Transubstantiation
While Weiss is herself a lawyer, her career path—accomplished and impactful in its own right—has eschewed the high-dollar corporate track in favor of service work. Her personal financial disclosure, submitted in August, lists only $2,500 in income over the prior 18 months, and tax statements show that she does not take a salary from her nonprofit.
Instead, her personal loans actually appear to come from her husband, Jason Weiss, longtime partner at a global law firm. All of Joanna Weiss’ bank accounts are jointly held with her husband. And Jason Weiss’ recent, steady income has included fees collected from the Catholic Church for leading its legal defense in a number of child sex abuse cases.
That hasn’t stopped Joanna Weiss from burnishing her legal ethics during the campaign, including in attacks against her political rival. Nor has she addressed her husband’s longtime client in the context of abortion rights.
Last summer, a HuffPost report revealed that Weiss’ primary opponent, California state senator Dave Min, had served as faculty adviser to a campus branch of the ultra-conservative, anti-abortion Federalist Society from 2014-2016. In a statement for the article, Weiss undercut Min’s ethics, citing the life lessons she’d taken from her legal practice.
“Especially my pro bono legal work with domestic violence survivors and students with special needs,” she said.
But her husband’s professional experience and the income that now appears to be powering Weiss’ campaign, has its own abortion angle—the Catholic Church is famously a major obstacle to abortion rights.
Tithings of comfort and joy
On paper, Jason Weiss’ work appears honorable enough. He works as a partner in Los Angeles-based Sheppard Mullin LLP’s labor and employment division, a title he’s held for more than a decade, where some of his heaviest casework has been in defense of child molestation lawsuits.
To be clear, it is of course unfair to paint an attorney or firm with a brush colored by their client’s actions. Neither Jason Weiss nor Sheppard Mullin is in any way associated with the allegations beyond providing their clients with constitutionally enshrined legal counsel. Additionally, holding Joanna Weiss accountable for who her husband has represented is even a further step removed from these tragedies.
A Weiss campaign spokesperson repeatedly refused to say where her loans came from. Over the course of conversations with multiple representatives and surrogates, no one denied that the bulk of that $231,600 came, directly or indirectly, from her husband’s work for the church.
Clerical error
As far as Jason Weiss’ record goes, his results on these sex abuse lawsuits are mixed. The diocese settled two of the cases on undisclosed terms. One civil suit from 2020 is slated for a Los Angeles jury trial, though the court docket indicates Sheppard Mullin at some point discontinued representation. The fourth case ended in a partial victory, but the plaintiff dropped the matter to refile under California’s newly passed Child Victims Act.
And he appears to have thrown himself into the work.
The attorney for one survivor—veteran trial lawyer with victims advocacy firm Anderson Associates, Michael Reck—told The Daily Beast that Jason Weiss’ legal tactics on behalf of the diocese were “aggressive” and “hurtful to survivors.” Reck was opposing counsel in Weiss’ one qualified win—a widely reported 2018 lawsuit accusing all California dioceses of covering for credibly accused priests. In defense, Weiss argued that the Diocese of Orange was protected by freedom of religion, and he was partially successful.
Weiss defended the diocese in at least three other recent abuse cases. The church settled two of them on confidential terms. The third, which alleges that a priest performed graphic “acts of childhood sexual assault” against a child for seven years, is scheduled for trial next month. That docket, however, no longer lists Weiss as an attorney.
Blinded by the light
After this article was first published, The Daily Beast was contacted by David Clohessy, former national director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and current volunteer director of the Missouri chapter. In an interview, Clohessy excoriated the “well-heeled, well established” attorneys who after decades of scandal still choose to defend the Catholic Church in molestation cases.
“I don’t know how they sleep at night. I really don’t,” Clohessy said.
A veteran anti-abuse activist, Clohessy first came forward in 1991 about his own experiences at the hands of a priest who had also molested three of his siblings. One of them, his brother, later joined the church and went on to molest children himself, Clohessy said. When those accusations came to light, his brother was suspended under what Clohessy described as a spurious excuse of alcoholism. He now runs a funeral home.
Clohessy feels it is fair to distinguish attorneys who defend the church out of financial necessity or lifelong religious devotion from the choices of established lawyers and firms, like Sheppard Mullin.
“I can understand how defense lawyers can defend accused priests because the lawyers are devout, deceived Catholics. A lawyer who has known the priest, who the priest has helped—holding his dying mother’s hand—I can imagine how that lawyer, blinded by that experience, would truly believe in my brother’s innocence. I don’t have sympathy, but I can understand how they could be persuaded by these often charming priests,” he said.
“I don’t feel the same anger towards them that I feel towards these well-heeled, well established lawyers, who take these cases when they’re not blinded by a lifelong loyalty to the Catholic Church and its doctrine,” Clohessy continued. He noted that attorneys like Jason Weiss are not public defenders, and the lawyers are “almost universally not fresh out of law school, saddled with debt, and taking any clients that they can just to keep the lights on.”
“These are huge firms. They don’t have to do this,” he said.
Genuflection
Weiss and her campaign manager provided statements deflecting from the issue of her funds, instead attacking the character of this report as “desperate,” “disgusting,” “shameful,” “shameless,” and “misogynistic.”
“As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I am heartbroken to see this be weaponized to further [my opponent’s] political ambition,” Weiss said in her statement.
At no point did those statements deny the heart of this story—funding her campaign with money that the Catholic Church used to deny restitution to sexual abuse survivors.
This is an excerpt from an in-depth report. The full version, including comment from the diocese and Weiss allies, can be read here.
