A California judge has dismissed a lawsuit from a man accused of sexting a minor despite no evidence that a crime took place.
Judge Margaret Morrow, a U.S. district court judge, dismissed for the second time a lawsuit filed by Scott Hounsell, a former executive director of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. This was Hounsell’s amended complaint filed earlier this year.
But in a move beneficial to Hounsell, Morrow did not dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, allowing the former Republican staffer to amend his complaint once again, in part thanks to reporting on the case by the Washington Examiner.
Hounsell’s trouble began in 2012, when he participated in a bus caravan from Sacramento to Santa Clarita while he was still working for California State Assemblyman Cameron Smyth. Along for the trip were students from a local charter school who were learning about politics. One of those students was “Jane Doe” (her name was changed since she has not been charged with a crime), who would later accuse Hounsell of inappropriate behavior.
Doe claimed she sat next to Hounsell for about two hours during the return bus trip. One of her teachers disputed this claim, saying Doe had been kept away from Hounsell because she had remarked earlier she thought he was “cute.” Hounsell says he spent the return trip sitting next to friends and watching a movie.
Facebook messages between Doe and, allegedly, Hounsell sent nearly a year after the bus trip were discovered on Doe’s computer at school when she left the social media website open. Screenshots of the messages were taken by other students (though they appear to be screenshots of a phone, not of a computer) and sent to school administrators.
When school officials questioned Doe about the messages, she said that Hounsell had tickled her ribs on the bus trip but that the messages didn’t start until sometime after the trip. When she was questioned by the police weeks later, she claimed that Hounsell had tickled her leg while talking to another person and that sexually explicit Facebook messages began while they were both on the bus.
Doe insisted to police that she never planned to follow through with anything said in the messages and that she and Hounsell had never made plans to do so. Doe gave police access to her Facebook account to search for the messages. They found none.
Despite this, and the district attorney declining to file charges, the Los Angeles City Attorney picked up the case almost immediately and charged Hounsell with two counts of trying to seduce a minor. Before Hounsell was even aware of the charges, he says he and his former employer were inundated with media calls. Hounsell turned himself in downtown as media vans swarmed his home. He spent seven hours in jail.
A few weeks after his arrest, two charges were added against him, yet no evidence was presented to justify the claims. The new charges alleged that Hounsell had texted an adult he believed was a minor. The updated complaint demanded that he turn over evidence to bolster the city’s claim.
Data from Facebook also could not prove the LACA’s case. IP address data was inconclusive, and an exhaustive search of Hounsell’s Facebook page found only one instance of contact between him and Doe — a photo of a pumpkin Hounsell had carved for his son that Doe commented on: “ahahah.”
In February 2014, the deputy city attorney, Tracy Webb, said she needed more time to review the Facebook messages. Two weeks later, the LACA offered Hounsell a deal to drop the charges, which he called “essentially extortion.” Hounsell agreed as a way to get the charges dropped and avoid a $50,000-plus trial.
The deal called for Hounsell to donate $2,000 to a charity chosen by the city attorney and to attend therapy. Hounsell attended therapy, though it was not, as the LACA told the Examiner, “court-ordered diversion counseling.” Instead, and Hounsell’s therapist backs this up, he attended therapy for the depression and stress he was under as a result of the ongoing court case. The therapist was not contacted by the court and was sought by Hounsell himself. The therapist also acknowledged that he does not provide “diversion therapy” at his practice or to Hounsell.
Hounsell says he completed the agreement, but the deal was suddenly revoked on the day the charges were to be dropped. Two months later, the charges were dropped due to there being “no victim” because Doe refused to testify and “no forensics,” due to the absence of Facebook messages. The dismissal of charges also states that Hounsell had fulfilled the terms of the agreement.
The Los Angeles City Attorney had argued that it had absolute immunity in deciding to file criminal charges against Hounsell even though police had failed to find evidence of a crime. A spokesman for the LACA told the Examiner in late April that the reason the deal Hounsell made with the LACA was revoked at the last minute was that Hounsell needed to “complete more of the court-ordered diversion counseling.”
It was that statement that allowed Judge Morrow to decline dismissing the case without leave to amend.
“Hounsell is correct that ‘[c]omments to the media have no tie to the judicial process just because they are made by a prosecutor,’ and that ‘in these respects a prosecutor is in no different position than other executive officials who deal with the press, and … qualified immunity is the norm for them,'” Morrow wrote in a filing provided to the Examiner. “The court thus concludes that Hounsell has sufficiently alleged that LACA made statements to the media for which he is not entitled to absolute immunity.”
For that, Morrow is allowing Hounsell once again to amend his complaint because it was not clear “that the complaint could not be saved by further amendment.” Morrow did, however, note that if his newly-amended complaint, which he has 20 days to file, fails to persuade her, she will dismiss it with prejudice, meaning that he will be unable to continue with his lawsuit in federal court.
Hounsell is taking this as a positive step. He told the Examiner that he thought Morrow “has been extraordinarily fair up until this point and she seems to understand that something questionable happened here.” He believes he can successfully amend his complaint this time: “Since the majority of my damages come from the sheer publicity of this issue, that shows that the City Attorney’s office intended their defamation.”
The difficulty for Hounsell will be in trying to prove that he was treated differently because he is a Republican. Morrow dismissed the idea that political parties count as protected classes, so Hounsell will have to prove that the treatment he received was harsher than what others have received.
Hounsell also said he is continuing to fight in state court to prove that the LACA has continued making false statements about him (like the comments made to the Examiner).
“To this day I still remain unemployed and hope to be able to move on soon,” Hounsell said. “I know that in time, I will be able to find gainful employment, but for now I have to take it one day at a time, one foot in front of the other.”
When the Examiner first profiled Hounsell’s case, he had a job in Texas lined up and was supposed to move in June of this year. After a background check discovered the dismissed charges, that job fell through.
