The Orange County District Attorney’s Office was removed Thursday from handling high-profile criminal charges against a Newport Beach surgeon and his girlfriend accused of drugging and raping several women, after a judge took the rare step of determining that local prosecutors must be disqualified from proceeding with a case that has drawn international attention.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Gregory Jones noted that District Attorney Todd Spitzer has accused his predecessor of “manufacturing” the criminal case against Dr. Grant Robicheaux and Cerissa Riley, that Spitzer referred to it as a “travesty,” and that the DA has apologized to the couple.
“I have serious questions about the district attorney’s office ability to proceed on this case,” the judge said. “I think they are hopelessly conflicted.”
Spitzer had tried to drop the case, which was brought by former DA Tony Rackauckas. There was insufficient evidence for prosecution, Spitzer said.
The judge on Thursday ordered that the case be turned over to the California Attorney General’s Office, and directed local prosecutors to turn over to state prosecutors the evidence they have collected.
Deputy District Attorney Rick Zimmer told the judge that the DA’s office remains “steadfast in its belief the evidence is insufficient to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.” As a result, the prosecutor said, the office has an “irreconcilable conflict” that means they cannot ethically take the case to trial.
Attorney Philip Cohen, who is representing Robicheaux, repeatedly argued against the removal of local prosecutors.
“The district attorney’s office has said there is not probable cause to proceed on this case, period,” Cohen told the judge.
Matt Murphy, a former Orange County homicide prosecutor who is now representing some of the alleged victims in the Robicheaux and Riley case, has accused both the DA’s office and defense attorneys of harassing, lying to and publicly shaming the women.
“This is a good day for victims’ rights,” Murphy said after the hearing. “The women on this case have been treated so badly we had to ask the court to remove the district attorney. Today the court agreed. My clients are profoundly grateful for the court’s ruling.”
In a statement released after the hearing, Spitzer said he was “confident that the state attorney general’s office will resolve this case in a fair and just manner.”
“A lack of admissible evidence does not mean that a crime was not committed; it means we lack the evidence to meet our legal burden in a court of law,” Spitzer said. “Without sufficient evidence to prove the filed charges beyond a reasonable doubt, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office is ethically prohibited from moving forward with this prosecution.”
Then-DA Rackauckas during widely covered press conferences in September 2018 accused the “clean-cut and good looking” couple of meeting women at restaurants and bars in Newport Beach, drugging them and then luring them back to Robicheaux’s apartment to sexually assault them. Rackauckas also made what turned out to be a false claim that investigators had recovered from the couple hundreds, potentially more than a thousand, videos of intoxicated women, some of which depicted sexual acts.
Months after taking over the office, current-DA Spitzer wrote to the state attorney general’s office that the case had been “rife with prosecutorial misconduct” while under the stewardship of Rackauckas. Spitzer later claimed that Rackauckas mishandled the case in order to bolster a failed bid for re-election, an allegation that Rackauckas has denied.
Despite the politically-charged allegations, the state attorney general’s office in late 2019 declined to take over the case, telling Spitzer that his office was “fully capable” of handling it.
In a surprise announcement earlier this year, prosecutors reversed course, moving to drop the criminal charges and citing a lack of evidence and a belief that the couple were not sexual predators, but instead swingers whose sexual encounters, and drug use, were consensual.
The abrupt move to dismiss the case angered some of the victims, who said they had not been given advanced warning. Attorneys for some of the women accused the Orange County District Attorney’s Office of colluding with the attorneys representing Robicheaux and Riley, noting that the alleged victims lived across the country and had never spoken to each other, yet leveled similar allegations of sexual assault against the couple.
The DA’s office later blamed much of the case’s problems on one of their own investigators, who they alleged had left key information out of her reports and led a “whisper campaign” to exaggerate evidence against the couple.
Judge Jones was unconvinced, and earlier this year refused the request to dismiss the criminal charges, at the same time expressing concern over how the case had become “infected” by politics.
“The public has heard from the politicians,” Jones wrote in an opinion released earlier this year. “The public has never heard from the alleged victims. Any objective analysis of this case leads to the conclusion that these charges should be put before a jury. A back-room dismissal by prosecutors without the alleged victims ever having the opportunity to be heard is contrary to the core values of our legal process and the interests of the public.”
Attorneys representing Robicheaux and Riley unsuccessfully sought to remove the judge from the case, and more recently argued he had no legal authority to remove local prosecutors. They did not respond to a request for comment regarding the ruling on Thursday.
No one from the state attorney general’s office was at Thursday’s hearing. Asked for comment, officials with the office confirmed they will be reviewing the matter, but declined to comment further.
It is rare for a prosecutor’s office to be removed from a criminal case.
That last time such a drastic step occurred in a major Orange County case was under Rackauckas’ leadership in 2015, when the OCDA’s office was removed from the case against confessed mass murderer Scott Dekraai after a judge found that the defendant’s right to a fair trial had been violated by false testimony and the withholding of evidence.
