As investigation drags on, former Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli gets engaged, lives luxurious life in Italy

In a video published on Instagram this week, a man in a blazer asks a woman in a white dress for her hand in marriage. She says yes. They are at an ancient theater in Taormina on the Italian island of Sicily, and the proposal is made in front of a legendary bystander — tenor Andrea Bocelli.

The man in this scene of Old World romance is 41-year-old Dominic Foppoli, the former mayor of Windsor who resigned in May 2021 after being accused of rape, sexual assault and harassment by nine women.

The accusations drew swift political exile and public opprobrium in his hometown. Over time, the number of allegations rose to 14, sparking three civil lawsuits and a long-running criminal investigation that the California Attorney General’s Office has now held for over 18 months without any announcement of criminal charges or public updates.

Foppoli’s fiancee is reportedly a 26-year-old Italian woman who works in fashion and design.

She posts frequently to Instagram, giving a glimpse into a whirlwind of luxury travel through the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa and the Middle East alongside the disgraced Wine Country politician. When not jet-setting, her posts also depict time spent at the Foppoli family’s thousand-year-old castle, with a hot tub and sweeping views in a mountain valley northeast of Milan.

That lavish lifestyle, paired with the slow pace of the Attorney General Rob Bonta’s criminal investigation, grates on Foppoli’s accusers, an attorney who represents eight of them told The Press Democrat.

“He continues to live this globe-trotting life and flaunt it out there while we are waiting patiently for the criminal piece,” attorney Traci Carrillo said. She said she believed the AG’s office continues to work on the case, and referred to a “slow churn of justice.”

The wait is difficult for her clients’ morale, she said.

“Dominic’s current lifestyle is a vile but crystal clear expression of our government’s failed system,” one of the women wrote in an anonymous statement provided by Carrillo. “He is living proof of the unyielding power of economic status and archaic law simultaneously producing freedom for predators and hell for victims.”

Foppoli is also under investigation by the police department in Reno, Nevada, and law enforcement in Montana, as well as by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission over possible campaign finance violations.

So far, none of those investigations has resulted in criminal charges, though the status of the Reno investigation was not immediately clear this week. Police there had told The Press Democrat last December that charges were unlikely.

Even the FPPC investigation, more than two years later, remains “open,” an agency spokesperson said Thursday.

In a series of text messages to a Press Democrat reporter on Thursday, Foppoli said he has undergone intense scrutiny but, so far, no agency has charged him with lawbreaking.

“I’ve maintained my innocence this entire time,” Foppoli wrote. “I have been thoroughly investigated by multiple law enforcement agencies. They have exhaustively interviewed everyone who can possibly give them any information along with raiding my home and search through electronic devices … It’s been more than two years and with all of that I have never been charged with a single thing.”

The allegations against Foppoli first broke on April 8, 2021, when The San Francisco Chronicle published detailed allegations from four women. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office opened a criminal investigation. Because one of Foppoli’s accusers, Esther Lemus, was a fellow Windsor City Council member with Foppoli and a prosecutor with the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office, the local DA’s office recused itself.

The Sheriff’s Office passed its investigation to Bonta’s office in March 2022, more than a year and a half ago.

Spokespeople for the attorney general’s office have consistently declined to discuss the scope or status of the investigation.

“Our investigation remains ongoing, no updates to share beyond that,” a representative from the press office who did not share their name wrote in an email on Thursday.

In civil court, Foppoli’s first lawsuit came from seven women represented by Carrillo’s law firm. Though the women are anonymous in the lawsuits, the allegations largely match accounts published by the Chronicle and The Press Democrat.

Farrah Abraham, a reality television star who has accused Foppoli of drugging and raping her in Florida, also sued him in Sonoma County. And in a third lawsuit, an anonymous Montana woman sued him, accusing him of raping her multiple times in 2020 when she was 18 years old.

Foppoli in his text messages Thursday called all those cases “frivolous and deceitful“ and driven by a desire for a settlement payout.

While he filed a response denying all charges in the largest case from the seven women, he has since ignored requests to produce material relevant to the case attorneys made through the legal process known as discovery, according to Nicole Jaffee, Carrillo’s colleague.

If he has seemingly sought to ignore the lawsuits, the lawyers suing him say he won’t be able to keep that up for long.

In the Abraham case, Carrillo and Jaffee are working with Spencer Kuvin, a high-profile litigator who successfully brought civil lawsuits for the victims of financier and serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Foppoli has not responded to that complaint, leading the TV star’s attorneys to ask Sonoma County Judge Christopher Honigsberg to issue a default judgment against him. That motion was granted, opening the possibility that the plaintiffs in the case could begin to seek a damage award from the judge and pursue Foppoli’s assets.

“We are going to ask for a full measure of damages,“ Kuvin said, and then pursue those damages through the court.

Foppoli was defiant. “As long as I have a voice, I will never authorize a single penny to be paid out to any of these false accusers,” he said.

But he also has yet to hire an attorney to defend himself. “I would rather dedicate my money to starting a family with my amazing fiancee who has been so supportive during all of this,” he wrote. He said he would seek representation if he felt it became necessary later.

As the civil cases grind on and the criminal investigation dragged into its second summer, Foppoli has instead traveled.

Six days ago, his fiancee posted a photograph from Jordan, where they stayed in a luxury hotel with a bubble roof. A post from earlier in September had them in Sicily. In late August, she posted photographs of the couple in Albania, and earlier that month her photographs put them in Cyprus, the Greek island of Santorini and the Israeli port city Haifa.

In between trips, photos show themed parties at the castle, including a Fourth of July celebration. The ancient structure also earned some measure of infamy during the series of Foppoli-related scandals that broke one after another in 2021, when the Chronicle published an investigation into Active 20-30, a prominent charity Foppoli was a part of.

In a 2019 Santa Rosa chapter newsletter, members of the club appeared to be referring to it when they joked about Foppoli’s Italian “rape castle.”

The lawsuit from the seven women also names the charity club as a defendant. Both that suit and the lawsuit from the Montana woman also name Christopher Creek, a winery outside Windsor that Foppoli is part owner of.

By text message Foppoli said he still has supporters in Sonoma County, and he suggested they outnumbered his detractors.

If his recent engagement worried his accusers, it also drew out support, he suggested: “More than 700 people, with the largest part coming from Sonoma County residents have publicly congratulated me on social media platforms on my engagement.”

In a July 31 post, Foppoli posed holding his now fiancee in a low dip in Athens, Greece, with the Parthenon in the background. Those photographs, in particular, bothered one of Foppoli’s former fellow Sonoma County politicians, Healdsburg Mayor Ariel Kelley.

“Looking through the photos of his travels, one that particularly struck me was the disgraced former mayor posing in Athens, which was the birthplace of the democratic courts and judicial system,” Kelley said.

“Let’s be absolutely clear. The only courtroom he should be seeing the inside of is right here in Sonoma County, being brought to much-needed justice.

“The longer this investigation drags on, the longer justice is denied,” Kelley added

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88