The Deep Dive on How a Former Google PR Executive Smeared a Congressional Candidate

Every single thing I say can be documented and explained in depth and people can reach me anytime with questions at patricia@matchmapmedia.com or 202–351–1757. I wish it could be a simple story that did not take many pages to document, but it is not. It’s a nuanced and complex one, so re-telling it deserves that layer of respect. I am concerned that the same thing is still happening in the 2024 election and beyond. That’s why I must tell it.

As a sexual assault survivor and media advocate on the subject for thirty years, believe women is my motto. But in April of 2020 when I began working as a media volunteer on the Shahid Buttar campaign, who was running against Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 general election, something smelt off when people started spreading rumors in late July that he was guilty of sexual assault. Mainly, the complaint originated from and gradually escalated behind the scenes as a new rumor daily from men.

The man largely behind taking what was once just random rumors to the press was one that I, a woman, happened to replace on the campaign. He was a long time Google PR Executive named William Fitzgerald. And from the very beginning something was not right. I will describe the chain of events below. The Google PR guy had left Google, and became a political consultant for Shahid Buttar’s campaign. He was on a new mission to brand himself as a social justice warrior for workers. Buttar was one of his first clients at his firm called The Worker Agency.

Before we get into the real details of the Google PR guy, I want to note the background of how it started. Jasper Wilde (they/them), Buttar’s former campaign manager, was the original one who accused Buttar specifically of the sexual assault rumor, through a bunch of continuously changing accounts. Jasper repeatedly alleged that Buttar sexually assaulted someone else, not themselves. Except there was one problem — no woman ever came forward and said Buttar sexually assaulted her. None. It was just a rumor now admittedly made up by Jasper Wilde.

To be very clear, trauma survivors, including myself, often get confused on the details of their sexual assault or unable to remember some parts of it at all in some settings due to the nature of trauma and how it is remembered in the brain. A repeatedly changing story from someone who experienced sexual assault is often common for a variety of reasons that would take an entire book to describe. Witness false testimony is a common reason for innocent people being sent to prison all the time and has now led to many criminal exonerations in the United States. Sometimes the reason is not because people intentionally lied, but because extreme trauma blocks memories and can cause people to not recall accurately. This is an issue I care about tremendously and that I personally have done public interest public relations around for many years for some of the leading criminal justice racial and civil rights and women’s rights organizations and lawyers in America.

But in this case, there was no woman, just a repeatedly changing rumor and the person who started the rumor finally admitted they made it up. But by that time it was too late. The narrative had been told to the press.

For weeks there was buzz that there was a sexual assault committed by Buttar and lots of gossip from just about everyone in DSA, Harvey Milk Club, and SF Berniecrats. Now they all seem to deny it ever happened once it was revealed as a lie. No one wants to admit they were involved in spreading the rumor. I must have dreamt testifying about it in their meetings. In fact, my own testimony as well as that of Gloria Berry’s, both of us sexual assault survivors who were unwilling to go along with a rumor, was struck from the SF Berniecrats record when posted online, so maybe I did dream it. Or maybe they are still trying to cover up that time when they accidentally accused a brown man of sexual assault.

Nonetheless, when they couldn’t get that rumor to go forward or pick up speed, Jasper claimed they made a typo. In September, Jasper told Akela Lacy, a reporter at The Intercept, who had covered the story in July that they made a typo, and Akela Lacy at The Intercept said oh yeah, that happens and did not even question it. Casually, she wrote that in her story without asking how one could make such type of typo to repeatedly say a man of color committed sexual assault. Jasper then went on to say harassment, which also was never true. Akela didn’t call it out because she would have to admit she was entirely and embarrassingly spun by the Google PR guy, and none of the story would any longer make sense. She would be a fool. More on that below. There was no assault and there was no harassment. Akela even debunks the harassment claim in her own article, yet continues to allow Jasper to say he harassed people.

At any rate, I have made a lot of typos in my life, but that is a whole new level of typo. I often joke that when I was hiring people in the PR field, the worst typo I have seen (on multiple occasions actually) was people tragically accidentally typing pubic relations instead of public relations in a job application, resume or writing sample. Embarrassing typos happen. I don’t fault people for making mistakes, that’s why I am an abolitionist and believe in a restorative justice approach. But I have never seen someone just accidentally out of the blue make a typo that says sexual assault or harassment from nowhere. I think that typo Jasper made is a tragically worse and more embarrassing fate on the scale of mistakes, seems like racist slander and libel to me instead of a typo.

Jasper admittedly wrote an entire DSA resolution and presented it based on a typo. Jasper’s typo appeared over multiple pages and said aloud to groups of people including press. Is there a world record for length of typos? We might have found a winner. So that didn’t pan out. To accuse someone of sexual assault, you actually need to have a person who says they were assaulted.

This typo Jasper made just so happens to be one of the most historically classic forms of racism, for which many men of color of are sitting in prison today, because of false accusations of sexual assault from white people.

People are often surprised when I tell them that I have been a prison abolitionist since the age of 5 years old, which is when I believe I was first sexually abused. When I was abused the person who did it told me that I was at fault, and I would go to jail if anyone found out to prevent me from telling anyone. At a young age, I really believed I did something wrong, and I started looking into prison and the treatment and conditions there, which were entirely inhumane, fearing that I might end up there. Sociologically, I now know from my work on this issue as an adult that being sexually assaulted is a leading factor for how women end up incarcerated in the first place. The majority of women in prisons today started out by being sexually assaulted. The trauma often leads them to situations that lead them to prison. Personally, I went the opposite direction and excelled in my career and avoided any type of trouble ever in my life. I have always been a very clean and rule-following adult for that reason.

Even when my own abuser went to jail when I was in my teens, I still thought we needed reform. There are so many reasons why I believe our current system is not the best approach. I felt that when this whole event happened with Buttar that people did not care or want to listen to me about this. They don’t understand the very issues they claim to care about or report on, and it dug into the trauma that I have. That is why I have been very vocal about how wrong this whole chain events has been. I could barely even stand to listen to the SF progressives tell me about Chesa Boudin, Pamela Price, criminal justice or the metoo movement when they couldn’t even stand to get this very basic and common fact about my own experience and that of many others.

In a way, I feel that I can relate to Buttar, and the many others I have worked with who were exonerated after being falsely accused of a crime because what happened to them was similar to what happened to me. The lack of anyone wanting to listen was a familiar pattern. If anyone thinks in reading this entire piece that I am anything but genuine, then I don’t know what to tell them. I tend to see the humanity in all people, even those who do the worst crimes. As I went on to explain this to everyone, for speaking out, they called me mentally ill and other things people often use to stigmatize sexual assault survivors. Their ability to claim moral high ground here was really getting on my nerves because they had no idea what they were talking about and clearly no lived experience with this type of trauma.

Ironically, I took on the “always a victim” or calling out trouble makes me the troublemaker when I spoke out against wrong doing. Frankly, despite being a sexual assault survivor, this was the first time I ever told anyone about it. I was always behind the scenes advocating for others. As I wrote in a different post, when speaking up for Shahid, it is ironic that those advocating against him, particularly those in the DSA and San Francisco Berniecrats, said the things that reminded me of my own abuser. They had the abusive and gaslighting language. I am the trouble-maker. I will get sued. I am mentally-ill. I am harassing them. No. Just like when I was five years old being sexually abused, I am not in the wrong in speaking up. When I am 40 years old watching a racist campaign falsely accusing a Muslim man of sexual assault, I am also not in the wrong. The behavior and language of abuse, regardless of what kind, never changes. I was surprised about the correlation I observed between the two.

The shame here does not belong to Buttar or me. It belongs to the people who were making false accusations and worse yet the systems and people surrounding them which allowed it to happen. It was those falsely accusing Buttar who reminded me of my own abuser. They were using language that sounded like what, in my 40s through lots of therapy, I learned is the language of abuse. When I described this situation to my therapist, she was the one who encouraged me to speak out against this racism. So when these bullies sarcastically tell me to seek professional help, I did. She told me I was observing racism.

Yet, Jasper was never removed from the clubs where this rumor was spread, instead they were promoted to a board member of the Harvey Milk Club. No one wants to take accountability, and they just say this whole thing never happened. The Milk Club meeting where Jasper said it all had more drama than the 90 Day Fiance episode I was missing to attend it.

The way Jasper interacted with Buttar at that meeting, making him read his finances off from an app, was what I would call bullying and harassment of Buttar — not Jasper or anyone else. Harvey Milk probably would have rolled over in his grave to see what has happening at the rumor fest. In fact, during the meeting, they spent time trying to convince people I was actually a man and Buttar was paying me $5,000 a month. News to me. I have been a female since birth. FEC records can prove I never took a cent from the campaign and was doing it all volunteer. Jasper was the one who was using female pronouns and had been on the payroll while actively disparaging the campaign. Not me. Some of the crazy, and easy to debunk, rumors entertained in that setting are not even worth spreading even further. They were just throwing wild things out to see what stuck and who would believe what. I mention this to show just how intentional this was and not just simply a mistake.

Gloria Berry talks about the recruitment of this rumor campaign here. Berry, who also offered to talk to the press who were covering this inaccurately, describes how another rumor ended up in a Medium piece, and eventually also reported in the press, from a woman recruited named Liz Croydon, who has a long record of falsely accusing anti-war candidates. Holes were found in the story quickly. It turns out that Croydon’s story was entirely stolen from someone else.

In the past, Croydon had also been tweeting all kinds of stuff about Buttar, and making baseless accusations, like that he and others prominent in the antiwar movement murdered someone. Croydon had been tagging press especially at The Intercept, especially Ryan Grim, for a long time while Jasper and William had been on the campaign. I find it highly unlikely that Jasper and William would not have known that. It would have been their job to know that.

In Akela Lacy’s article, they make it seem like staff just found her tweet in July, and that led to them reconsider their experiences on the campaign. To me, knowing what I know about the past, it seems more like they knew she existed, was not stable, and recruited her in their crusade to make up stories about Buttar. Then they presented it in an embargoed press release to press described below. Given, as described above, that Croydon’s story had been the product of someone else’s, this theory makes more sense. How in the world is Akela, as a reporter, not putting this together?

It also confers with what Berry describes in her piece, Raya Sarkar Steier, whom we will describe below has a deep history of making up stories about sexual assault and Muslim men, called this woman up and convinced her to write a Medium post that other reporters eventually found out was based on a stolen story of someone else. They then went on to pitch it under embargo to press in combination with a false DSA resolution. I will describe more of that below.

In addition to that, a small team of people who were involved went on to make up rumors about workplace misogyny to add more to the claim, because the others were falling through. They went on a campaign to get someone — anyone — to say Buttar was sexist to them. They tried multiple avenues, including approaching volunteers to lie, and it just wasn’t working. No woman would say it. People who ended up on the Buttar campaign as a volunteer in the first place are people who have a high amount of integrity. When no one would say it, they made it up about them. More on exactly how that happened below.

There are rumors in every campaign. So we followed the traditional response on a campaign like that, and we didn’t respond to nor engage such unbelievable nonsense, so as not to keep it going further. Until the rumors started making their way to the press and people like Akela Lacy unbelievably took it seriously. Then we were forced to respond, as most people would. This is pretty standard guidance on most campaigns. Furthermore, the one who would have installed this guidance was William Fitzgerald, but he did not do any of the things to prevent Buttar from smears. I recall Ryan Grim, editor at The Intercept, in an interview talking about how similar accusations were going to be made about the Bernie Sanders campaign and more senior staff prevented it from happening. Rumors are just rumors until an outlet like The Intercept verifies them. I always say, as someone who does media relations, we don’t do that for views anymore. There are easier ways to do that. We do it for credibility — third party verification. So when a media outlet makes a decision to cover easily nonsensical rumors like this, they give them credibility.

To be very clear, I have spent my career pitching stories of survivors to press like The Intercept, including to journalists like Ryan Grim. I am a huge fan of media to tell stories of survivors. If it were not for that, my own abuser would still be doing it today. I owe media everything when it comes to this. It is the entire reason why I am in the career field I am in today. This is what I consider my life’s purpose. Yet, it is also a journalist’s job to verify what is true and what is an obvious made up rumor — that happens on just about every campaign — including, as Grim noted, Bernie Sanders.

Nonetheless, Buttar was running a challenger campaign, so it was almost impossible to find experienced staff, especially due to rules set up by Nancy Pelosi that blocked vendors who worked for challengers from ever working in the Democratic Party again. It put Buttar at a real disadvantage from the start. Candidates like Buttar do not have the access to experienced staff like a Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020. Comparing Bernie’s ability to respond versus Buttar’s is apples to oranges. But it opens the campaign up to potential infiltrators and inexperienced people (or worse yet, a combination) on purpose. I am of the full-hearted belief that if Buttar had the resources that Bernie had to protect himself, he never would have been smeared by such ridiculous rumors. I showed up far too late in the game to prevent it, so I had to just role with the punches now that it was happening.

Anyways, surprise or not, it was William Fitzgerald, of The Worker Agency, who was the first in the press to be quoted accusing Shahid Buttar of workplace misogyny. A claim that reporters said helped boost Jasper’s typo from a rumor to perhaps legitimate. This was strange for several reasons that raised immediate searing warning signals and red flags to me as someone who has done media relations on the topic of workplace harassment before on behalf of some of the top plaintiffs’ law firms in the country. Not to mention, I had also already seen them all trying to start a rumor campaign, so I was skeptical.

Personally, I would have left in a second if I saw Buttar doing this stuff. I wasn’t even getting paid, and I was a woman like any other trying to figure out exactly what was happening. Perhaps, I should be quitting? These were the thoughts that emerged in my head, undoubtedly, just like everyone else. Having spoken to maybe 100s of people about this to make sure I was doing the right thing, I am absolutely certain that my reporting here is accurate. I don’t think there is a single person who knows more about what went on behind the scenes than me, including Shahid Buttar himself, despite many trying to discredit me. Clearly, there is no way I could not know when I am documenting everything below so thoroughly, and this is me trying to keep it brief.

While Shahid is just a few years older than me, we actually paved a lot of the same path in Washington DC when we first started. In fact, we had even overlapped at a civil rights organization in 2007. The lawyers who Buttar had hired there were my direct clients, and they are people well known and distinguished in reporting on these issues. While I never knew Buttar directly or worked with him then, I never heard anything negative about him. I started asking around about Buttar, and I was told by many people that he was always great to work with. No one had started talking about this until now when he was running a campaign against Nancy Pelosi. His reputation was stellar. Not to mention, the more I dug into what Jasper said, the more I found lie after lie, to the point of insanity. People were knocking on my door to express concerns. I couldn’t even escape it. Getting those in my nonprofit background to speak out on that was challenging though because people who work in 501c3 nonprofits are not supposed to be weighing in on electoral politics. Also, no one was going to risk upsetting Pelosi when they worked at a nonprofit that depended on her. I am vague on the nonprofits I work with for that exact reason. I am good listener and people trust me and my integrity to do the right thing. That is why people seek me out to work for them on these issues.

When it was happening, I did not know at the time that Fitzgerald was a long time Google Executive known for spinning PR narratives for Google and who launched a new venture and was rebranding himself as PR guy for workers.

Fitzgerald had gained trust by pitching Glenn Greenwald when he was at Google regarding Edward Snowden, but I watched him feed Akela Lacy easily verified lies about the Buttar campaign to benefit the Democratic Party. He even bragged about paying the local nonprofit “media,” which were really just biased bloggers.At any rate, Fitzgerald has bragged a lot about all the things he did supposedly against Google while working for them as a PR guy, and yet Google has not done anything to take action against him. I am not buying it. Where is Google’s outrage that Fitzgerald was meeting with Glenn Greenwald to protect Snowden if he were really going against them? I have a hard time believing there was not some sort of interest there from Google and that William was doing this out of the kindness of his own heart. Reporters need to do a better job of researching who is sending them information in the world of disinformation and war. What interests do they actually have that are not being revealed? In piece, it says that Glenn may not have even known that Fitzgerald was working on behalf of Google. That is a disaster, but also shows just how much Fitzgerald has been spinning The Intercept on who knows that for likely quite some time. I suspect that the Buttar situation was only the most recent.

In fact, looking at what was set up on the campaign before I joined, I thought it was being run by someone who had no experience at all. It was old adage to assume someone has no idea what they are doing rather than malice. Now that I know of his level of experience, I am starting to wonder if it was all deliberate and had been planned for a while and directly set up to smear him at the right moment. Not to mention, these kinds of rumor campaigns had long been a tactic to smear people outside the margins or leading civil rights movements in the past. Who exactly was involved and who was carried along for the opportunism or easy manipulation was hard to tell. These types of things are meant to be confusing. I can’t give you clear answers. I can only document what I saw in hopes others can prevent it in the future.

Challenger campaigns often hire people who feel good about the cause, but have no idea what they are doing, so I didn’t think anything of it. I personally joined the campaign and refused pay despite having a high level of experience, because I felt passionate about it and was coming down from a huge upset after Bernie Sanders, who I poured my heart into for five years, left the race. I was part of the public relations efforts for the organization(s) that got Bernie to join the race in the first place. I also had used that platform to direct many people to the DSA and Berniecrats as a result. After seeing how they behave now, I now regret doing that. The movement is now infiltrated and destroyed.

To me, Bernie was more than a candidate who had a longshot margin of actually winning because of what the establishment would do to him, but an effort to attract young people into a movement. I felt the same about Buttar. Electoral politics never really interested me as much as the causes and movement on the individual issues. I make my successful living from doing caused related social justice PR. I never wanted a campaign job because I didn’t want to abandon my successful business and nonprofit clients I loved. When I donated and volunteered thousands of hours to both Bernie and Buttar and many others at every level of the political spectrum and area of the country, I knew I wasn’t necessarily paying to see them win, I was paying for them to tell it like it was on a national stage, and shift the narrative. We did that. We made progress, and that was a victory in itself.

At any rate, in a Mission Local article it says: “William Fitzgerald, who handled PR for Buttar, shared similar memories: “It felt to me, as a white guy, he listened to me a lot more than the women members of his team,” said Fitzgerald, a principal at The Worker Agency. It was obvious and he would often speak down to and be extremely rude to women. And in front of lots of people. And it was not a one-off and not to just one woman.” Fitzgerald says he broke ties with the campaign in April. “We wanted to see him through the primary.”

This was bizarre because this is someone who markets himself as a PR firm for workers’ rights issues. I do as well. In all my contracts, I have a termination clause. If I witness workplace misogyny, I am out the door immediately. I don’t waste a second and certainly don’t wait until my contract is over or someone ends a primary. It goes against the ethics of my firm to stay when I tout myself as someone who does earned media on workers’ rights issues.

William was literally arranging press events about Shahid Buttar being a stellar guy for workers while on the campaign. He could have chosen any issue to promote Buttar on, and he chose that one. For instance, Buttar was running on many different issues. If William saw him being rude to workers, even if he needed to stay on for the money to prevent his own homelessness, he could have said, well, the guy is rude to his workers, but I will just promote him on environmental issues and then step away later. No, he chose to actively host press events positioning Buttar as a great guy for workers.

I would never stay and then come out in the press three months later telling everyone I lied when I said he was good before during a press conference. I find it highly unethical. He continued specifically doing press events touting someone as a champion for workers’ rights after he witnessed them not being a champion for workers’ rights? That is blatantly lying in the press for money. No one questioned him about this. He had full power to quit, unlike any individual on a campaign who would need to worry about their personal expenses. There is absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t have just walked away and spoke out about it the moment he saw it.

Only one of two things can be true here. He either never witnessed what he suggests and was running an infiltrated smear campaign against an immigrant candidate of color or he does not actually stand by his ethics to stand up for workers’ rights because he watched a candidate abuse his female staff and continued to pitch him to the press as a good guy for workers.

Fitzgerald later talked about quitting a contract around labor issues with a news outlet covering race and the criminal justice system called The Appeal, (something that raised immediate concerns to me again about what exactly happened there when they had to stop and then resume and now some of their former workers are funded by Google) so he gets what he is talking about. He’s a very good spin artist to come across as aloof when he knows full well what he is doing.

I also want to point out that in the Mission Local article accusing a man of color of misogyny in the work place, there was not a single woman quoted. They will say it is because of NDAs, but that makes no sense. Only one person had a mutual NDA, his fomer campaign manager Jasper Wilde, described above, at their own request when their contract was renewed. They already broke the NDA prior to the article being published, so that was not the reason. The campaign didn’t have any record of any other NDAs. They clearly were not worried about NDAs when they wrote an entirely long typo about sexual assault previously or bragged they wrote the DSA resolution that was the basis for the article to frame him for multiple untrue violations.

I begged to be interviewed as well as offered many women who could have offered the opposite picture including women on our campaign who were members of the DSA. One of them was even on the call when Shahid did the Mission Local interview. They were left out of the story. I also offered the lawyer for the campaign who could have clarified the NDA issue to both Mission Local and The Intercept. No one wanted to speak with them, which I find to be journalistic malpractice, especially at the level of The Intercept. They just went with more made up lies taking their word for it that a valid NDA existed. I personally knew a lot, and had seen emails in regards to the NDAs, yet, as I was not a campaign lawyer, I could not officially speak about that. I have spent a lot of time working for workplace harassment attorneys and know better than to comment in the media about legal matters. I have a lot of training on this issue.

Yet, I could not understand why none of these “journalists” wanted to hear the truth, because this was the opposite experience I have ever had in 20 years working with professional journalists who want to get the truth and cover things accurately. It shook my entire worldview of truth in media, which I had always consistently seen as someone who had worked on these issues for a while.

But then I figured out perhaps why. William Fitzgerald posted a tweet bragging that he “donated” to the local “press” after Shahid Buttar was smeared. The same local outlets who smeared Shahid Buttar were the ones he gave money. I am not saying $6,000 is a lot of money, but in a pandemic when some of these outlets were really pressed for getting funds and do not operate on that high of a level of a budget, it certainly can make a difference. In another now deleted tweet, which I have a screenshot, he bragged that when he was at Google they just paid to get things published.

As an earned media specialist, I never give the appearance that I pay for press coverage. All my contracts make this quite clear because it raises ethical and legal concerns. Earned media and advertising have different legal transparency requirements. They should never be confused.

What is concerning about this is that some of the local press he mentions are what I am newly coining as a term called “dark money media.” A dark money nonprofit, by definition, means we have no idea how they are funded. There is no transparency. I am now applying that same concept to media outlets. Without transparency there is nothing to prevent William Fitzgerald, other than maybe the FTC guidelines in 2009 which barely attempts to regulate endorsements, from giving these reporters money and them writing a story he requests. The FTC guidelines were more intended as a response to regulate online disinformation. For instance, if a sponsor gives Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars, and then she claims they are great, she has to now record and make it transparent that they gave her money. The 2009 regulations were an attempt to catch up with the now online media’s attempts of payola. It is the same ways that advertising is regulated, and it is why you will never see a traditional news outlet doing the same thing.

The dark money outlets I am referring to are: @MLNow, @48hills, @BrokeAssStuart, and @PaydayReport. Mission Local is MLNow, and they recently registered as a 501c3 nonprofit since then, which would mean they have to be transparent. It also means they are not supposed to have politics as their main objective. However, prior to that, they were not operating that way. I have not noticed much change since they registered as a nonprofit either. I see them having a direct political focus.

Mission Local claims to list their donors, but they do not list William Fitzgerald or The Worker Agency anywhere transparently. I scoured their websites, and if they do now, it is newly added. All four of these outlets were involved in the smears of Shahid Buttar. There is no way to know where they get their money. When another journalist confronted them, they said that they didn’t get money from Fitzgerald. Someone is lying somewhere. Either William didn’t donate it or the “media” are saying he never did.

I would also like to note that Shahid Buttar also paid for advertising for Broke Ass Stuart, and Broke Ass Stuart claims on twitter he returned the money when he found out about the smears (indicating that his coverage and where he takes money are contingent). However, the campaign does not seem to have any indication of him returning the money. It seemed he just said that to look good to his cult like following.

Anyways, the way that traditional news outlets handle this payment issue legally is through transparency. Failure to do this creates the appearance of payola. It is unethical to even create the appearance of payola in my field. Earned media consultants NEVER send money to any media outlets. However, at the end of every article where Shahid Buttar was smeared was a plea for money because these outlets were facing hard times during the pandemic.

Mike Elk of Pay Day Report even sent out an email saying he was short only $574 of meeting his monthly fundraising goal. He is notorious for making the point that the funds that support him literally go toward things like his rent, healthcare and food for the month. Small amounts of money make huge amounts of differences to these small content provider outlets. He then tweeted out the smears against Buttar and refused to cover the story accurately when I contacted him.

I think these press outlets and The Worker Agency should account for what money was exchanged and for what. If Kim Kardashian should be regulated about it, then election agents and media should as well. There may have been nothing nefarious about this at all. However, how would we even know? Ethics exist for a reason. This type of behavior would not fly at a more traditional journalistic news outlet for numerous reasons. It’s the blogger types that are questionable from a media literacy standpoint, and the general public needs to be aware of that.

It is odd that they have all now shifted to call Buttar a grifter, since the other claims were all debunked, but they were all taking money from the campaign. If it were a grift, Fitzgerald and the rest of them were in on it the most because they definitely poured in the money from it — at a rate more than Buttar — if you look at it at on a more holistic scale regarding how often candidates can take money from campaigns. I repeat again that I am the only one who refused to accept money at all from the campaign. Everything I have done here is volunteer, often in the middle of the night at the detriment of my own career and business, because I care. Hence the occasional typo in my story recount — never as bad as accidentally typing assault in the middle of nowhere though over the course of multiple pages. What happened here keeps me up at night because it goes against everything I have ever worked on in my career.

Buttar’s accusations went from a vague story of sexual assault, down from many different lessened versions of that, to anger that a man of color is paying himself on his campaign. But as for the general public, they were so confused that they just assumed Buttar committed sexual assault. I repeatedly saw these white men making claims online about Buttar that they would not say about white men in the same situation. Aaron Peskin, who was on the Board of Supervisors actually did say many disgusting things to women at the same time, and yet, no one had any problem with him. It shows the hypocritical nature of the progressive opportunists in San Francisco. The same people who smeared Buttar are Peskin’s greatest cheerleaders, so this was never genuinely about workplace misogyny. It was political. No one cares about women in the workplace. Clearly.

William’s claims were used to leverage and add credibility to a now admittedly false and made up DSA resolution written by Jasper Wilde, which The Intercept was then promptly sent and pitched to cover. I can document exactly what time Akela Lacy at The Intercept was duped as part of a strategic process because I was the one who was answering the reporter emails from the campaign. I knew that the reporters mentioned above got the resolution under embargo. Akela told me she hadn’t, so it was clear she was part of the second round of pitching to leverage this up. It was very clear to me that The Intercept was definitely a prong on a strategically crafted PR strategy to confuse people and create a false narrative. The goal was to create confusion, so it makes it so hard with multiple versions of lies that people just give up and assume it is true. I just happened to have a sophisticated background and be the one who was at the right place at the right time, or no one would have noticed or caught it.

In public relations, this strategy is known as pinballing false things to make them seem credible. The term comes from a pinball machine where flippers are used to leverage a ball upward. Pinballing is how PR people create narratives — whether true or false. Then what happened was circular and you can see the track play out in Akela’s own writing. The members of DSA and SF Berniecrats thought since The Intercept covered it, that it must be true. Then they voted to unendorse Shahid Buttar as a result. Since DSA and SF Berniecrats voted to unendorse Shahid Buttar that then became the basis for more coverage from Akela and others verifying the original fake resolution. Yet, it was always fake. There was absolutely no credible basis to the resolution. Even DSA admits that. DSA did not unendorse him because they agreed with the first resolution of sexual assault. It was written admittedly by the Jasper Wilde above, who admits it was left vague, so we could not debunk the claims specifically. When we presented the lies to media outlets, Jasper just changed the story again.

I want to make very clear that eventual resolution that DSA passed to unendorse Buttar had nothing to do with sexual assault, harassment, workplace misogyny, or anything like that. It just said they didn’t want to endorse Buttar anymore because they didn’t think he could win, after his background was now clouded, and didn’t want to put resources into it. They never publicly admitted none of the rumors were true, and that they were the original source for the reason his background was now clouded. They only said that behind closed doors. That’s whole different story than the one told in the press, and people were led to believe. The Berniecrats followed the same suit. They claim we don’t have to apologize for falsely claiming all the rumors, because our final resolution didn’t say that. Yeah, but you let on that narrative for months and never cleared it up. You even let it go wrong in press articles. There were a number of things DSA and Berniecrats could have done to fix this, and they didn’t. So that means they are guilty for the outcome.

DSA knew Jasper wrote the resolution because they bragged about it on twitter, but they claimed to not know who wrote it. It was a big mystery. They also claim not to know who sent it to the press and insist it didn’t come from them directly. I am told that DSA members contacted Lacy and told her that the resolution was not an official one from them, and they were mad it got in her hands because it misrepresented what happened. Everyone claims to act like it wasn’t them who was involved in this rumor, like it never even happened. Yet, the effects still linger. Did DSA send Akela at The Intercept fake resolution and typo? Or did Akela not check who actually sent it to her? Did she write the whole story without calling DSA at all to verify if it was real and get commentary from them? Who is lying? DSA or Akela? At what point exactly did William Fitzgerald get in touch with Akela and why in the world did that happen? Where did he even come from being quoted in the press and why was he relevant? Was he the one who sent her the resolution as some signs indicate might have been possible? How did he know about it in the first place since he was not a DSA member? All these questions remain unanswered or rather everyone seems to have a different account of the story, but either way make Akela look like a very poor reporter. Someone is lying because the accounts are not lining up here. Akela should be the one to have to answer for this.

Apparently, when I asked how this happened, DSA told me anyone can write a draft DSA resolution and present it to press, but that doesn’t make an official DSA resolution. So while Jasper wrote it and DSA members like Jackie Fielder and Dean Preston signed it, that doesn’t make it official DSA resolution, according to people at DSA. I could, for instance, write a DSA resolution that says Whereas DSA will now call Blue Green and Green Blue, and also we support Nazis. Agreed today. I can then send it to press, and it’s a DSA resolution. Yikes. It only becomes official when it is passed and voted on. It is worth continuing to note that DSA did not pass the resolution that accused Buttar of any of these things mentioned above. It just looked like they did, and they never clarify it.

At any rate, I use the pinballing tactic all the time ethically. For instance, if I wanted to establish the digital team at The People for Bernie Sanders, as the ones who created the original #FeeltheBern hashtag to the media, and I did brand them as that, I would start by making that claim in a small or trade publication first, then I would send that small or trade publication to a larger publication as proof of my claim. At the time, when that was happening Ryan Grim, Akela’s now editor who I describe multiple times in this piece, was a relatively unknown writer at Huffington Post. He’s one of the first reporters I contacted to tell that story. The barrier of entry at the Huffington Post was easier than the New York Times. So I sent it to him to help create that narrative first. Except here, we are not talking about who gets credit for creating a hashtag on a political campaign. We are talking about branding men of color as sexual predators. That is the wrong and unethical way to use the pinballing technique. That’s called racism.

As a side note, The Intercept’s now editor Ryan Grim currently credits Winnie Wong as the creator of the hashtag and movement in articles about his new book. That’s wrong. I was Winnie Wong’s public relations person for many years as part of the People for Bernie digital team. Winnie took credit for an entire digital team’s work to get herself a job on the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Winnie’s media interviews, including those with Ryan Grim, had been arranged by me, for several years. I am not sure if Ryan Grim is continuing to get the story wrong to please mainstream Democrats or Winnie is continuing to mislead people after I stop working with her. Either way it’s opportunism all over the place here.

Coincidentally, it was actually Winnie Wong who told me to work with Shahid Buttar in the first place because she stood by who he was and his past work. She vouched to me for his character.

I was furious and refused to ever work with Winnie again after she started taking credit for a whole team’s worth of work to promote herself and refused to speak up when she knew completely that this was a smear on Buttar.

My conversations with Winnie and others at the national level about Buttar revealed that this was more than a local issue of discussion, but one that was happening among people at a more national level to pick a new candidate, like Jane Kim or Dean Preston, over Buttar. Whether it was organized by them or just happened to play into their aspirations is unknown. There were a lot of agendas at play, which made careerists easy to manipulate to lie.

I was one of the few who had been involved in both the local of the local San Francisco politics as well as the national Bernie movement. At the time, coming down from the Bernie campaign, I was meeting with several of Bernie’s former senior level staff including Winnie Wong to discuss what we were going to do next with the movement. They were all asking me what was going on with Buttar, and I told them it was a smear rumor campaign. I told them that it would really help if they could speak up, so I wasn’t alone. Everyone knows I don’t make things up. Yet, I felt a slap in the face when they told me, they wouldn’t. Why? Because it would hurt their friend Jane Kim. What does she have to do with this? Turns out she wanted the seat, and she thought Pelosi was going to retire soon. It was easier to be silent and let Buttar go down in flames. Many people wanted a job on her campaign, and they thought it would be more promising than Buttar’s and could get the endorsement of Bernie Sanders himself. I was physically disgusted and in tears after speaking with these people who I looked up to for so long. It made me second guess everything I ever did to help get these people into power. This is wrong. With every fiber of my being, this is wrong.

Bernie would not endorse Buttar because it was a political death to endorse anyone but Pelosi. But if she was not in the race, then it was a different story. Bernie had made some comments about Buttar at one point earlier on in his campaign before I was involved and faced the ire of Pelosi’s daughter in the New York Times the next day. Wait and watch for this all to carry out in upcoming election cycles. Additionally, there is a long rumor that Pelosi wants to install her daughter in the position. Oddly enough, I had been in conversations with the Daily Show about booking Buttar. Yet, just after that, they instead booked Pelosi’s daughter, and told us they couldn’t do it. It was strange. All things I document for people to make their own decision about what happened.

Jasper Wilde had previously worked on the Jane Kim campaign. Furthermore, I had been getting some pretty extreme bullying by Brandon Harami, the former head of the San Francisco Berniecrats, and no one from the believe women crowd stood up for me or believed me, which broke my heart. Harami also worked on the Jane Kim campaign. In fact, Shahid had hired Jasper based on his recommendation. I started to notice that almost everyone involved here in propping up this rumor and not dispelling it had either worked for Jane Kim or Dean Preston. I was confused about how believe women was constantly being told to me, but no one believed me that I thought Brandon was running anonymous accounts to harass me. It’s because believe women is subjective to them. They only believe when they want.

Harami is now known for bullying others in Oakland using anonymous accounts. Scores of them. He got caught doing it and is now under an ethics investigation. In the meantime, immediately after a bunch of threatening direct messages from an account called Shahid Buttar parody account, which I suspected he was running but am unable to prove, I started getting strange mail and my passwords leaked online. The account entirely disappeared when Brandon Harami announced he was going off twitter after he got caught. Actually, all the accounts harassing me disappeared when Brandon left. The link seemed odd.

The weird mail was part of a scam where someone had individually signed me up for random universities as though I was going to be a student there. There were also letters that I intended to donate to strange charities. I am not really sure what the point was to do that. I told the universities that someone had stolen my identity, and they told me they legally had to file a report about that. I don’t know if they ever did. Personally, I never wanted to get the FBI involved, which is what I was told to do, so I didn’t really do anything in response. When I found out all this was happening, I was actually on a call with those same people about Chesa Boudin’s recall and started crying. It was then that I stopped trying to work with them at all. For a while, I went under the radar and became afraid.

I asked Brandon and the San Francisco Berniecrats, who had coincidentally just posted my location online, and it just so happened that it was Brandon who was running the twitter account of SF Berniecrats, if he was behind sending me the mail and hacking. He said no, so I guess I have to believe him, but it sure did seem strange. I have also gotten dozens of bullying messages from these people — everything from calling me a Russian bot to the C word. And it always links back to my work on Buttar. I am still unsure what happened.

At any rate, it gets stranger regarding William Fitzgerald. There is constant confusion of how many people left the campaign which became another point to sell that Buttar was a bad boss for women. There is a false number floating around that 13 people left the campaign. The Buttar campaign had no record of this. He was a challenger campaign, we didn’t have a huge staff. However, we did see a list of people that was given to Akela Lacy. It named individually several people who worked for The Worker Agency as individual members of the campaign. In fact, many of those people were men, of course. Akela had a lot of confusion, and it took me many hours to explain and prove to her that those people did not work for the campaign directly. They worked for a private agency run by William Fitzgerald. They appeared to all leave at the same time because the contract ended. There was never a large group of people leaving the campaign at the same time.

Instead of writing that a PR firm left, Akela thought the best way to handle this was to say 10 contractors and staff left at once to create a narrative that Buttar was so bad a boss for women that his employees left. This was not accurate and gave a huge misrepresentation of the situation. I have worked for PR firms in my life, and never were individual members of PR firms counted as individual contractors working for the campaign. I believe she also includes people in that number who left the campaign for other reasons because I am not even sure how she got it. So there were really only a handful of people who left, at most, including Jasper Wilde, and it was not at the same time.

After Buttar won the primary, he started staffing up with a lot more sophisticated staff and high level volunteers, many coming down from the Bernie Sanders campaign, including myself. We actually really started to pick up speed and get national press attention. It is worth noting that the smears happened just after Buttar had been featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and covered by USA Today. I was never a paid staff member, but I was in all the senior staff meetings, and I was operating like a staff member.

Another point that is interesting is that Akela Lacy’s piece relied heavily on quotes from a woman named Sasha Perigo. After a long search, they finally found a woman who would speak up against Buttar. Well, it just so happens that Sasha was hired by William Fitzgerald the next day! Only a few months later Perigo went on to accuse another promising young man of color, who had intentions of running for a Board of Supervisors seat in 2024, of rape. That same man is now engaged to the woman who was recalled in the School Board election, and it was in the middle of a contentious election season. I am not saying that a rape did not happen, and I tend to believe women. Yet, the circumstances here looked very odd to me based on what I witnessed in the past. There were a number of points that raised flags in her account.

Furthermore, it looked like same people were involved again who spread the rumors last time. I had seen this play out before. In Sasha’s account, there were other women who were going to come forward to allege the same thing. Oh dear, here we go again. Another typo? They never came forward. Rape happens and progressives are not immune. Even the most revered progressive can very likely be someone’s rapist. I know this to be the case. This one seemed off to me though when I read it. I will never know, but rape rarely happens in a vacuum. A person usually does it more than once. The story really seemed strange.

This is part of the danger that past lies present to our movement. Believe is a challenging word in the survivor movement due to a long history of reasons and the effect that trauma has on the brain. I will never personally say I don’t believe women. I will point out when they lie though. The difference is believe is what you have when you don’t know. I also do not believe that people coming forward falsely hurts the overall survivor movement, and I say that due to the psychology of how sexual abuse affects the brain. I encourage all people to come forward with any claims of sexual mistreatment. Yet, we can also point out lies.

The first person to like Sasha’s rape accusation tweet and promote it was William Fitzgerald as well as all the same people who admittedly made up lies about Buttar.

Meanwhile, another man who supposedly left the Buttar campaign because of misogyny and was on the list of names that Akela gave got a job at….Mission Local! How interesting.

I have always been confused on how white men claiming that a man of color was a misogynist ever passed a smell test to begin with. In the meantime, I, and many other women, begged to be interviewed. We were told to believe women while the men were mostly quoted.

At any rate, people were denying my credibility because I had not worked on the campaign long enough and because a false rumor was spread that I lived in Washington DC, which Lacy actually reported falsely and left it up. That was not true at the time, and led to attempts dox my actual living arrangements. However, even if it were true, that’s absurd because I overlapped on the campaign with most of these people, and we were all in the same meetings that took place over zoom. Does anyone remember how March-July of 2020, everything was on zoom? We were in a pandemic. Surely if Buttar was doing these things, they would have been on zoom, and likely recorded. In the long run, I have worked with Buttar now for four years, and found him nothing but one of the nicest and most genuine people I have ever worked with.

At any rate, I repeatedly told everyone involved, including Lacy, that I did not want my address made public because during COVID, I was concerned that my own abuser would be released and find out where I lived. No one cared about that. These are not people who care about sexual abuse survivors in any way shape or form. Where is their outrage that they had when Buttar was falsely accused? If they are so concerned, why do they not care at all when I tell them what happened to me? It continues to re-affirm to me that this had nothing to do with concern about women like me, and everything to do with smearing a Muslim man. I am pissed that they were using my cause for racism when I never hear them speak up ever when it is needed. They are performative.

Additionally, the point from Akela Lacy that I wasn’t on the campaign long enough to be quoted also doesn’t stand as Raya Steier (they/them) was quoted in The Intercept, and at that point I had been on the campaign longer than they had. The Intercept failed to note that Raya Steier previously went as Raya Sarkar and has a long time of efforts to smear Muslim men for sexual assault in India, which was called out by some of the leading women’s advocates there.

Raya had given a story to The Washington Post that oddly looked the exact same as the one they spread a rumor that Buttar had done to a female volunteer on the campaign. When Raya says on video that a former professor “pimped” them out, I got chills. It was the same thing I heard them make up about a female volunteer on the campaign. Buttar was trying to get a female volunteer’s number to “pimp her out” to his friends. That volunteer said this never happened and Raya made it up and stop lying about her. This was deemed irrelevant to the story by The Intercept. No one checked to see that the story was the same as the one Raya gave the Washington Post in 2017 that happened to her, and then said Buttar did the same thing not to her, but to someone else, who says that was not true. I am really getting tired of watching one lie after another be made up about Buttar. And the press continue to not uncover any of them, and continue to quote these people as though they are legit and honest sources. It goes against everything I stand for in my life. I was disgusted.

A list of prominent Indian feminists, including Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association wrote a letter of extreme concern about Raya making up false accusations of assault against Muslim men in India in 2017. In fact 17 prominent women came forward about Buttar expressing similar concerns, including Medea Benjamin, but none of that got reported either. Many had concerns that Raya was misrepresenting their caste in India. I am personally a little puzzled on how, in a very short period of time, Raya went from Dalit woman (with very light skin) to elite educated American lawyer who works on some of the most prominent political campaigns. The math doesn’t seem to be mathing. In response, Raya had posted a now taken down facebook post asserting that just as one could choose their own gender, they can also choose their own caste. That makes no sense, as many of India’s feminists pointed out, and Raya appeared to be misrepresenting themselves as a historically oppressed group of people.

Back in 2017, while Raya was smearing Muslim men in India and William was working for Google spinning narratives, I had been working with the Bernie campaign as well as helping do public relations for the Women’s March Convention in Detroit during the Harvey Weinstein metoo movement when this attempt to smear Bernie Sanders with bots happened. I remember it quite well because I was there, writing the press releases. What I can say is that immediately after Croydon tweeted her account to smear Buttar, it was tweeted by the exact same bot network that smeared Bernie Sanders. In fact, specifically Sally Albright tweeted it. This made me consider, yet not be able to fully connect, if they were working on behalf of an establishment Democratic PR firm. Seemed odd again. Yet, no one else wanted to cover that.

That same week when I was doing all the above, I was exhausted because I had flown to multiple locations to do press events for one of the most prominent organizations in the country that works on preventing women from being harassed in the media. I am intentionally being vague about naming my clients. Ryan Grim should know quite well because he was working with me on covering it, and even launched the story I pitched him as a way to get covered in the media for work on this issue. Raya was co-opting the movement I was working on back in 2017. Akela had the nerve when I asked her to correct her inaccurate lies about me in the media to accuse me of harassment. No, my work on this goes deep, and seeking accountability is not harassment. Ask your editor. If he doesn’t remember, I have receipts of emails back and forth with him covering women actually harassed in the media — not sexual assault survivors simply seeking to have their address details removed from your unnecessary article.

It reminds me all the way back to the Milk Club when lies were being made up about me as well, I mentioned some of my background on this issue. The same men who smeared Buttar as sexist had the nerve to tell me no one cared about my resume. No, I am a women who has had a lot of success in my field, and these people are the sexist ones. Take several seats.

At the time in 2020, when I was supposedly defending a sexual assaulter, I was also volunteering intensely on behalf of a campaign for the man who wrote and passed the Child Victims Act in a different state. Some of his work led to E. Jean Carroll to be able to sue Donald Trump. I have actually been doing this work for a long time. I continue to do it today. I don’t have time for nonsense and rumors. And one thing is for sure, there is not a person out there who cares more than me.

As someone who spent my life dealing with this issue because I was exposed to it when I was only five years old myself, I know what it takes for press to cover stories about sexual assault. I have told these stories on behalf of women many times. It was clear to me that the coverage about Buttar was racist. The situation was completely different when we were talking about a Muslim man challenging power clearly falsely accused and a powerful white man genuinely accused. Not only that, at the same time as Buttar was smeared, Grim spent hours looking into what happened to Alex Morse, who was smeared too, and refused to look into what happened here. It was very clear and blatant what was going on. I can actually name countless examples from Andrew Cuomo to Pete Buttigieg. Sickening. My own abuser was a white man whose family owned a prominent business in our community. I know what it takes to prove to journalists that a white man has engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior versus someone else of a different race and ethnicity. It is wrong.

Many will note that Akela is a person of color, and exactly why she was so willing to be duped about false accusations about a brown man is unknown. This commentary fails to understand systemic racism in America. Any person of any color can uphold white supremacy. Using a position of power to falsely accuse a man of color of sexual assault is by definition upholding white supremacy, regardless of what you look like.

When Ryan Grim posted on twitter that he was actually going to cover a related story near where I live, and he was asking for restaurant recommendations, I gave him many. I offered to show up at a nearby restaurant and walk him through it all. In addition, I even offered him to come over to my house, so I could point out that Akela’s article is entirely still wrong, including where I live. I even offered to cook for him, and show him exactly the errors in the piece. At every point, I tried to tell these people that their story was wrong, it was like the sticking their fingers in their ears and saying lalalalalalalala. We don’t want to to hear you, because it makes us look bad, and we want to still believe a Muslim man did this.

Some might think that it is strange for me to have invited Grim to my home. Not really. I am a professional media consultant who has pitched Ryan Grim stories before. It is not unusual for people to have meals with journalists in that situation. In fact, many reporter outlets have specific guidelines for what can be accepted and best practices at those meals including etiquette on who pays. I only offered him to my house because somehow it was wrong in the story, and he could see it for his own eyes. But truth is not what they were going for. We were also still in a pandemic, and eating at a restaurant was not as safe nor recommended. I have done dinner, drinks, and coffee with many journalists in my life.

Often times I bring a source with me, sometimes even a sexual assault survivor, for them to interview. It’s a more casual and less stressful interview situation. It is also in public, so things can’t be lied about. That’s the reason why people like me often staff interviews — like I staffed the ones with Shahid, so that no one does anything alone. This is something I recommend to all activists. Never meet with a journalist alone.

I have never in my life, including in past experiences, with Ryan Grim seen anyone act like this. Not only that, but if I am discredited because I supposedly live in Washington DC, then what about Akela and Ryan who DO LIVE in Washington DC. How can their account of what happened be trusted? Akela even admitted to someone she spoke with, whom she never including in the story, that she had not been following San Francisco politics specifically. Then why are you covering it? As I mentioned in an earlier piece, I was on the phone when Lacy (first) and Grim (second after Lacy messed it up) interviewed Buttar.

In the meantime, the coverage on Buttar happened at the same time the Black Lives Matter activities in DC. Lacy failed to show up to our press event in June of 2020 about what BLM candidates running for Congress would do if elected, offering policy solutions, but jumped on the performative story about false accusations of a Muslim man in July. These are instances of how racism controls our journalistic reporting. Lacy will sign letters about the reporting in Gaza and how it needs to change, not observing her own role in rushing to judgment on accusations about a Muslim man played in the coverage and how differently it would look if her own reporting were not responsible.

During my call with Grim, I mentioned how PR consultants, namely William Fitzgerald, had pitched Lacy disinformation, and he giggled. I don’t find it funny.

The situation happened with Buttar and The Intercept just days before the founders of The Intercept quit alleging Democratic Party interference at The Intercept. I cc’d the founders in my correspondence with Lacy, and she wrote me a note back warning me not to do that again. Given my experience, I would believe what the founders alleged and that includes Glenn Greenwald mentioned above. They updated the piece in a frenzy to do better after called out in the New York Times, but they still got it wrong. I personally reached out to Greenwald and told him what happened, and he seemed interested. When I told him the name William Fitzgerald, he was no longer wanting to know more. I suspect that is because of the Snowden connection that I found out about later. The whole entire thing makes no sense.

Why didn’t I speak out sooner and connect these dots? I did. I tried to get press to take note of what I am describing here. Many of them did. However, at the last minute it was always cut, and I was never told why. Only one local reporter, Susan Dyer Reynolds, whom they all falsely call a Trump level conservative, wanted to listen to me. Coincidentally, Dean Preston, who signed his own name to Jasper’s typo, is now trying to get Susan defunded for reporting negatively about him. That is authoritarian. So I am telling my own story. I can’t sit here in 2024 and watch them do it again. I have grave concerns that Dean Preston is running against a Muslim man in 2024, and that the same people will do it again. There were no consequences the last time.

I will tell you frankly, I am a PR person. I almost didn’t give my story to Susan because I understand audiences. I know she is a polarizing person, and I knew that speaking to her would not exactly gain me friends in the progressive community. I ended up deciding to do it because Brandee Marckmann at the Berniecrats threatened to sue me if I told her what they did to Shahid. I don’t buckle to threats, so I spoke to her. As described earlier in my post, it was people like Brandee who were abusive. She went ahead and triggered the same if you tell on me, you will get in trouble trauma that I experienced as a five year old. This is what I mean when I talk about abusive behavior from those making accusations against Shahid. The correlation for how much they sounded abusive — psychologically proven abusive tactics — is not lost on my observation.

Susan, honestly, was really great and sensitive to me. She understood the issue far more than the men I had been begging to get to speak to me. I left that interview having a great deal of respect for her to tell the story in a way that gave me integrity. There are a lot of things that can be said about Susan, but she understand women and sexual assault, when I spoke to her I felt safe on that issue. I am still waiting for Brandee to sue me, but I expect she won’t because I have never said a lie. No lies detected. Ever.

Brandee has her own issues. She and Brandon Harami were then both co-leaders of the Berniecrats. They are unofficially known as Twitter Brandee and Twitter Brandon. Tweedlee, tweedlee, tweedlee dum. I saw tweets of Brandee trying to track down where I live (they got it wrong) and then dox me. At any rate, I am saddened that the Bernie movement had so much promise and turned into this nastiness. None of this reflects the movements I helped start, both on Bernie nor Metoo.

In a tweet on February 7, 2022, Susan documented that Brandee tried to dox Susan Dyer Reynolds, but she got the wrong person and left some poor realtor in the area wildly confused about why this woman was going after her. Sounds familiar. She then went after the tech crowd in San Francisco making all kinds of racist claims. Bad move, because they deposed her and she had to admit she had several anonymous accounts engaging in this behavior. We don’t win because our side engages in sophomoric bullying rather than actually work on the issues. It is not advisable to go after people with money and engage in the same behavior as done to me. For the record, I grew up working class union of autoworkers, and am not exactly rich in any way shape or form. I am renter in my 40s. The same can’t be said of most of the people involved here. Many of them grew up with a silver spoon, and that includes Brandee, or Karen, as many like to call her. If you are going to engage in these games, at least be good at them.

At a national level, Katie Halper also gave me an entire platform to speak, which I am incredibly grateful. Yet, the issue here is that the topic is so complex, and I was learning new things daily about what happened. Every day I was getting new details, and it was hard to boil them down into one simple message. That was part of the problem. People do not want to read pages or sit through a 3 hour interview to explain how I know what I know. They want simple details. I believe that was part of the strategy. I actually wrote 70 pages about this documenting how it all happened — that no one has ever seen — mainly because I know it was long and people likely would not read it. But I didn’t want the same thing to happen to others that I worked with in the future. These seem like small political items, but they have dire consequences, and what happened here can’t be swept under the rug. It keeps me up at night worried about the state of media literacy and election disinformation in our country. More on the consequences can be found in this other piece I wrote. I can document every single thing I say.

In hindsight, when I joined the campaign after The Worker Agency left, having an earned media background, I was shocked by the lack of infrastructure set up. The campaign was operating like they never had a PR firm before. I was having to introduce basic concepts that a professional PR firm should have set in motion a long time ago. There were blatant and glaring elements that were missing from the campaign. I don’t know the scope of The Worker Agency, but regardless, some of these items were basic that they should have recommended. When I do my work, it is not my client’s job to know what they need. It is my job to tell them.

Any one of these items alone I might have been excused or written off, but taken all together have definitely made me wonder the extent that William Fitzgerald, a former tech executive for Google, played in smearing Shahid Buttar. Challenger campaigns need to be very careful about hiring in the future.

Oddly enough, when William Fitzgerald no longer worked for Shahid anymore, he passed his press list off to me. This is not something that earned media people do, and as a professional, I can tell you this is really weird activity. Just to let you know if you were working with William Fitzgerald as a member of the media, he is giving your contact information out to people. At any rate, professionals working in my field would gasp. Most public relations professionals are very territorial about their lists. This is how we make our money. While I am personally not a territorial publicist, this was weird even for me. Our lists are super personal, and so I never looked at his list when doing media outreach of my own. It seemed really unethical for me to do that to steal his work, and I just chalked it up to inexperience and did my own thing. In hindsight, when I learned of his past PR experience at Google, I thought it surely can’t be inexperience. I am also not really a fan of lists myself, I like to have more 1:1 relationships, but understand it is a necessary part of the field. If I send you information about Buttar, you likely were not on a list, but emailed it directly from me individually with a great deal of thought.

However, when strange things started happening in relation to William Fitzgerald, I thought I would take a look at his list to see who was on it. Sure enough. I found it striking that the people on that list were the exact same people contacted about this smear. The exact reporters who covered the smears. I do want to point out that Akela Lacy was not on the list. It was Maryam Saleh, Nausicca Renner and Ryan Grim at The Intercept who were her editors. It is highly likely it was sent to them first and passed on to Akela as an assignment. So, we at least know that William Fitzgerald had a very targeted list of these people who he could have sent something to all at once instantly in a strategic order to smear someone. It was literally the exact playbook for how he smeared Buttar.

Upon further reflection, it made me reconsider that earned media is not how William Fitzgerald is making his money. If it were, he would not have sent his list to another earned media consultant. How exactly is William Fitzgerald making his money? Who is paying him? And to do what? We have no idea. What I do know is that William seems to be going around offering himself up as a former Google Executive who left to rebrand himself as the worker PR guy. Some of the things he does never seem to catch the ire of Google if he were really such a hostile former employee now working against them. In fact, they seem to benefit Google.

In the meantime, I am devastated because as an abolitionist, I am a huge fan of Chesa Boudin and Pamela Price. I donated, above my personal limit, to support Pam Price to become DA because I believed that this was important. I cried tears of joy at what this would mean when she won. In addition to donating I made it quite clear on numerous occasions that I had a long background in public relations and wanted to build her a plan to prevent from having an immediate recall campaign set up. I wanted to do it pro bono for no money because I cared. I tried to as much as possible to tell people how to avoid smears and a recall. I had done all the research including on all the tech company smears.

Yet, instead of bringing me in, her largest supporters, the progressives in the SF Bay Area, set out instead to dox and smear me. They even went as far as looking into where my dying mother lived and her voting record. It was scary. I now find out that Pamela Price is paying William Fitzgerald at The Worker Agency to do her public relations. I am not surprised. I think this explains why she has had one PR misstep after another. I am sad because this will create a national narrative that progressive DAs are not successful. Not to mention, the only major press outlet there is Oaklandside, which is entirely funded by Google.

The restorative justice movement is ultimately the one that loses because of these people. I could not be more angry at what I am watching as the white Google guy ruins yet another movement run by Black and Brown women. I no longer have any respect for Pamela Price after I have watched her behavior, most likely at the guidance of William Fitzgerald, for months now. There is not one single thing about William Fitzgerald that suggests to me that is a man who cares about restorative justice. Frankly, anyone who participated in smearing a man of color as a sexual predator doesn’t get it. Pamela Price is in big trouble if she is facing a recall with him in her court. Like Chesa and the school board members, she will be recalled. That’s the clear plan here. Her campaign is infiltrated, and it makes me sick.

Why is there a national narrative about a crime wave happening in San Francisco an Oakland right now? The reasons I describe above. I tried to give the entire progressive community the resources, for free, to prevent this narrative from happening. They seemed adamant to not follow it. So now, the narrative is being run by the right wing because the corporate infiltrated people in the Bernie movement were incapable of running the most basic of public relations efforts, and they allowed themselves to be torn apart and smeared. They allowed themselves willing to be recalled by the same people who infiltrated their clubs. That’s true of the school board members, Chesa Boudin, and now Pam Price. The people running the show ran it into the ground, and I have been standing here screaming don’t do it the whole time. I am furious.

Many people are mad at how the Buttar campaign handled the situation. This criticism makes me laugh for not the sake of crying. First of all, I am someone who specializes in this field. Not only that, his response team was made up of sexual assault survivors, men and women.

Everything we did, despite our opponents trying to claim the opposite, was to remain sensitive to the overall issue of sexual assault survivors. We specifically did not have white men, who were not sexual assault survivors, on the team that was working on the response to this. I advised Buttar on what made sense to do in response to maintain votes and overcome this situation. We played nice at first and followed the traditional campaign playbook of rules for how one should react in this situation.

Ultimately, when you look back on it, we somewhat set the standard for how others started responding to these types of claims including other campaigns even taking our same language. While I stay under the radar, I know that people in DC among the establishment follow me and know and admire my level of work. My own career legitimacy has never been in question over this. That shows just how much integrity I have been known to have. I am not someone who seeks a spotlight traditionally. I prefer behind the scenes.

I didn’t come from nowhere and land on a political campaign with all this knowledge and experience. I spent time in Washington DC, including at the public relations firm where I was personally trained by the late Frank Mankiewicz, the press secretary when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, on political crisis response. My family set record breaking precedent for child sexual assault cases in Ohio, including being invited to speak on Oprah in the early 90s. I had personally worked on behalf of some of the top journalism advocacy organizations in the country in the metoo movement in media, including pitching Ryan Grim many of the stories he covered that made him known as the journalist he is today. I had been working on the late Ady Barkan’s Be A Hero campaign when Christine Ford testified. Ironically, Akela Lacy was the Ady Barkan fellow, which broke my heart, because I found her to be one of the most unethical reporters I have ever worked with. That’s is saying a lot because I have worked with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal on issues of race before, and even they had more integrity to report things accurately. My resume is long in this field.

In the 2022 election, we decided that traditional strategy was not working. We made a strategic decision to take the gloves off and to call out these people and address the racism. I always do what is best for the movement. In this case, I believe what is best for the movement is for me to speak out about this, so it doesn’t happen again. We knew Buttar would look like a villain and be disliked, (not an advisable strategy when running for an election) and I would as well, but we did not care. Calling out the racism was more important, and so we did that. I can proudly say that everything I say and do is for the sake of a movement, and I don’t think anyone can prove otherwise. I have a long time of background of working in this field, and if you have never heard of me, it’s because I am rarely sticking my neck out to take credit. As many will tell you, I am not here to litigate Buttar. That doesn’t matter to me. I am here to warn people what happened in 2020 looks on the way again in 2024 and it hurts movements, and I want people to be wiser when it does. I would love to be able to retire from politics and go away, but then this continues to persist. The story must be told to save the future. People can believe me or not. But I was not raised to be silent in the face of injustice. I will continue to speak up as much as possible, especially in the 2024 elections and beyond.