Los Angeles County District Attorney has been sued for workplace retaliation...again. I've lost track of how many this makes so far. Gascon lost the first one that went to trial last year, despite testifying on his own behalf. He was ordered to pay $1.5 million in that case. A couple months ago the LA Times reported there were 14 more cases pending. So I guess that makes this one case number 16 brought against him by his own staff.

The gist of this is that Deputy District Attorney Shea Sanna says he was retaliated against after he leaked information on a defendant who admitted in jailhouse telephone conversations that he was pretending to be trans in order to avoid a male prison. One of the justifications for the demotion Sanna received was that he had misgendered this same defendant.

I've written about the case of James Tubbs before. In 2014, when Tubbs was 17, he followed a 10-year-old girl into a Denny's bathroom and sexually assaulted her. Tubbs had apparently done something like this before. The lawsuit reveals he was previously caught molesting two 4-year-old girls in a public bathroom.

Tubbs escaped justice for years but finally he was arrested in Idaho in 2019 and extradited back to California to face charges. Because of the serious nature of the crime and the fact that Tubbs had committed it just days before turning 18, prosecutors wanted to transfer his case to adult court. That's probably what would have happened if not for the election of George Gascon.

On December 7, 2020, the recently elected Gascón instituted Special Directive 20-09.  

Among other changes, the new policy restricts prosecutors in cases involving minors by requiring them to file the lowest possible criminal code section that corresponds with the alleged conduct, mandating a maximum of one count charged per incident, and importantly, preventing the filing of motions to transfer youth to the adult court system, regardless of aggravating circumstances. 

The prosecutor handling the Tubbs case argued an exception should be made but Gascon's officer refused. That's where Deputy DA Shea Sanna entered the picture after being assigned to the case in October 2021:

On November 22, 2021, Tubbs called his father from jail. A review of the recordings of this and other calls, some of which were eventually released the following year, makes clear that Tubbs planned to claim insincerely that he was transgender in order to obtain favorable housing in a women’s juvenile facility. To the best of Sanna’s knowledge, Tubbs is not transgender...

On November 30, 2021, Tubbs was convicted of the 2014 sexual assault of a child. After the hearing, the bailiff and custody staff notified Sanna that when they searched Tubbs’s property bag, they noticed that he had not taken any of the hormone tablets that he’d been given to assist with his gender transition—each remained undisturbed in their foil packaging. 

There was plenty of evidence that Tubbs was not trans and was using this as a scheme to avoid spending time in a male prison. But there was also media interest in the case and that led to some of Gascon's top deputies getting involved. His deputies (Woo and Blair) pressured Sanna not to present any evidence that would undermine a plan put forward by the defense attorney to release Tubbs. Despite this, in January of 2022, Sanna sent copies of all of the jailhouse recordings to Tubbs' rehabilitation team, letting them know that Tubbs' trans identity was a ruse. He was immediately pulled off the case.

On January 31, 2022, Tubbs’s Multi-Disciplinary Treatment (MDT) meeting was held. While the meeting was ongoing, Sanna sent an email to the members of Tubbs’s rehabilitation team with the recordings of Tubbs’s 256 jail calls attached. As summarized in Sanna’s email, these calls plainly show: (1) Tubbs is not sincere about identifying as transgender; (2) Tubbs is extremely racist; (3) Tubbs is violent and dangerous; (4) Tubbs is a sexual deviant and has sexual compulsion issues that crop up in nearly every conversation; (5) Tubbs had bragged about the lack of consequences under Gascón’s current policy and how he was working the system; and (6) Tubbs made a statement about harming the Judge in his case. Sanna also emailed all 256 jail calls to Assistant Head Deputy of Juvenile, Frank Santoro, and DDA Jennifer Gowan. Sanna made it clear that he intended to play the recordings for the court during the MDT hearing so the court could consider the information when determining the terms of Tubbs rehabilitation plan.

The day after Sanna forwarded the recordings, the Gascón administration retaliated against him and removed him from the Tubbs case.

Gascon had access to the recordings but was still defending his decision to treat Tubbs as a juvenile offender. But the moment it became clear the recordings had leaked to the media, Gascon did an about face and said he regretted his decision.

On or around February 16, 2022, Gascón informed a reporter that in his opinion, “the Tubbs case still does not belong in adult court.” At this time, Gascón and his office had been in possession of the Tubbs recordings for over two weeks.

On or around February 21, 2022, a rumor began to circulate that various news outlets had possession of the Tubbs recordings and planned to release them in the near future. Having almost certainly heard the recordings himself or been informed of their contents, Gascón attempted to get out in front of the predicable backlash by walking back his prior support for Tubbs and his unquestioned acceptance of Tubbs’s purported gender transition.

“It’s unfortunate that she gamed the system,” Gascón told the L.A. Times on February 21st. “If I had to do it all over again,” he said, “she would be prosecuted in adult court.”

The tapes were released and Gascon was publicly humiliated. DDA Sanna was warned that Gascon's people would be coming for him. In March, an investigator with the DA's office filed a complaint against Sanna. The basis for the complaint was that Sanna had allegedly misgendered Tubbs. Of course, it was well known by this point that Tubbs' trans identity was a ruse. Also, the complaint says it wasn't Sanna who misgendered Tubbs in the meeting but someone else.

When Sanna requested clarification on the allegations against him two-days later, the only information provided was that it alleged “third-party harassment” against him for misgendering Tubbs.  

The Gascón administration instigated this complaint, notwithstanding that (1) it was in possession of the Tubbs recordings and had been for months; (2) the recordings document how Tubbs devised a plan to transition to female to obtain favorable housing in a young women’s facility, and how his gender transition was thus a ruse; (3) Gascón himself publicly stated that he questioned the sincerity of Tubbs’s gender transition, acknowledged that Tubbs had attempted to game the system, and explained that if he had to do it over again, he would have tried Tubbs as an adult; and (4) the statements that formed the basis of the “third-party harassment” complaint for misgendering Tubbs were actually made by DIC Holmes during the meeting on January 26, 2022, not by Sanna, as Holmes himself admitted.  

Meanwhile, the Tubbs case took another turn. Thanks largely to work by DDA Sanna, Tubbs was charged with murder. Gascon was allegedly furious about this as it once again made him look like an idiot.

Gascón and his inner circle—including Alisa Blair, Sharon Woo, and Chief of Staff Joseph Iniguez—knew that Sanna had played a role in Tubbs being charged with murder.

Contrary to the expected reaction of a district attorney whose prosecutor played a pivotal role in charging a heinous murder, Gascón was livid. Why? Because it furthered the narrative that Gascón’s policies were ineffective and supported Sanna’s position that Tubbs was a dangerous individual that should have been tried as an adult initially. 

The day Tubbs was charged with murder, Gascón’s office immediately began calling Sanna’s department nonstop. It became so hectic that Sanna’s Deputy-in-Charge, Andre Holmes, asked Sanna to transport boxes 50 miles away to Santa Clarita just so Sanna could escape the fray.

Do you get the impression George Gascon cares a lot more about his personal PR than he does about doing his job and putting away violent criminals? I do.

I won't belabor the rest of this but suffice it to say that, in addition to misgendering a fake trans person, DDA Sanna was also accused of being racist in an anonymous complaint. That complaint was eventually revealed to have been made by the same person behind the other complaint, who wasn't even present when the comments in question (describing a group of black robbers who circled around a black victim as acting like hyenas swarming prey) were made. But three people who were in the room for those comments backed up Sanna and said there was no racial component to his comments. One Deputy Probation Officer wrote "“I am an African American woman who has had many experiences with racism in my 55 years and at no time did I take any offense with Mr. Sanna's reference. His statement was about the behavior, not the race of the minors."

The result of all this nonsense (and more) is that DDA Sanna was suspended. In October of 2023 he was demoted and given a pay cut. Sanna is now asking for an injunction to prevent further harassment by Gascon and his team and for damages and attorneys' fees.

This case clearly won't reach a court before the election but at least people can read about it and know what type of person DA Gascon is behind the scenes.