Hat tip to Ajay Mohan, executive director of the DPOC, for digging this out. Earlier this month, OCDA Todd Spitzer issued a press release citing a Washington Examiner expose on OCDA Democratic Candidate Pete Hardin’s alleged creep behavior. Spitzer used this report to call on Hardin to drop out of the race. His press release lede was this:
A breaking bombshell report from the Washington Examiner has revealed woke District Attorney candidate Pete Hardin used his position of authority at the Orange County District Attorney’s office to prey on vulnerable witnesses, victims, and defendants. Based on this information, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer is calling on Hardin to drop out of the District Attorney’s race immediately.
Journalist Tori Richards has a MuckRack profile where she is identified as an investigative reporter for the Examiner, a hard right wing DC daily, and her work has appeared in Reuters, Business Insider, the Daily Mail, Fox News, MSN, Yahoo News, AOL, NBC News, the New York Daily News and New York Post, among others. What’s missing from her profile is that Richards spent 10 months as Director of Communications for then Supervisor Todd Spitzer from April 2018 to January 2019 where she did all manner of public relations services for Spitzer. There’s no mention of her PR experience at all.
Richards did not disclose her conflict to readers of the Examiner piece but hopefully she has to her editors, whom, if they possess any journalistic ethics at all, would not have published her hit piece on Hardin but assigned it to another reporter. Richards completely ignores the complaints from OCDA staff about sexual harassment from Spitzer’s best buddy who worked in the DA’s office.
Attacks on Hardin for being a “womanizer” is just Spitzer’s team showing their projection of his own office’s misconduct and lack of ethics to secure this hit piece and promote it.