Former Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli, accused by multiple women of sexual assault, will not face charges, says California Attorney General

Nearly three years after Dominic Foppoli was first accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, and two years after the California Attorney General’s Office took over the investigation of the former Windsor mayor, the office said Thursday morning it is not filing charges against Foppoli.

“At this time, we don't have enough evidence to warrant filing charges on the cases not barred by the statute of limitations,” a spokesperson for Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a written statement. “However, our investigation remains open, and we urge anyone who believes they may be a victim or who has evidence to come forward.”

Thursday’s announcement marks, for now, the conclusion of the last publicly known ongoing criminal investigation into Foppoli, the once-politically ascendant scion of a wealthy local wine family. Like the AG’s inquiry, those investigations have fizzled out or stalled as detectives have failed to turn up evidence in cases that are often old.

In 2016, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that did away with a statute of limitations on rape cases. But that law applied only to crimes committed after Jan. 1, 2017.

The assaults alleged by Foppoli’s accusers took place between 2002 and 2021, and often involved alcohol. Those women include an ex-girlfriend, guests at his winery, a fellow Windsor Town Council member, a fellow member of the Santa Rosa chapter of the Active 20-30 club, and an 18-year-old from Montana.

The spokesperson for Bonta noted the Attorney General’s Office had both reviewed the investigation done by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and conducted its own investigation.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office opened its criminal inquiry after allegations made by an initial group of four women, who came forward in an April 2021 San Francisco Chronicle story that detailed accusations of sexual assault or misconduct by Foppoli.

A subsequent Foppoli accuser, Esther Lemus, who shared her account with The Press Democrat, was a fellow Windsor Town Council member, and a prosecutor with the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office. Citing a conflict of interest, then-District Attorney Jill Ravitch handed the investigation in March 2022 to state prosecutors, who have worked these past two years with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

Foppoli would eventually become the focus of four known criminal investigations, in four different states: California, Montana, Florida and Nevada. None of the investigations have resulted in criminal charges.

“Our investigators dedicate extensive time, effort, and resources to ensure a complete and thorough investigation before submitting a case for potential prosecution,” said Misti Wood, community engagement manager for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

“We respect the Attorney General’s decision in their independent investigation.”

With each new accusation, Foppoli consistently proclaimed his innocence.

“The presumption of guilt until today has destroyed the lives of me, my family and our businesses,” Foppoli said in a Thursday morning text message to a Press Democrat reporter.

In a 562-word statement texted later in the day, Foppoli came off as alternately conciliatory and aggrieved. He began with a qualified apology to some of his accusers.

“Through prayer and reflection,” he had come to realize, he said, “that especially in my younger years I was not an ideal partner.”

The cavalcade of accusations and investigations resulted in “real consequences,” he said, mentioning the “dozens of families” who lost incomes when Foppoli’s businesses were “unfairly shut down or ostracized,” along with nieces and nephews who were “bullied incessantly on the playgrounds at their schools.”

Foppoli did not specify which businesses had been shut down. His winery, Christopher Creek, continues to operate.

“But now,” he said — after describing newspaper coverage of the allegations and investigations as “sensationalist yellow journalism” — “it’s time for healing.

“This has been an incredibly difficult nearly 3 years for my family, my friends, people in my businesses, and for our town. Now is a time for us to learn from the experience and move forward together.

“I look forward to returning to my beloved Windsor and rebuilding broken relationships to make them stronger than ever.”

One Foppoli accuser, who asked to remain anonymous, was not in a peacemaking place on Thursday. “He knows as well as I do that he is a rapist, that he raped me and multiple women,“ she said.

Reading from a statement she’d written, the woman expressed deep anger at the Attorney General’s decision. “But I take solace,” she said “in the fact that Dominic has suffered repercussions for his criminal conduct.”

She described some of those consequences — “the loss of his position in politics, his loss of standing in the community,” and adverse impacts on his businesses — as “community justice.

“And for that, I’m grateful,” she said.

The AG’s decision, she said, “has highlighted a systemic problem. The system is broken.

“How many rape and sex assault victims and survivors will it take for rapists to be held accountable criminally? Sixteen? Twenty? Forty? Seventy?

“I ask that our state policymakers please take note. The system is broken. The laws need to be changed, to make it easier to hold rapists accountable.

“Unfortunately, our culture is one that shames and degrades rape victims into silence. We need change.”

Lawsuits still active

The 41-year-old vintner still faces at least three active lawsuits in civil court. In April 2022, seven women joined in a suit that accused him of sexual assault. The 30-page complaint, filed in Sonoma County Superior Court, accused him of using his “power, connections and alcohol to prey upon dozens of women in Sonoma County.”

That suit also named Christopher Creek Winery, then owned by Foppoli and his brother, and the Santa Rosa affiliate of Active 20-30, which profited, according to the complaint, from Foppoli “luring Plaintiffs to events held at or on behalf of” the two institutions.

Traci Carrillo, a Santa Rosa attorney representing the seven plaintiffs in that initial lawsuit, said Thursday marked a difficult day for the women.

“Obviously this is very triggering,“ she said. ”The initial reaction is always ‘Why weren’t we believed?’“

“You have all these women that come forward independently of each other,” Carrillo said, and they ask “’Why wasn’t that enough for a law enforcement agency?’ and they’re right, and it’s really hard for me to explain. It goes back to a bias in the criminal justice system.”

But civil cases continue to advance, she said, and should begin to accelerate over the course of the coming year. Those cases are based on different standards of evidence than criminal prosecution.

“We will proceed undaunted despite the fact that I still believe Foppoli should be in jail,” she said.

In May 2022, Foppoli was sued by a woman in Gallatin County, Montana, who contends that he raped her multiple times when she was 18 years old. The first assault, that complaint alleges, happened during a promotional tour for Foppoli’s winery that brought him to Montana in 2020.

The Montana suit accused Christopher Creek Winery of ignoring Foppoli’s sexual misconduct and knowingly fostering “a pervasive and hostile environment that utterly disregarded the rights and safety of women.”

In December 2022, the reality TV star Farrah Abraham sued Foppoli in Sonoma County Superior Court, claiming he drugged and raped her at his friend’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, in late March 2021.

The lead attorney on that case was Palm Beach-based Spencer Kuvin, who represented at least nine victims of the late prominent sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Abraham was represented locally by Carrillo, who noted that Abraham’s allegations were “just one more consistent piece of a very clear pattern of predatory behavior.”

Kuvin previously told The Press Democrat that Abraham had “blacked out” after sipping an Old Fashioned given to her by Foppoli. According to the complaint, Abraham woke up the next morning in a bed next to Foppoli with no memory of the night before. When she visited the bedroom she noticed broken jewelry and “some cuts and bruises,” according to the complaint.

“She knew she had been raped” by Foppoli, the complaint read.

Abraham filed a police report April 2, six days before the Chronicle published its original allegations of four other women against Foppoli.

Swift fall from public office

His plunge from grace was swift. Then the mayor of Windsor, he faced widespread calls for his resignation — from city residents, every other member of the Town Council, all five county supervisors, every other mayor in the county, along with lawmakers at the state and federal level.

Foppoli was stripped of his appointment to the district overseeing the Golden Gate Bridge, lost his leadership post in a statewide group of elected city officials and was booted from the rosters of civic groups, including Santa Rosa’s Active 20-30 club.

The accusations were too much for his older brother Joe Foppoli, chief operating officer of the family’s Christopher Creek Winery, who announced that Dominic had been relieved of his CEO duties at the winery, expressing disgust at his younger brother’s “promiscuous lifestyle” and lack of “moral character.”

But Foppoli refused to leave his office for more than a month, finally stepping down on May 21, 2021. That decision elicited both relief and irritation among locals incredulous and furious that he hadn’t resigned earlier.

“I have always and will always maintain that I did not engage in any nonconsensual acts with any woman,” he proclaimed in a written statement at the time, adding that “I recently learned that a woman in Palm Beach, Florida, is accusing me of nonconsensual acts while I was visiting there in March of this year.”

By resigning, he said, Foppoli hoped to spare Windsor “undue national attention” brought about by “lawful, but poor choices, I have made in the recent past.”

In November 2021, authorities raided Foppoli’s Windsor home. A two-hour search was led by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, and included members of a North Bay law enforcement task force specializing in computer evidence.

Abroad in Italy

As the California criminal investigation dragged on, Foppoli spent much of his time in Italy. His family owns a thousand-year-old castle above the town of Mazzo de Valtellini, 75 miles northeast of Milan in northern Italy. When the castle went up for sale a decade or so ago, “I made a crazy lowball offer for it,” he told a visitor to Christopher Creek Winery in 2020.

Foppoli was back in the news in last September, when an Instagram video showed him proposing marriage to a woman in a white dress. She said yes.

That proposal took place at an ancient theater in Taormina on the Italian island of Sicily — witnessed by the legendary tenor Andrea Bocelli, who can be seen in the background applauding.

The Instagram account of Foppoli’s fiancee, now private, showed the couple at other renowned locales: the Acropolis, and on Santorini island in Greece; at the Pyramids of Giza and the Royal Ascot horse race in Berkshire, England.

Reacting to the sight of Foppoli traipsing around Europe, one of Foppoli’s accusers, who preferred to remain anonymous, described his lifestyle as “a vile but crystal clear expression of our government’s failed system.

“He is living proof of the unyielding power of economic status and archaic law simultaneously producing freedom for predators and hell for victims.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88.