power brokers Tom Fuentes and Michael Schroeder provided character references to USC Law School on his behalf. Nielsen's father, Ben, is a former Fountain Valley mayor.

….[Deputy District Attorney Dan] Hess displayed blown-up copies of e-mails between Nielsen and Doe, which, he said, corroborate the allegations and show that Nielsen pursued the relationship after Doe told him he wanted to end it and find someone closer to his age. Hess closed by handing each juror a folder containing copies of five images of child pornography he said were found on Nielsen's computers.

Taking umbrage at that move, defense attorney Paul S. Meyer asked the judge for special permission to start his opening statement before the recess that is typically given after the prosecution opens the case…"The reason I didn't want to take a break is because a picture is worth a thousand words," he said, urging jurors to ask themselves, "Why are we looking at these photos?"….

The accuser is expected to take the stand next week.

—OK, I'VE GOT A PREDICTION. Nielsen may or may not be convicted. But, conviction or no, we’re never gonna learn much about Nielsen's interesting life with the boys of the good old OC Republican Party. That’s for damn sure.

Mentoring do's and don't's

Mentoring is a good thing. But you've gotta be careful. Many years ago, in one of my philosophy classes, I mentioned a very difficult essay—it was called, “Do the numbers count?”—and it was considered a brain-teaser by my pals back in grad school. In class, I briefly explained its argument. I mentioned that I found it difficult. The next day, a student from that class showed up for my office hours to explain the article to me. He had found it, read it, and understood it. I was astonished. There was no doubt in my mind that the kid was a genius. Subsequent conversations confirmed this. I was his mentor, I guess, for about a day or two. But some of his remarks soon revealed that he was, well, mentally ill. (Don’t ask.) I’m no expert, but I am certain that the kid was very dangerous, perhaps a psychopath. I tried to nix the mentor/mentee thing (and I tried to get the kid some counseling), but it was too late: he started stalking me and I had to call in the authorities. I hate when that happens. EARLIER TODAY, I read the latest article in the OC Weekly (Sad Chronicle) about accused child molester Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, a prominent local Republican activist with close ties to Republican bigwigs like Dana Rohrabacher, Michael Schroeder, Scott Baugh, and Tom Fuentes. According to the Weekly, back in 1996, then-25-year-old Nielsen was being mentored by the likes of Tom Fuentes. That, at any rate, is the impression left by letters printed by the Weekly and allegedly written at the time by Nielsen to a young boy in Virginia. In a letter dated October, Nielsen wrote:

It was really nice to get a letter from you and for you to call me. I understand that you are not able to call me as much as I call you. Just tell me when you want me to call. I don’t mind being the one doing the calling, as long as you’re there to receive the call…. So, here’s what’s going on with me. On Friday, Tom Fuentes (the chairman of the OC Republican Party) called me and wanted me to meet him at Macy’s at South Coast Plaza. I got there and he bought me a suit. Then he took me to dinner and the sauna at the ritzy Balboa Bay Club. [Name deleted] told me he likes to reward hard-working young Republicans that he likes and he knows are going to go far. It was really rewarding. As you know, I’ve been working really hard on the Scott Baugh campaign…. The only time I’m not working is when I’m watching a USC game, at church, asleep or writing you . . . or trying to get my law school applications together. I’ve got both my USC and Chapman applications typed. I’m working on getting all of my Letters of Recommendation together now. I’ve got Rohrabacher, Flanagan and Fuentes done. Today I found out that this guy who is the state chair of the Republican Party, Mike Schroeder (a friend of Rohrabacher), would also write me a letter of rec. It’s really good that he does because he’s on the board of trustees at USC Law School.

Gee, sounds like Jeff’s got some important friends there! Eventually, Scott Baugh got Nielsen a job with fancy Irvine law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Then (says the Weekly), in 2003, “Nielsen was arrested…for allegedly molesting a Westminster High School freshman boy and possessing a huge, illegal cache of man-boy pornography.” After several (suspicious) delays, the trial is set for January 22. I know what it’s like, Tom. You try to help a kid out, and what happens? They turn out to be psychopaths and accused child molesters, that’s what. I woulda nixed the suit-buying episode, though. And that “dinner and spa” business is a little off, I think. Sends the wrong signals fer sher. But, other than that, I feel your pain, brother.