Nielsen to plead guilty

Jeffrey Ray Nielsen—the well-connected Orange County conservative activist who claimed the so-called liberal media, specifically OC Weekly, was out to get him by publishing a series of exposés on his pedophile activities—is expected to finally admit tomorrow that he used two boys for sex since 1994, according to law-enforcement sources.

A legal representative for Nielsen, who has extensive personal ties to Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Orange County Republican Party boss Scott Baugh, told prosecutors early last week that Nielsen would plead guilty to two felony counts: committing lewd acts on a child under 15 years old and committing lewd acts on a child under 14 years old.

In exchange, Nielsen, 37, is expected to receive a three-year prison sentence, which is mild considering he faced more than 30 years if convicted of all the sex-crime counts in two scheduled upcoming trials. He will also have to register as a sex offender for life.

Nielsen’s high-priced legal defense team of Paul S. Meyer and John Barnett had hoped to win Nielsen merely probation. A formal sentencing hearing isn’t expected until next year in Superior Court Judge David Thompson’s court; Nielsen is expected to be in court Wednesday to accept or reject the deal.

“Mr. Nielsen is pleading guilty and accepting responsibility for his actions,” said Susan Kang Schroeder, spokeswoman for District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. “We think this is vindication for the two victims. We’re very sorry for what they’ve been through.”

The son of former Fountain Valley Republican Mayor Ben Nielsen, Jeff Nielsen was brought to Washington, D.C., in 1994 by Rohrabacher as his aide. During this period, Nielsen befriended a seventh-grade Virginia boy he met as a church youth counselor. For three years, Nielsen engaged in sexual conduct with the boy (including in public), tried to convince the boy he was homosexual, and wrote a series of love letters to the boy after he moved back to California to enter USC law school, according to court records. Rohrabacher, who nowadays claims amnesia about his ties to Nielsen, wrote a glowing personal letter of recommendation for Nielsen’s admittance into the school.

Nielsen later became close to then-Orange County Republican Assemblyman Scott Baugh. He worked for Baugh. He socialized with Baugh. He derided liberals with Baugh. When Baugh left Sacramento and negotiated a job with the powerhouse law firm of Manatt Phelps & Phillips in 2001, he convinced the firm to hire Nielsen with him.

It was during this period that Nielsen found a Westminster high-school freshman in an online gay chat room. Prosecutors say Nielsen repeatedly picked the boy up from school for sex. Once, Nielsen visited the boy’s home when his mother was at work and sexually molested him on her bed, according to police records. The boy shared his experiences with a classmate, who promptly told school counselors.

When police arrested Nielsen, a prominent GOP activist at the time, TheOrange County Register failed to tell its readers. In fact, the paper—some of whose staffers enjoy cozy relationships with local GOP leaders, including Rohrabacher and Baugh—waited more than three years to mention Nielsen’s arrest. Worse, while Nielsen awaited trial for molesting the Westminster boy, the Register’s Richard Chang helped to bolster the accused pedophile’s reputation in the community. In an article, Chang didn’t mention the charges, but rather praised Nielsen for volunteering to help homeless puppies from the Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Earlier this year, the DA’s office blundered its way through the first Nielsen trial in the Westminster case. (One big error: They failed to call the Virginia boy as a witness.) Meyer, Nielsen’s defense lawyer, savaged the clearly embarrassed Westminster boy on the witness stand; Nielsen claimed he was only interested in mentoring a troubled youth. Never mind that Nielsen possessed more than a thousand man-boy and boy-boy sex images in his Ladera Ranch home (near a grade school, no less), a confused Newport Beach jury deadlocked. Nielsen fans in local Republican circles wrote triumphant letters to the Weekly.

Afterward, Rackauckas reassigned the case to a new prosecutor, Colleen Crommett, who promptly filed charges based on OC Weekly’s 2006 exposés detailing Nielsen’s relationship with the Virginia seventh-grader. Meyer, who has specialized in representing pedophiles, angrily claimed the public couldn’t trust this “tabloid” paper’s reporting. The two cases were both scheduled to go to trial when Nielsen’s representatives finally requested a plea bargain a week ago.

Editor's Note: Scott Moxley has been central to the investigation and exposition of Nielsen's crimes. LaderaPortal is grateful for his diligence to this story and for providing us with this and previous stories.

Nielsen confesses to molesting a 14 year-old Virginia boy.

Nielsen confesses to molesting the 16 year-old Westminster boy