Councilmember calls allegations of misconduct 'embellished and exaggerated claims'

Six months after police intervened in an incident between 2nd District Long Beach Councilmember Jeannine Pearce and her former chief of staff, an effort to recall her became official this week.
At Tuesday’s Long Beach City Council meeting, Ian Patton, a member of the Committee Supporting the Recall of Councilmember Jeannine Pearce, served a notice of intention to circulate a recall petition after Jonathan Crouch, founder of that committee, outlined the reasons his group is seeking her recall during a public-comment period.
However, it was not clear when the notice was actually served, since Crouch said the committee would do so the next day, as it appeared Pearce had left the meeting for the night shortly before he began speaking.
In an email to the Signal Tribune Thursday morning, Patton explained that he himself served the papers to the city clerk during the meeting.
“What happened is that [Pearce] saw that Jonathan was about to speak on behalf of our group— already holding ‘Recall Pearce’ signs— and she bolted out of the chamber,” Patton wrote. “Jonathan, assuming she had left for the evening, read the alternate ending of his statement announcing that we would serve her by mail in light of her absence. But then she returned to the chamber as soon as he was done speaking. So, I took the opportunity to go ahead and serve her personally by handing the notice of intention to the city clerk, who handed it to her.”
Patton said the city clerk has since sent a memo to the mayor and city council confirming that Pearce was indeed officially served by personal delivery that night.
“So, at that point, it was no longer necessary to serve her by mail,” Patton said. “Officially, she was personally served by me at approximately 9pm Tuesday night.”
Pearce responded by email Thursday morning to the Signal Tribune’s request for a statement on the matter, and she indicated she has no intention of resigning based on what she sees as inflated allegations.
“I am focused on my responsibilities as a councilmember and serving as the responsive and effective advocate that the residents of Long Beach’s 2nd District deserve at City Hall,” Pearce wrote. “I went through a difficult time in my personal life earlier this year, and some of my political rivals have decided to use that as the basis of a recall campaign. I’m confident that voters in my district will reject the embellished and exaggerated claims that are made in this recall petition.”
Those claims were outlined Tuesday night, when Crouch presented the reasons his committee is seeking Pearce’s removal from office.
“I came before this body a few months ago regarding Councilmember Jeannine Pearce and the events that took place before, on and after June 3 of this year,” Crouch said. “Since then, we have learned the following about Councilmember Pearce: she drove while intoxicated, endangering motorists and pedestrians from Orange County all the way to downtown Long Beach; she assaulted her former chief of staff, Devon Cotter, continuing a pattern of domestic violence, which he later outlined to the police; she used her position as a city councilmember to obtain special treatment from the Long Beach Police Department in order to escape justice; she misled the police investigation, denying that she caused injury to Cotter’s head by stating, ‘I swear on my kid, on my dead mother, I didn’t do it.’ Later, she admitted to doing just that.”
Crouch went on to claim that Pearce had lied about being a domestic-violence victim and back-pedaled her allegations that Cotter had been physically abusive to her. She hired Cotter last year while engaging in a personal relationship with him, continuing it in “clear violation of the City’s sexual-harassment policies,” according to Crouch.
“She subsequently, after their affair, became problematic, facilitated a fraud against the Long Beach taxpayers by allowing Cotter to go on paid leave between December and February, while doing private campaign consulting work,” Crouch continued. “And she essentially turned her council office into an extension of Cotter’s private consulting firm— Bullhorn Consulting— in order to benefit him financially, to keep him quiet about the relationship, which he’s on record threatening to expose.”
During his public comments, which the City limits to three minutes per speaker, Crouch said that he didn’t have sufficient time to relate all the details of the “corruption” associated with Pearce, Cotter, Cotter’s successor as chief of staff and Bullhorn Consulting, but that they can be found at RecallPearce.org.
He added that the district attorney’s corruption investigation remains ongoing.
“Due to the severity of Councilmember Pearce’s conduct, it had been my hope, and the hope of many others, that she would do what was best for the district and resign,” Crouch said. “It is obvious at this point that she will not— that putting her constituents before herself has never been under consideration. Accordingly, we the residents of the 2nd District are left with no other recourse but to seek Councilmember Pearce’s recall and removal from office.”
On Wednesday, the Committee Supporting the Recall of Councilmember Jeannine Pearce issued a press release stating it had “personally served on Councilmember Jeannine Pearce a notice of intention to circulate recall petition” to begin the process of her recall and removal from office.
As previously reported in the Signal Tribune, in the early-morning hours of June 3, California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers and eventually the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) discovered both Pearce and Cotter in a vehicle parked on a median of the 710 Freeway, near the Golden Shore exit. When CHP officers approached the car, they found Pearce and Cotter in the middle of what Pearce’s former attorney described as a “heated” argument.
LBPD officers performed a field-sobriety test on Pearce, who had been driving.
According to police, she passed the test and officers separated the two. Officers drove Cotter home, while Pearce was allowed to ask a friend to take her home, according to a statement from the department. However, later that morning, Pearce called police to intervene again. This time, Cotter had confronted the councilmember outside her home.
Officers discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for Cotter related to a previous charge for a 2014 DUI, and they also arrested him on a charge of public intoxication. Cotter’s attorney said that his client spent only a few hours in jail that day and thereafter enrolled in the necessary alcohol classes related to his DUI case. The attorney also claimed that Cotter sustained injuries that day.