Sheriff Mark Essick releases investigation into allegations he bullied Supervisor Lynda Hopkins

After fighting for 18 months to keep an investigation into a heated phone call with Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins secret, Sheriff Mark Essick this week chose to drop his legal case and release the report to The Press Democrat days before a court deadline.

An outside lawyer and workplace investigator hired by Sonoma County officials to write the Dec. 11, 2020, report concluded Essick used his position to intimidate Hopkins in a phone call during the August 2020 Walbridge Fire.

The investigator concluded the intimidation was political in nature and not a threat to Hopkins’ physical safety.

Hopkins called Essick on Aug. 20, 2020, to inquire about people entering an evacuation zone to retrieve or care for their pets, but the phone call quickly turned into an argument.

Essick told Hopkins he would expose her as “a fraud” and that she did not “have a friend” in the county’s top law enforcement official, the investigator concluded after interviewing both parties.

In a 3:30 a.m. email to her district staff the morning after that phone call, Hopkins wrote she worried about being targeted by deputies or for future bullying and harassment by a man who “controls a substantial arm of the criminal justice system.”

Hopkins complained about the call to the county’s human resources office. The following month, county leaders hired Berkeley workplace attorney Amy Oppenheimer to investigate.

Hopkins told Oppenheimer that after the phone call, it “felt hard” when she had to pass by sheriff deputies maintaining evacuation zones for the fire.

Hopkins wrote a 10-page criticism of Oppenheimer’s report disputing descriptions of the phone call as an argument, and said it was one of the more jarring points in her political career.

“Never before have I felt as unsafe as I did when the Sheriff threatened me,” she wrote. She described Essick as “unhinged and out of control.”

Essick, in an interview this week, said Hopkins’ accusations were a “mischaracterization of what happened,” though he said previous political disagreements and Hopkins’ past public criticism of him drove his loss of his temper during the phone call.

Hopkins was one of three women who told the investigator they believed Essick treated women differently. Oppenheimer concluded, however, that Essick was motivated during the phone call by his long-standing public differences with the supervisor more than sexism.

However, she wrote, her interviews during the investigation suggested his actions were “due, at least in part, to gender.”

Oppenheimer documented a second incident where Essick sarcastically told a woman colleague, whose identity is redacted, that he was going to “beat (her) up” during a February 2020 meeting about a large homeless encampment along the Joe Rodota Trail. Though people at the meeting said the sheriff appeared to be joking, the recipient, a Black woman, said she took the comment as an attempt to intimidate her.

Essick did not recall making the remark, he said. “When it got brought up in this investigation I had no recollection of it at all,” he said. “There was no threat there. It was a joking conversation between colleagues dealing with a difficult situation.”

Essick and Sonoma County have been in a protracted legal fight over whether the document would be released to the public since The Press Democrat requested a copy of it in December 2020. The county agreed to release the report, and Essick, who said this week he expected confidentiality when he participated in the investigation, sued to maintain its secrecy.

Essick argued he was entitled to confidentiality as a peace officer and county employee. Two courts found against him, with judges concluding that as an elected official, Essick was ultimately accountable to the voters who were entitled to the investigation.

On June 29, a state appeals panel in San Francisco ordered the documents released on Friday, barring a further appeal from Essick to the California State Supreme Court. Essick decided not to appeal, he told The Press Democrat this week, and decided to release the report and the supporting documents behind it.

Sonoma County Counsel Robert Pittman said he is not able to discuss the report until the court’s deadline expires Friday. Hopkins, who is on vacation, said the same in a text message.

Pittman did not respond to a request asking he verify that the 130 pages of documents Essick released composes the full report. Essick said he released every document he had access to, adding he was not aware of any additional documentation beyond what he’d provided the newspaper.

The court should unveil its copy of the complete report as soon as Friday.

In an interview with The Press Democrat Monday, Essick maintained his court fight in part because he felt the results would affect other peace officers. He declined to say how much was spent on his legal defense, and whether any law enforcement associations helped bear the cost. No public money was spent on his defense, he said.

Essick did not run for reelection this year. Assistant Sheriff Eddie Engram was elected in June and will replace Essick in January.

The contentious phone call began after a public meeting to discuss the Walbridge Fire, which was burning into its third day and had driven evacuations in Guerneville and West County.

Hopkins texted Essick after the call, asking for an opportunity to discuss whether her constituents might be able to return to evacuation zones to care for and look for pets.

In his response, Essick accused Hopkins of deliberately leaving law enforcement officers out of a public thank you she had made to firefighters during the public meeting. “How about you quit with the crap and come together for our community?” he wrote.

A subsequent phone call appears to have been contentious from the beginning.

Essick said he regretted his language and attitude during the phone call. He described it as borne of exhaustion during a severe wildfire and fueled by long-running disputes with Hopkins over big political issues facing the county like its pandemic response, homelessness and law enforcement oversight.

“Certainly the public’s interest was not well served by my breakdown (in communication),” Essick told The Press Democrat.

Essick said he did not intend to threaten any loss of law enforcement service to Hopkins and her family. He denied any suggestion his response to Hopkins was driven by sexism.

“I’ve never ever had that come up in my 28 years as a cop,” he said.

“I do think (the incident) has been made more of than it actually was,” Essick said.

Essick said both he and Hopkins “resorted to insults.” In the report, the two offered the investigator differing versions of what Hopkins said, though both parties agreed she told the sheriff she thought he was sexist. Hopkins did so only after Essick had attacked her at length, she said.

Essick told investigators he recalled Hopkins calling him “a small man with a fragile ego who is afraid of women,” and also a bigot and a misogynist. Hopkins disputed his recollection both in an interview and her subsequent letter to Oppenheimer.

She did tell Oppenheimer she called Essick “arrogant and sexist,” during the August 2020 call.

In her early morning email to her staff, however, Hopkins described “personal, hateful attacks” during the phone call that she said began from the onset.

“He immediately began mocking me and treating me like I was stupid,” she wrote. The sheriff went on to call her “manipulative” and carried on a “hateful, derogatory, disdainful and dismissive personal verbal attack,” Hopkins wrote.

Essick told Oppenheimer he did not remember calling Hopkins manipulative.

In her email to staff, Hopkins wrote she intended to contact county human resources, but said she did not welcome the scrutiny that would occur. She feared a “whole messy public opinion court where my motives and integrity and honesty are questioned,” she wrote, but felt she had to take action.

In the report, which contained interviews with Essick and Hopkins as well as input from Hopkins’ husband, who listened to part of the call, Oppenheimer found that neither elected official was “blameless” for a dispute.

Hopkins had criticized Essick publicly in recent days and in the phone call “used insulting and inflammatory language that would reasonably be expected to get a reaction,” the investigator wrote.

Hopkins contested that assessment in her response to the Oppenheimer report, stating that she only called Essick sexist after being insulted for some time and did not see her comment as insulting.

Oppenheimer also wrote that the investigation’s effectiveness was stymied by relying on two recollections of a phone call — Hopkins’ husband heard only the end of the conversation.

“It is likely that each of them has mis-remembered and/or exaggerated in their own minds what the other said,” she wrote.

Oppenheimer interviewed eight people in her investigation, but most of their names are redacted.

The other incident she outlined came during the February 2020 meeting about a homeless encampment. Essick described the meeting as a discussion about how to approach a sprawling Joe Rodota Trail homeless encampment, but declined to identify the person he addressed.

Essick made the comment sarcastically, and “in jest” according to the observations of others in the meeting that are documented in the report, but it was considered inappropriate by both the recipient of the comment and others present.

The recipient of the comment told Oppenheimer she took it as “a statement intended for intimidation.”

“There was energy behind it and the point was for me to be taken aback,” the recipient of the comment said.

The investigator said the statement could not reasonably be considered a threat in the context of the conversation, and said it was evidence of Essick’s “carelessness with words that can be incendiary more than a tendency to threaten people.”

Read the report and exhibits here.

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