It was not unusual, during breaks in the trial of ex-Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli, for bailiffs and attorneys on the second floor of the Sonoma County civil courthouse to see jurors engaging in Qigong, an ancient Chinese practice blending movement and patterned breathing.
During their two weeks of deliberations at the end of the trial, recalled Juror No. 9, a contemplative woman who described herself as “theologically trained” and preferred not to share her name, she and her peers began each morning with a “grounding practice” of “breathing and listening, or tuning into the body.”
After two months of intent listening and tuning in — of “really paying attention to everything,” she said, “questions, word choices, facial expressions” — the jury found Foppoli liable for sexually assaulting seven women in encounters spanning two decades, awarding them over $15 million in damages.
And now, said the juror, standing in the shade of a tree in the parking lot outside the courthouse on Sept. 16, she was exhausted and wanted to go home.
Juror No. 9 and her peers had earned the rest.
Their verdict, and the case presented by attorneys Traci Carrillo, Nicole Jaffee and Gina Fortino Dickson, did more than vindicate the plaintiffs and deliver an emphatic, expensive defeat to Foppoli, who has faced no criminal charges and repeatedly denied accusations of sexual assault, insisting all such encounters were consensual.
The trial pulled back the curtain on a misogynistic culture at a club to which Foppoli belonged, the civic nonprofit Active 20-30 Santa Rosa #50, which was ordered to pay $2 million to one of the plaintiffs, Jane Doe 4, for failing to take action after she disclosed her claim that Foppoli assaulted her during the organization’s national convention in 2012.
It also exposed what Carrillo referred to as an “old boy network within Sonoma County” – an amorphous but entrenched power structure willing to overlook the predations of a well-connected “political darling” – and the “incestuous” dynamics that kept people from calling out the alleged sexual misconduct of a person in their circles.
And it heightened awareness of sexual assault, and the different forms it can take, while shining a light on the resolve and resilience of the seven women, all referred to as Jane Does in court, whose testimony against Foppoli the jury found clear and convincing.
“We entered the courthouse individually, carrying our own stories,” said Jane Doe 4, who identified herself after the trial as Allison Britton. “Somewhere along the way, we became something more. We became seven women standing together.”
Women silenced
Carrillo said her hope, shared by many others, is the closely watched trial will hasten the demise of that old boy network, and with it “a culture that didn’t protect women” and “silenced them in many ways.”
The trial, said Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, revealed “an alarming underbelly to Sonoma County politics that we owe it to voters to grapple with.”
Indeed, Foppoli was allowed to serve as mayor even after the Windsor Town Council received two emailed warnings, one in 2017, another in 2020, about his alleged sexual abuse of women. Those emails were forwarded to Windsor police and to Sonoma County sheriff’s detectives. No investigation was opened at the time.
At trial, testimony portrayed Active 20-30 Santa Rosa as a male-dominated organization where crude behavior was overlooked or minimized. After Britton disclosed her claims to chapter leadership, a former chapter president said at trial, he confronted Foppoli about the allegations but let the matter drop.
“No one was willing to do the right thing,” Carrillo said. “And because of that, there were more victims.”
Carrillo also criticized The Press Democrat, which became aware of some sexual assault allegations against Foppoli in 2019, but ultimately did not write about them at the time.
That year, then-Press Democrat reporter Alexandria Bordas spoke with two women who told her they’d been assaulted by Foppoli. When she relayed those accounts to her supervisors, “editors failed to follow through and pursue the story,” wrote then-executive editor Richard Green in a front-page mea culpa to readers on April 9, 2021. He’d arrived at the newspaper two months earlier and been unaware of the Foppoli allegations.
Bordas began working for the San Francisco Chronicle, which after months of investigative work, on April 8, 2021 published a “Special Report” with claims by four women against Foppoli. By the end of the next month, 13 women had come forward.
That bombshell began a chain reaction of events: a criminal investigation spearheaded by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, then taken over by the California Attorney General’s Office; Foppoli’s resignation from office in May 2021, and the 2023 lawsuit filed on behalf of the seven women against him and Active 20-30 Santa Rosa.
In a statement texted this past week to The Press Democrat, Foppoli said, “I have been fully investigated by multiple law enforcement agencies who all determined the same thing, there was nothing there to press any charges. I have always and continue to stand by the fact that I’m (completely) innocent of these accusations.”
Foppoli and his defense attorney, Andrew Watters, have signaled they will seek to overturn the verdict on procedural grounds. If that bid fails, Watters said, he will file with the California Court of Appeal.
Meanwhile, Foppoli said, the idea the trial exposed anything about Active 20-30 Santa Rosa was “ridiculous.” He noted one of the partners at Carrillo’s Santa Rosa-based law firm, Perry, Johnson, Anderson, Miller & Moskowitz, “was in 20-30 leadership with me for years.”
‘Given a pass’
At the time claims surfaced against Foppoli, he had been a rising star in the North Bay’s political firmament who’d received endorsements, in his mayoral campaign, from four of the five county supervisors. Many of the area’s elected officials had spent time with him at fundraisers and ribbon-cuttings, even socially.
Jeff Okrepkie, now the vice mayor of Santa Rosa, found himself ensnared in the trial after attending an event at Foppoli’s Christopher Creek Winery in 2020. As he was leaving, Okrepkie testified at trial Aug. 13, Foppoli showed him cellphone footage that made Okrepkie quickly turn away.
It was a video of Jane Doe 7, he recalled, which appeared to depict her in a sex act with a man.
Jane Doe 7 was one of several plaintiffs who accused Foppoli of assaulting them when they were intoxicated, and possibly drugged.
After showing his guest the footage, a buoyant Foppoli yelled, “Now she’ll never run against me,’ or something to that effect,” testified Okrepkie – a former president, incidentally, of Santa Rosa’s Active 20-30 club, who also went on to serve as the organization’s national president.
In the immediate aftermath of that evening at the winery, Okrepkie took no action. When the Chronicle story broke nearly eight months later, he reported what he had seen to law enforcement.
Okrepkie was harshly criticized by some, following his testimony, for not immediately reporting what he’d seen on Foppoli’s phone.
After noting in a Facebook essay Foppoli “was given a pass by a whole lot of elected officials and prominent community leaders,” Supervisor Hopkins then turned her attention to Okrepkie:
“Guys, can I ask, what would you do if someone showed you a sexual video and made a statement that sounds a whole lot like blackmail? Is there some kind of bro code for this? Is this common?”
Asked for his response, Okrepkie replied in an emailed statement:
“As I said in court, I saw the video for a split second; long enough to recognize who it was, but not long enough to determine whether the act was non-consensual. As I stated in my testimony, Dominic voluntarily trying to show me the video was morally reprehensible.
“The moment I learned it was non-consensual, I contacted law enforcement,” he added. “In the months leading up to trial, I also worked with t