City Council, labor

It’s Full Speed Ahead for Nelson’s Delivery Driver Wage Reduction Bill
City Council President Sara Nelson.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is fast-tracking a repeal, sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson, of the city’s minimum wage for “gig” delivery drivers after companies like Doordash, Instacart, and Uber imposed a $5 fee on every order—essentially crashing their own Seattle market—and said they would not remove the fee unless the city reduced driver wages to the citywide minimum, currently $19.97. Under the current law, known as PayUp, drivers average about $26 an hour before adding tips and subtracting expenses.

Under Nelson’s proposal, the companies would be required to pay the city minimum wage,  plus 35 cents a mile for mileage—less than half the federal rate workers can claim on their income taxes. (Nelson said the lower rate made sense because people in Seattle tend to drive smaller-than-average cars, without noting that they also pay higher-than-average rates for gas.)

Because Nelson’s bill would allow companies to average workers’ pay out over two weeks (and remove a $5 per order minimum), workers could actually earn less than minimum wage but be paid the minimum once companies “trued up” their wages on payday. Workers would also have to pay $5 to withdraw their wages before the end of each two-week pay period, despite the fact that they are not technically employees of the companies that employ them.

The PayUp legislation, passed in 2022 and implemented last year, requires app companies to pay higher mileage and per-mile rates than Nelson’s proposal; it also required them to pay for costs they previously passed on to drivers, such as the employer half of income taxes and state unemployment, family and medical leave, and workers’ comp insurance. Nelson’s bill would allow companies to once again pass these costs along to drivers.

Nelson introduced her bill in her Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee on Thursday. She said she felt a “moral obligation” to move quickly on the bill because drivers and restaurants are no longer getting enough orders to make a living, now that the companies’ high fees are driving customers away. “The impacts are quite real,” she said. Nelson then blamed the city’s own Office of Labor Standards for asking the companies for more data and putting “the focus… on the network companies” to demonstrate why they need the law to change.

“I am a pragmatist,” Nelson said. “I don’t want to wait for months, because people can’t pay rent rent right now. And so that is why I am motivated to do something that will have an immediate impact. And this first-in-the nation legislation is what caused the chain of events that we’re experiencing now.”

“Some would say,” Nelson added later, “some have argued, that it sets the highest city-established minimum wage for app-based workers so far in the country.”

But drivers (those not affiliated with the Uber-backed group DriveForward, at least), along with other labor advocates, poked holes in that argument.

Kyle Graham, who has driven for Uber and UberEats since 2016, said that after the city removed a temporary COVID-era pay increase for delivery drivers and other essential workers, his pay dwindled to as little as $3 an order, before tips—and a lot of people no longer tip. “This $5 they added [to each order] is just to try to get customers and drivers to fight in these council chambers for Uber, because they think that if they get rid of this ordinance, they’re going to drop those fees,” Graham said, but Nelson’s proposal does not remove the fees. “But orders are coming back [with the new fees], and if they’re getting just as many orders, they’re to going to drop that fee.”

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Once he pays for gas, maintenance, and all the other expenses Uber would have to pay if he was an employee, Graham said, it sometimes “just isn’t worth it” to keep driving. “The people who are still driving are the people who are the most exploited or can’t find anything else.”

In addition to lowering drivers’ wages, Nelson’s proposal would bar workers from filing lawsuits against the app companies; strip the city’s Office of Labor Standards’ power to ask the companies for information or impose any new restrictions on the companies in the future; and remove transparency requirements. Continue reading “It’s Full Speed Ahead for Nelson’s Delivery Driver Wage Reduction Bill” →

City Council, Crime, Police

Councilmember Cathy Moore Says She’ll Reintroduce Repealed Prostitution Loitering Law “In Short Order”
Police Chief Adrian Diaz, City Councilmember Cathy Moore, and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski at Bitter Lake Community Center

By Erica C. Barnett

During a public safety forum in north Seattle on Thursday night, District 5 City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she will introduce legislation reinstating the old law against “prostitution loitering,” which the city council repealed unanimously in 2020 with then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s support.

“The former council repealed the law against loitering for purposes of prostitution, and since that happened we have seen an absolute explosion in sex trafficking,” Moore said. “Now, we can all have differences of opinion about whether prostitution is good or bad. But what I can tell you is that people are being trafficked, and that it’s creating a tremendous amount of public disorder and unsafety. And so, we have got to address it. We have several tools; one is, we can reinstate the loitering law.”

After pausing for a moment while the crowd applauded, cheered, and shouted “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” Moore continued, saying she is “looking at coming forward with that legislation in short order, and hoping that I will get the support that I’m hearing from the community for taking that concrete action.”

The prostitution loitering law prohibited sex workers, described in one section of the law as “known prostitutes,” from being in any public place—notably Aurora Ave. N., where sex workers congregate, with the intent to “commit prostitution.”

The point of reinstating the law, Moore said, would be to give police an opportunity to intercept sex trafficking victims, not to jail and prosecute the “mostly women, and mostly minors, who are victims themselves, many of whom have been prostituted since they were children.”

Prostitution itself is still illegal, but SPD has only made 25 prostitution arrests since 2019. Instead, the police and City Attorney’s Office have focused on arresting and prosecuting sex buyers, who are overwhelmingly men of color, according to attorneys who represent these defendants in court.

Speaking to PubliCola after the meeting, Moore said her “hope” for a reinstated loitering law “is really just to give officers the authority to approach and begin a conversation and to look at opportunities for diversion,” including to safe houses, “and to make sure they’re not being trafficked.”

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Amy Smith, director of the city’s CARE department, which operates 911, told PubliCola she didn’t think sex work “should be treated like a crime,” adding that the issue is “really complex. …We’ve got to figure out what is the mechanism to get [sex workers] indoors and safe and then rehabilitate them. … Thirty years ago, they used to have a mechanism to get someone in and to try to get them to testify against the pimp, and all of that’s gone away.”

The Seattle Police Department’s policy manual already empowers police to initiate “social contacts” with people in public spaces without detaining or arresting them.

The council repealed the laws against prostitution loitering and drug loitering after the Seattle Reentry Workgroup, established to come up with recommendations to help formerly incarcerated people reenter their communities, recommended repealing both laws on the grounds that they disproportionately harm people of color and amount to “criminalization of poverty.”

Before the unanimous 2020 vote, bill cosponsor Alex Pedersen said that repealing “problematic laws on our books, such as these loitering laws, [is] a small but important step that this city council can take” to reduce the “disproportionate impacts of our law enforcement system on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.”

 

homelessness, King County, Police

At Press Conference, Majority of Burien Council Demands Sheriff Enforce Camping Ban They Overturned
Burien mayor Kevin Schilling (KING 5 screenshot)

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling, who has repeatedly butted heads with the King County Sheriff’s Office over the city’s 24-hour ban on “living” outdoors, held a press conference with three other city council members Thursday morning to criticize the King County Sheriff’s Office for refusing to enforce an anti-camping ordinance the sheriff’s office calls unconstitutional. (In Burien, the council selects a mayor from among its members every two years).

The sheriff’s office, which provides police service to Burien under an interlocal agreement, sued the city last month, arguing that the ordinance violates the constitutional rights of people living unsheltered in Burien. The city responded by withholding payments to King County for police service; countersuing; and demanding the removal of Burien police chief Ted Boe, who works for the sheriff’s office. The city also terminated its contract with its homeless outreach provider, REACH.

“There has been no [judicial] order calling our ordinance unconstitutional. It has just been the sheriff’s office and the county executive saying it is, without any kind of legal support for that statement,” Schilling said.

KING 5 attended the press conference and posted a full video on Thursday.

The expansive new ban repealed and replaced an earlier law, Ordinance 827, that banned “camping” during daytime hours and placed restrictions sleeping in public at night. The newer, more restrictive law includes exceptions for people to sleep outside at night if no shelter is available, but the city has interpreted that to include shelter in Seattle, 12 miles away—another matter of dispute.

Schilling held the event in a meeting room at the King County Library, which shares a building with City Hall. He did not inform city staff about the event, which some staffers didn’t realize was happening until they walked by the press conference on their way to their offices.

Schilling appeared alongside three other members of the seven-member city council—Alex Andrade, Linda Akey, and deputy mayor Stephanie Mora. Under the state Open Public Meetings Act, it is illegal for a majority of any elected body to hold a scheduled or special meeting without providing at least 24 hours’ notice, such as by posting the meeting agenda on the city’s website. Not only did Schilling not post any public notice of the meeting, he did not inform city staff it was happening.

A spokesperson for the city declined to comment on the potential open meetings violation. “[S]taff were not involved with nor made aware of the event in advance, so we don’t have that level of detail to share at this time,” the spokesperson said.

During the press conference, Schilling repeatedly claimed the sheriff’s office could simply start enforcing the previous version of the sleeping ban. “The ordinance is already in place,” Schilling said. “It is the King County Sheriff’s office’s stated goal to not enforce any part of the ordinance and they’re choosing to do that.”

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“We have requested again and again and again for them to just go back and enforce the parts of the ordinance that are already in place,” Schilling said.

In a joint statement, King County Executive Dow Constantine and Sheriff Cole-Tindall said the sheriff’s office had no problem enforcing the earlier law, but the city would need to reinstate it. “In the media event today, Mayor Schilling claimed that there is no need to reinstate the prior ordinance because it already exists,” Cole-Tindall and Constantine said. “But it was replaced and amended with the adoption of the new one. This leaves KCSO with nothing to enforce except the new ordinance which, again, appears unconstitutional on its face. ”

The US Supreme Court will likely rule early this summer on a case called Grants Pass v. Johnson that could overturn a 9th Circuit ruling that prohibits cities from sweeping unsheltered people if no shelter is available. If the court upholds Grants Pass’ camping ban, it could affect the portion of the lawsuit that is based on the 8th Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment, but it won’t impact the sheriff’s 14th Amendment claims.

That amendment, which guarantees due process, prohibits laws that are too vague for an ordinary person to understand. Burien’s camping ban  bars people from “exercis[ing] nontransitory exclusive control over any portion of nonresidential public property” without explaining what “nontransitory exclusive control” is; it also includes a map of areas where no one can “live” at any time, even if no shelter is available, and gives the city manager unfettered authority to expand the prohibited areas without notice.

Cole-Tindall and Constantine also disputed Schilling’s claim that the sheriff has an obligation to enforce the law until a court determines whether it’s constitutional. “Both Burien Mayor Schilling and Deputy Mayor Mora have admitted in writing that the constitutionality of the new camping ordinance is for a judge to determine, which is why we have placed it before the federal court,” they said. “The city has yet to present a defense of its new law, which we believe cannot be done. Rather, the approach has been to avoid and delay resolution.”

City Council, labor

Nelson Bill Would Eliminate Minimum Wage for “Gig” Drivers—and Slash Workers’ Rights

By Erica C. Barnett

Gig delivery workers and their allies were bracing for legislation by City Council President Sara Nelson to repeal minimum wage legislation passed last year, known as the PayUp law. What they may not have expected was how far Nelson’s proposal would go to roll back reforms unrelated to wages, including protections against deactivation, transparency requirements, and legal rights for delivery workers to sue if their employer violates the law.

The new minimum wage, which works out to around $26 an hour, was intended to offset many of the employer-side costs drivers must bear because they’re classified as “independent contractors,” including workers’ comp insurance, employer payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, family and medical leave insurance, and gas, maintenance, and other costs associated with driving for a living.

The PayUp legislation also ensured that drivers would be paid for rest breaks and time spent doing work other than actively driving—costs that an employer would have to pay if the workers were traditional employees. And it made it harder for the companies to deactivate or otherwise penalize workers for doing things the companies don’t like, like going offline during periods of high demand.

Delivery companies, including Uber and Doordash, claimed that paying for these expenses would make it impossible for them to turn a profit, and imposed a $5 fee on every delivery order, instantly driving down demand for drivers’ services and leaving many in desperate straits. Nelson and other allies of the delivery companies now argue that rolling back the minimum wage is the only way to eliminate the fees and get Seattle residents ordering again—a claim workers dispute, noting that the apps haven’t provided financial data to back up their pleas of poverty.

But Nelson—whose company, Fremont Brewing, just sold a majority share to a firm that also owns dozens of restaurants that deliver through DoorDash—has proposed legislation that would far beyond repealing the new minimum wage. The bill Nelson introduced this week would put far more power in the hands of delivery companies, and strip authority from the city to enforce its own labor laws.

And, notably, it wouldn’t require the app companies to stop charging the $5 fee or prohibit similar fees in the future, leaving open the possibility that every time the city attempts to regulate them, the apps could just impose fees large enough to grind their own business to a halt.

At the city council’s regular meeting on Monday, most of the people who testified about the legislation were against it. One, a former driver for Uber and Lyft named Sandra, said she drove 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for years until she was deactivated without explanation last September. “There is no consistency in pay, and the apps treat workers as disposable,” she said. “These apps like to pretend they’re doing things that are in their workers’ interests. …  They are not. They just want to get out of paying a minimum wage.”

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In addition to eliminating the minimum wage for drivers, which worked out to about $26 an hour before expenses, Nelson’s proposal would:

• Cut drivers’ base per-mile payment from 64 to 35 cents a mile, less than half the federal rate for tax deductions;

• Eliminate a $5 minimum payment for each delivery offer;

• Eliminate penalties (currently double pay plus $5,755) imposed on companies that fail to pay drivers;

• Deny workers the right to file a civil suit against delivery companies that withhold their wages or violate other rights guaranteed by the law;

• Remove transparency requirements that help workers decide whether to accept a delivery offer, including whether the delivery requires climbing stairs, what’s in the delivery, and the amount of any tips provided in advance;

• Reduce the amount of time workers have to decide whether to accept an order or lose it from two minutes to 45 seconds;

• Extend the amount of time companies have to inform workers how much they made on a delivery from 24 hours to 48;

• Prohibit the city’s Office of Labor Standards—the only city agency that enforces local labor laws—from asking delivery companies for “the production of any record,” including information that would help workers make informed decisions about which apps to work for, unless it’s part of an enforcement action against a company;

• Bar OLS from adopting rules that “impose additional requirements” of any kind on delivery companies, in perpetuity;

• Require OLS to give the app companies 30 days (with an option for extensions) to correct most “non-willful” violations before taking any enforcement action;

• Remove a section prohibiting “adverse actions” by delivery companies that was intended to stop the companies from deactivating, threatening, penalizing, reducing or garnishing pay, or discriminating against workers because they won’t take certain jobs or aren’t available when the companies want them to be on the clock;

• Allow delivery companies to charge workers a $5 fee (adjusted by the rate of inflation every year) every time they take out their earnings before the end of the company’s “pay period”—an ironic twist, given that the rest of the law insists drivers aren’t employees.

 

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Removed All New Anti-Displacement Proposals from Draft “Anti-Displacement Framework”

By Erica C. Barnett

As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.

OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.

The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”

For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”

When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”

But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.

The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”

In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.

The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.

For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.

In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980),  the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)

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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.

The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.

A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”

“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.

As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.

These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)

A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”

Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.

Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.

Uncategorized

“He Grabbed Her By Her Hair and Hit Her”: Witnesses Describe Alleged Assault by Ex-KOMO Reporter Jonathan Choe
Screenshot of police report describing the alleged assault

By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this month, when a group of migrants from Venezuela and Angola briefly set up tents outside Garfield Community Center in the Central District, Discovery Institute staffer Jonathan Choe showed up and attempted to enter the area but was stopped by people who blocked his path with their bodies. (Choe started working for the Discovery Institute, which previously employed Chris Rufo, after KOMO News fired him for posting a video promoting a Proud Boys rally in Olympia.) In a choppy video he posted on X, Choe calls someone holding their hands in the air a “little soy boy” and repeatedly threatens to call the police if anyone touches him.

But Choe’s heavily edited video didn’t show what happened next: After leaving the parking lot, three witnesses say, Choe assaulted one of the people who had prevented him from getting closer to the migrants, punching her in the face repeatedly and sending her to the ground. One witness, a city of Seattle Parks Department employee who ran out of the community center when he heard shouting, told police he saw Choe punching the woman “two or three times.”

PubliCola spoke with the woman Choe allegedly assaulted, who asked to be referred to by her middle name, Celeste, along with three witnesses to the confrontation. (One, the Parks Department employee, said he had nothing to add to the statement he gave police).

Celeste said she was volunteering as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking migrants when Choe showed up and took out what police later described as a “retractable baton,” which she worried he planned to use against an Angolan migrant. “The worst-case scenario that was going through my head was that the migrant was going to defend himself, and because the migrant probably doesn’t have the same rights as I do as a citizen, I decided to physically get between Jonathan Choe and him,” Celeste said. “I was trying to say shit to him to distract him.”

Another witness named Riley, who was dropping off donations for the migrants, said she saw Celeste “putting her body in between [Choe] and the [community center] and using her words. He would rush her and retreat, trying to get her to touch him, and eventually, he ran out of steam.”

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At that point, according to Riley and Celeste, Choe went across the street to call 911 (telling the operator that people weren’t allowing him to “get by” and enter the park, according to the police report), then returned and kept trying to enter the area where the migrants were. After exchanging more words with Celeste, she said, he told her, “‘I’m going to turn my phone off so there’s no evidence,’ and punched me,” striking the left side of her face. “I kind of stumbled to the ground, and he grabbed my hair and ripped a chunk of my hair out.”

Riley, who had been watching from across the street, said “it looked like they stopped to have a conversation—another verbal spat—and then he grabbed her by the hair and hit her in the face two or three times.” When she ran over to intervene, according to Riley and another witness, Choe grabbed her phon and ran off with it. (Choe told police he returned Riley’s phone “immediately” after taking it from her; Riley says she chased him and got it back.) In the confusion, Choe dropped the baton, which Celeste said she hurled as far away as she could.

A witness who was waiting at the bus stop across the street told PubliCola she watched as Choe “threw [Celeste] down and started punching and kicking her” before taking Riley’s phone and running off “toward the dog park” near 23rd and Cherry.

The Seattle parks department employee told police he was inside the community center but ran out when he “heard a commotion,” then “observed Choe punching [Celeste] on her face 2-3 times.”

In his own account, summarized in the police report, Choe claimed Celeste was “bumping him and assaulting him” and that he “pushed her” in an effort to “defend himself.” Choe’s X feed is filled with videos in which he shows up at protests and other events and antagonizes left-wing activists and others, moving extremely close to them and then claiming they have “touched” or “assaulted” him. According to the report, Choe also told police he “believ[ed] that he would be assaulted by [Riley’s] phone.”

According to the police report,  Choe told the officer “he was dragging [Celeste] and threw her to the side. Later, I asked Choe to clarify what he meant by dragging and he explained that his hand became tangled on [her] which interfered with him letting go and leaving.” None of the eyewitnesses described Choe being “tangled on” Celeste so that he had to drag her; instead, they all independently described him punching her in the face.

The SPD officer who showed up in response to Choe’s 911 call wrote that he personally found Choe’s claims about self-defense “plausible” and that he couldn’t find probable cause to file charges against him for assault or theft. He also said that based on Choe’s “heavily edited” video, Celeste appeared to be “berating” him.

According to Riley and Celeste, Choe seemed fixated on their gender identities—asking Celeste if she was “one of those trans people” and misgendering Riley.

PubliCola sent Choe a list of questions. He responded (full exchange here) by saying he was “still sifting through the mountain of evidence and trail of destruction you left behind after your alcohol fueled benders” adding that he was “[g]onna make a huge announcement real soon. I just signed up to report for a national cable channel.” He did not answer our questions.