Guest Post: Nathan Fletcher's Vindication

Living with a rush to judgement

Stock image via Pixabay

Note from Doug: I have it on good authority that Nathan Fletcher has no interest in running for office; he’s turned a page in his life and it leads elsewhere.

By Cody Petterson / Reposted from Facebook w/permission

I want to say something about Nathan Fletcher. I’ve been sitting on thoughts and notes for a long time, not out of hesitation, but simply because I haven’t had the time to put them to paper. Judge Braner’s double dismissal over the last two weeks—first of MTS from the suit and then, a week later, of the suit altogether—both provides a long-overdue end to a shameful episode in San Diego politics and, unfortunately, leaves one last opportunity for dishonest political operators to spin this outcome as a “case study in how…to launder a reputation without ever addressing the truth,” rather than a vindication of Nathan’s initial and consistent account of events and a dismantling of the false accusations against him.

If that sounds bold to you, it is likely because you haven’t been following the case over the last two years. And because local media has refused to run stories about the suit, which they have known for at least a year was developing strongly counter to the bias of their initial coverage. The evidence in the case demonstrates conclusively that 1) the interactions between the plaintiff and Nathan were consistently, persistently consensual and 2) the plaintiff’s termination was for well-documented job performance issues and had nothing to do with their interactions, about which all evidence suggests her direct supervisors knew nothing.

It is important to acknowledge what Nathan DID do. Nathan had a series of consensual extramarital interactions with a woman who worked in an organization of which he was board president. The contacts consisted of several months of mutual Instagram direct messenger flirtation (beginning on or around February 13, 2022) (which the discovered and recovered messages demonstrate the plaintiff initiated), developing into three physical encounters (which the evidence demonstrates the plaintiff actively pursued), one in which the plaintiff came to Nathan’s hotel and they kissed in a stairwell (May 12, 2022), one in which they had a “make out sesh” (the plaintiff's description) in the organization’s conference room, fully clothed (the location was suggested by the plaintiff) (June 9, 2022), and a final one in which they again “made out” (fully clothed) in the conference room (December 1, 2022). After which Nathan was overcome by guilt and wrote to her explaining that he couldn’t continue the encounters. Outside of brief, passing conversations typical of organizationally distant colleagues, the two had no other in-person contact, either before, during, or after this period.

This is exactly what Nathan initially admitted publicly and what all discovered and recovered communication between Nathan and the woman and between the woman and her friend prove occurred. I will circle back to talk through what he did, but I want to briefly discuss what he was falsely accused of and what the evidence demonstrates he did NOT do. Nathan was accused of sexually assaulting the plaintiff and using his authority to have her fired (to be specific, there were eight alleged causes of action, including harassment, gender violence, assault, battery, discrimination, retaliation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and interference with prospective economic relations). At the end of last year, the plaintiff filed a dismissal of her allegation of gender violence, sexual assault, and sexual battery, in all likelihood because discovery and recovery of deleted messages had produced incontrovertible evidence of the falsehood of those allegations. So the case that the Judge threw out last Friday already didn’t include any claims of sexual assault or nonconsensual contact. But it’s important to emphasize and describe the extensive nature of the evidence of consent, since the allegations of sexual assault and nonconsensuality were central to the plaintiff’s claims and were the allegations that produced the vast majority of recriminations and slanders against Nathan.

All evidence—of which discovery and recovery produced an extensive amount—demonstrates that the physical encounters between Nathan and his accuser were categorically consensual. What the textual evidence demonstrates is that there was enthusiastic, abundant, repeated, consistent, persistent consent by the plaintiff. You can read the messages included in the filings. Because of the surreptitious nature of the interactions, the vast majority of all communication between Nathan and the plaintiff occurred in written messages. There are hundreds of Instagram messages and texts between Nathan and the plaintiff and between the plaintiff and her friend. Her expressions of enthusiastic consent, sexual and romantic desire, and post-encounter pleasure and excitement are too numerous to list here, but I’ll share a few that illustrate the degree of reiterative consent.

April 7, 2022, to her friend, "if only he wasn't marriedddd! ", Friend: "That's what divorces are for," plaintiff: "I'll just show him how smart I am and hopefully he will divorce his wife and realize he just met the actual love of his life Lmfao"

May 12, 2022, day of first physical encounter, to her friend, “I kissed him. I feel like I just came out of the wildest dream”

May 16, to Nathan, “Missed your lips”, “totally not thinking about kissing your face right now.”

May 17, to her friend, “I’ll just continue to enjoy every second of being his emotional support mistress.”

May 17, to her friend, “I say I won’t do it again. But I honestly don’t want it to stop.”

June 9th, 2022, day of first conference room encounter, to her friend “Having a make out session was not in my plans today, but hey. . . what do I know anymore.” Friend: ““That is like so hot though.” Plaintiff: “it is…(on fire emoji)”

December 1, 2022, just before second and final encounter, to Nathan, “Uhmmm... I was going to say something inappropriate... (laughing emoji) oh my mind... Are you leaving right after the meeting? Or staying a bit longer?"

To her friend ““OMG OMG . . . OMG . . OMG. . .OMG. . . We just had a heavy heavy make out sesh.”

These are just a few samples of messages that are directly in pursuit of or response to physical encounters. There are many more messages that establish a tone of romantic longing, desire, and sustained consent. And these are only a fraction of the potentially exculpatory Instagram and text messages that the plaintiff deleted or allowed to gradually autodelete, in spite of the Judge’s order to preserve all evidence. I encourage you to read the ruling.

It is damning. The destruction of evidence was pervasive and patterned. It is shocking that anyone would spoil so much critical evidence in defiance of a Judge’s order. Had the trial proceeded, the judge would almost certainly have instructed any jury to make an adverse inference, that is, to assume that the spoiled evidence was exculpatory for Nathan and damaging to the plaintiff's case. This, on top of the extensive evidence recovered already demonstrating that the encounters and text exchanges were consensual.

The second allegation that garnered Nathan condemnation was of employment retaliation. A week prior to dismissing the suit in its entirety, Judge Braner dismissed MTS from the plaintiff’s suit, noting that all available evidence demonstrates that MTS had identified recurring deficiencies in her work over several consecutive years of annual performance reviews, had notified her in August of 2022 that she would need to make “immediate and sustained improvement” in order “to maintain employment,” and had fired her for well-documented and -deliberated cause. Furthermore, he found that Nathan had no supervisory relationship to the plaintiff and that those who had supervised and evaluated her job performance had no knowledge and no way of knowing that she had any unusual interactions with Nathan.

So there is no evidence that Nathan did anything that the plaintiff initially alleged, the plaintiff herself dropped all allegations of assault, battery, or violence, the discovered and recovered communications demonstrate persistent, consistent, enthusiastic consent—expressed both to Nathan and reported by the plaintiff to her friend—and the Judge threw out all allegations related to MTS’s firing of her.

Which brings us back to what Nathan DID DO. Nathan had an affair. It was frankly pretty tame by most standards (3 encounters—once kissing, twice making out, while clothed), but he clearly violated his marriage vows, betrayed the trust his wife had put in him, and put the integrity of his marriage and family in jeopardy. Profound errors, with serious consequences, that reflect a grave lapse of judgment. I would point out, however, that infidelity is an error to which all humans are tempted in the course of marriage and to which many succumb.

I know many otherwise good people who have engaged in infidelity, and I can only assume that they represent a fraction of the infidelities in my social circles. I’ve read estimates that between twenty and forty percent of all spouses engage in infidelity at some point in their marriages. I’m not condoning it—I think it’s a profound interpersonal betrayal—but I AM suggesting that it is a ubiquitous human frailty. It is a vice and a betrayal that is well within the normal range of human experience and conduct.

Nathan’s interactions with the plaintiff also involved an employee in an organization of which he was Board President. Nathan was not technically an MTS employee, but the plaintiff was, in a broad sense, in his chain of command. That said, the plaintiff did not directly report to Nathan, Nathan was not her supervisor, and he had no authority to hire, lay off, assign, or discipline her. In fact, he was four levels above her in the organization (Board President-CEO-Director-Manager-Specialist) and had no knowledge or communication whatsoever about her job performance and the terms of her employment.

To be clear: I think it is very unwise to have even consensual romantic or sexual interactions with anyone, anywhere in one’s chain of command. And, for a Board member or Executive Director, that means, effectively, avoiding romantic or sexual involvement with all staff. That said, there are sound reasons why most organizations prohibit or require reporting of only relationships between supervisors and their direct reports or, in other words, between a superior and an employee for whom they are “responsible for the direct supervision, evaluation or discipline.” We spend an enormous and frankly lamentable amount of our lives at work, and a significant percentage of our romantic and sexual relationships develop in those contexts.

An organization needs to balance the need to prevent personal harm and organizational disfunction, against the right of adult employees to form and maintain consensual relationships. In practice, this means prohibiting sexual, romantic, and other intimate interactions between supervisors and their direct reports. Anyone who has been stuck with an abusive or creepy direct supervisor knows just how uniquely isolating and prone to mistreatment and misconduct direct reporting relationships can become if not properly constrained by policy and procedure.

Nathan was far from a direct supervisor of the plaintiff and there is no evidence that he had the authority or opportunity to direct or evaluate her work in any way. For him to have done so would have required acting through multiple intermediaries in very institutionally awkward, improbable, and risky ways, and there’s no evidence this occurred nor plausible reason why it would have. His interactions with the plaintiff did not violate MTS policy and would not have violated any of the personnel policies with which I am familiar.

Nathan had a series of consensual extramarital interactions that began with mutual flirting on social media, culminated with one kissing encounter and two (clothed) “make out sessions” with a mid-level staff member over whom he had no authority to hire, lay off, assign, or discipline, who was subsequently fired for cause after several years of mixed performance reviews and a final warning. That is the full extent of what actually happened.

So, at the end of two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of litigation, two years of chaos and deadlock at the County, and the destruction of Nathan’s reputation, career, and legacy by his erstwhile friends and colleagues, the question we're left with is, what went wrong? Why was the Democratic establishment so eager to turn on Nathan? Why did so few people resist the rush to judgment? How is it that a social network of friends and colleagues that Nathan had built and maintained for two decades, abandoned him over night? Disappeared from one day to the next?

The way our political ecosystem treated Nathan Fletcher tells us that each of us is one unsubstantiated, false accusation away from losing our friends, our colleagues, our job, our career, our achievements, and the social esteem and gratitude that we have earned through years of service. That cannot possibly be right. Whatever you think about Nathan Fletcher, that cannot possibly be how we build and preserve relationships and communities and how we respond to potential misconduct. If it happened to Nathan Fletcher—if the entire political community in San Diego County turned against him and shunned him over an unsubstantiated, and ultimately demonstrably false accusation—then it can happen to anyone.

I don’t want to drudge up all the tawdry, disingenuous piling-on that took place back in 2023. Once Nathan resigned, the floodgates opened. The pack hunts the weak, and a politician without a seat is easy pickings for anyone with anything to gain. Some took the opportunity to signal their outrage. Others lost their bearings in the fervor of the crowd. Most stood by and watched it happen. Almost no one publicly deferred judgment until there was more evidence of guilt or innocence. Fundamentally, there was an abdication of the community’s responsibility to demand some threshold of evidence.

I am not saying that we should accord those accused of sexual assault and other grave abuses the full, legal “due process” or “proof beyond a shadow of a doubt” at the communal level. For various reasons, that rigor may work for legal systems, but it is excessive for civil society. People are entitled to form opinions or voice condemnations without extensive legal deliberations and professional gathering and marshaling of evidence, and the demand for it, in practice, can enable serial abusers to escape accountability through settlements and other legal maneuvers, particularly since evidence in these cases is often testimonial or circumstantial. I’m not even saying Nathan should have been given the “benefit of the doubt.” People can appear to merit such a benefit and exploit such benefit to shield them from accountability. We do not fully know one another. People are rationally prone to hide their flaws, particularly their moral flaws, and politics dramatically increases this tendency. So, no, not even benefit of the doubt. But he should have been afforded—each person deserves to be afforded—some bare minimum standard of evidence before condemnation. There is a basic human expectation that an allegation against them requires evidence. What that might be varies from culture to culture and person to person, but everyone believes that the strength of accusations should rest on some sort of evidence.

What does it say about a political community that a single false, unsubstantiated accusation could cause a prominent, respected elected official to become a pariah, stripped of their office, their career, their dignity, abandoned by hundreds, thousands of people who claimed and appeared to be his friends, his allies, people who begged for his endorsement, his support, his collaboration, who celebrated and relied on his leadership? If you could only imagine how extensive Nathan’s social network was the day before the allegations, you would be stunned by the vastness, the suddenness, the completeness of the disappearance. It makes you ask yourself, was it ever there? Was the whole social ecosystem just a figment of power, of dissembling, of calculation?

I will tell you what it illustrates to me. It reminds one that so many political relationships—and the political ecosystems that are made from them—are loveless, hollow, transactional, dissembling. I mentioned to a friend how disturbed I was by the complete and immediate disappearance of Nathan’s social world and they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Yeah, that’s what power will do. There’s not a lot of genuineness.” There’s some truth there. Power is unforgiving and, to an extent, tempts all its aspirants to Machiavellian scheming and dissembling. Maybe power is so tantalizing, and its loss so terrifying, that it sterilizes, desiccates, hollows out all genuine mutual feeling and relatedness. Maybe nothing humane, no simple fellow feeling or mutual caring, can survive in defiance of the calculus. Maybe the social worlds that power and politics build are inherently artificial, inherently illusory, inherently loveless. I imagine that that “Game of Thrones” quality is one of the many things that discourage normal, good-hearted people from participating in it. That said--I may be naive, but--I think it is possible to foster a more resilient, welcoming, compelling, and vigorous political culture by cultivating mutual feeling and performing actions that are interpersonally virtuous—kind, caring, supportive, curious.

Until that time, at the very least, you should know that Nathan Fletcher didn’t engage in gender violence, or assault, or battery, or harassment, or retaliation. All evidence proves that he had a series of consensual extramarital interactions that involved one kiss and two (clothed) ‘make out sessions’ with a mid-level staffer over whom he had no direct supervision. He did not retaliate, he had nothing to retaliate for, and he did not communicate in any way with anyone about his encounters or communications with her, or about her at all.

If you had a friendship with Nathan, or were his colleague, or collaborated with him, or asked for and received his endorsement, or had any other reason to show him respect, compassion, support, or gratitude, and instead you condemned him over baseless allegations, or you stood by and watched his name and legacy blackened over baseless allegations, you should call him. You should make up for lost time, call him, and ask him how he’s doing. I don’t know if he’ll answer. Or call you back. But I asked him last year how many, of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people from whom he had earned friendship, respect, and a fair hearing, had reached out to him, and he said “Three.” I don’t know that he needs checking on now. The hardest days are hopefully behind him. But examine your conscience. If you didn’t do for Nathan in his time of false allegation, of need, what you would have wanted done for you if you were falsely accused, slandered, and abandoned, you should reach out to him.

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Eds Note: Rude assholes will have their comments deleted. Be nice to each other.