Supporters of Los Angeles City Council candidate Isabel Jurado on Wednesday criticized her opponent, Councilman Kevin de Leon, for hiring a prominent local activist who was accused of harassment by a woman he dated last year.
De Leon’s campaign paid Najee Ali $3,000 for campaign work this month, according to the City Ethics website.
The woman, Susan Bradshaw, accused Ali of harassing her and threatening to distribute illegal images in March 2023 after their four-year relationship ended, according to court records. A judge granted her a restraining order against Ali.
The allegations gained new attention on Wednesday, less than a week before the Nov. 5 election, when Bradshaw attended a news conference in Boyle Heights hosted by Jurado supporters.
Politically damaged by his role in secretly recorded conversations that included racist and crude remarks, de Leon is competing with a tenant rights attorney to represent neighborhoods in Los Angeles’ Downtown and Eastside neighborhoods. He is involved in a fierce battle with a certain Frado.
“Ali is not a phony figure in the community,” Bradshaw said Wednesday. “Behind closed doors, he’s a different person, a monster.”
Ali denied all wrongdoing, saying he had been the target of a smear campaign.
At a hearing on Bradshaw’s restraining order petition last year, Ali called her a “liar” who had “cherry-picked” a thread of long messages to frame him as a threat, according to court records. I gave it a kick.
In a 45-page restraining order application filed in March 2023, Bradshaw claimed Ali verbally abused her, threatened her and choked her during sexual encounters. Ali also claimed that Ali had sent nude and “illicit” images of herself to her “live-in boyfriend” and that Ali had blackmailed him, according to the documents.
According to court records, Ali said at a hearing in May 2023 that the choking happened during consensual sex “at her request.” Ali also said Bradshaw’s boyfriend had threatened him.
According to her application for a restraining order, Bradshaw launched a profane and violent tirade via text message shortly after she broke up with Ali.
“Mr. Ali texted me that I’m a whore, that he wants me to die, and that he wants my parents to be disgraced. He also told me that my boyfriend started calling and texting me constantly,” she wrote in her application.
Ali said in an interview that Bradshaw was not harassing him, not the other way around. He pointed to passages that Bradshaw wrote as slurs against homosexuals.
“I begged her to stop texting,” he told the Times.
Ali frequently attends political events in Los Angeles and worked on then-Mayor Eric Garcetti’s crisis response team, which was dispatched to the scenes of violent incidents. Mayor Karen Bass wrote the foreword to Ali’s 2021 book, “Raising Hell: A Life of Activism,” while she was a councilwoman.
Ali, who regularly speaks on behalf of families of crime victims, said she has been “the best advocate for women and children for the past 30 years.”
He became famous for helping draw attention to the case of Shelais Iverson, a 7-year-old South Los Angeles girl who was sexually assaulted and murdered in a Nevada casino bathroom in 1997. Ta.
In another high-profile case, he helped defend Tioni Theus, a 16-year-old girl whose body was found on the side of Highway 110 in 2022. Activists argued Theus’ case did not receive media attention because he was black.
In 2008, Ali was sentenced to four years in state prison after pleading guilty to attempting to bribe a witness in a criminal case involving his daughter. He was also convicted of robbery in 1992.
In her application for a restraining order, Bradshaw also claimed that Ali had been arrested on suspicion of rape.
Ali said Wednesday that she had been arrested twice on rape charges. At the first trial, in 1982, he was acquitted, he said. The second trial said he was arrested for trespassing near the University of Southern California in 1985. The police officer wrote “rape” on the arrest document, but that was a lie.
He said his past was no different from that of “other young black men who were arrested for crimes they didn’t commit.”
The Times could not immediately confirm information about the arrest.
De Leon’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about Ali.
