The latest guest on the podcast is reporter Robert J. Hansen.
He works for Davis Vanguard, and his work is also featured on the NewsBreak application.
For Davis Vanguard, he has been working on a multi-article series entitled, “Tainted Trials, Tarnished Headlines and Stolen Justice.”
We spoke about two articles which have been released and in the last five minutes about an upcoming article about a domestic violence shelter which manipulates victims and refers them to connected attorneys.
He wrote both articles with Susan Bassi; check out my recent interview with her here.
Ray McDonald
The first article we spoke about was an investigation into the alleged domestic assault by former 49er Ray McDonald.
It’s a story most people are familiar with, however this reporting delves much deeper than anything else I have read on the case.
The most significant revelation in the report is the presence of the Santa Clara Bench-Bar-Media-Police (BBMP): this somewhat secret committee is made of many of the people who would contribute to the case.
“For years, the conduct of McDonald got media attention because he was an NFL player. The discovery of the Santa Clara Bench-Bar-Media-Police committee reveals an undeniably close relationship between many of the people in control of this case throughout the courts, police and media,” Robert’s report in Davis Vanguard stated.
I reached out the 49ers, the Santa Clara DA, and the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) but received no response.
Also complicating the issue was the especially close relationship between the Niners and the SJPD. Many SJPD officers, at the time of the alleged assault, moonlighted as security for the 49ers. Here is more from the Davis Vanguard report.
The night of Mcdonald’s first arrest, his fiancée dialed 911. McDonald called San Jose police Sgt. Sean Pritchard, who also worked as security for the 49ers.
The relationship between the 49ers and the SJPD was heavily criticized by the media. Only a couple of months later, the San Jose Police Department barred officers from working for the San Francisco 49ers, according to the San Jose Mercury.
Tim Kawakami, writing for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, noted in a 2016 article.
It took a long time, no doubt. I said from the outset that I didn’t believe McDonald should play for the 49ers — I said he should be PAID, but not play until this case is resolved — and that would have been a long time for him to sit waiting for this case to be cleared up.
But it took so long largely because of the involvement of the 49ers-paid officer. Can McDonald fans not understand that?
This incident was blurry right from the start, only got blurrier because there was an officer on the scene who was apparently acting as both a 49ers employee and an officer (which is literally not possible) and because further information was difficult for the DA to ascertain.
This happens. It’s possible McDonald did nothing wrong, that is something I have always said. We don’t know.
That’s not the only relationship which may have been compromised: the media, the 49ers, and the Santa Clara DA’s Office also had a tight relationship.
The Davis Vanguard article noted that the involvement of the BBMP may have influenced the coverage.
For years, the conduct of McDonald got media attention because he was an NFL player. The discovery of the Santa Clara Bench-Bar-Media-Police committee reveals an undeniably close relationship between many of the people in control of this case throughout the courts, police and media.
Mercury News reporters Tracey Kaplan and Robert Solonga were the primary writers of the McDonald series.
Like Kaplan, Salonga and Clark are also BBMP members and so are former chiefs of San Jose Police, Larry Esquivel and Eddie Garcia.
I reached out to the San Jose Mercury News- which employed Solonga and Kaplan- for comment but received no response.
Finally, the DA’s office may have served up the victim: forcing her to testify at a key grand jury hearing without her lawyer.
Doe was not interviewed by the district attorney before she was called to testify about the May 2015 incident before a criminal grand jury. For that testimony, Doe had some support from victim advocate Kathleen Krenek of Next Door Solutions. However, Doe’s attorney, Nicole Ford, went on vacation.
When Ford returned, she learned the grand jury did not indict McDonald for domestic violence. Ford advised Doe that her domestic violence case was hopeless and encouraged Doe to dismiss the case she had brought in family court. Then, according to Doe, in her absence and without her written consent, Ford purported to enter into a settlement with McDonald.
“I was not present in court … Ford purported to enter into a ‘global settlement’ of the case,” Doe said.
Ford responded to me when I reached out to her by phone. She noted that she was not out of country, but on vacation: Davis Vanguard initially reported she was out of country.
Ford defended herself to Robert after the article was published, stating that the grand jury hearing was called very late and the vacation was already booked, but this is not what’s most important, in my opinion.
Whether this was heartless on Ford’s part or haphazard on the DA’s part, what is most important is that a domestic violence victim was forced to testify at a grand jury without an attorney.
The result was that the charges were dropped, and as often happens, this had reverberations in the child custody case the woman had with McDonald.
That order gave McDonald unsupervised visits three times a week for two hours.
Left without sufficient representation, Doe felt pressured to sign stipulations giving McDonald more time with their child and to accept $2500 a month in child support, which Ford told her was all she could get.
Besides the alleged victim’s statements, there was photographic evidence and later a video of a second incident. It wasn’t enough: eventually all charges were dropped against McDonald.
Paul Gackle
The second article we talked about was about the aftermath of the 2017 assault of San Jose Mercury sports reporter, Paul Gackle, by 23-year-old Sydney Whalen.
I reached out to the Mercury News about this story as well, but I received no response.
First, as Robert told me, the newspaper waited ten days before reporting on the assault, even though it was their reporter and he nearly died.
“Gackle, a San Jose Mercury reporter, nearly died after being stabbed 14 times,” the Davis Vanguard story noted.
Whalen went on to commit two more crimes in those interim ten days, Robert told me.
Whalen had a crime spree which included the attack on Gackle, but this story was not broken by the Mercury News, but rather by the Associated Press.
Northern California investigators have tied a 24-year-woman to a homicide and the stabbing of a sportswriter during a two-week period in 2017.
…
The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office said Sydney Whalen has been charged with attempted murder for July 21, 2017, robbing and stabbing of Bay Area News Group hockey writer Paul Gackle. There is no evidence he was attacked because of his profession.
Whalen is also charged in Alameda County with robbing and beating to death a 44-year-old father of four in a Motel 6.
Meanwhile, the Mercury News put pressure on Gackle to return to work. Here’s more from the Davis Vanguard article.
According to court documents, Gackle wanted to go on disability, but his sports editor, Bud Geracie, told him he would lose his beat if he didn’t begin reporting on the San Jose Sharks at the beginning of the season, which began the first week of October.
“He told me, ‘Paul, if you ride with me, I’ll take you to the top,’” Gackle said. “He’s like, ‘I know everybody in this business.’”
Gackle was also being stymied by the Santa Clara County DA’s Office for funds he should have received as a victim, Robert’s story noted.
On the fourth anniversary of Gackle’s attack, July 2021, Gackle received a phone call from his California Victim Compensation Board (CalVCB) case manager who told him his claim was denied.
CalVCB administers victim compensation for expenses to victims who suffered crime-related physical injury throughout California.
After struggling to receive victim’s compensation, Gackle reached out to victim advocates at Mothers Against Murder, (MAM) to help him get victim compensation.
Robert told me that when the Mercury News finally did get around to doing an in-depth piece on the assault, they did not write about his struggles with the Santa Clara DA’s Office.
The Mercury News did not even name the DA- Jeff Rosen- by name, Robert told me.
It’s not the only thing the Mercury News failed to report. Here’s more from the Davis Vanguard article.
When that article finally came out, Gackle spoke to Mercury editor Bert Robinson about his frustration with the article leaving out the fact that the Santa Clara DA, Jeff Rosen, had offered Whalen a plea deal which allowed for her release, nine days before attacking Paul.
“By going behind my back and going through Robert [Salonga] and Bert [Robinson], Jeff Rosen guaranteed that the information would be released to the public in a way that was beneficial to him,” Gackle said according to court records.
Postscript
Find the previous articles in this series: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3., Article 4, Article 5, Article 6, and Article 7.
For more articles like this on corruption in California family courts check out the fundraiser.
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