LOS GATOS — One by one, more than a dozen teens laid out in incisive detail how one woman — extraordinarily determined to make her son socially accepted and sexually prolific — hosted booze-soaked parties where she urged them to drink themselves into reckless oblivion.
The bashes, centered on Shannon O’Connor’s posh Los Gatos home but extending to hotel rooms and lodges spanning Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, were described as virtual grottos in which she egged on boys to be sexually aggressive and pressured girls into contorting both their bodies and minds to please them.
Girls, some as young as 14, testified how, in the fog of inebriation and under O’Connor’s directive, they were sexually exploited by the boys. O’Connor also was described as trying to pave the way for this before the parties ever began, engaging in abnormally intimate Snapchat and text-message exchanges during their middle-school years, during which she encouraged them to make themselves sexually attractive.
“She thought that sex, even at our age, was very important in a relationship, and she made that very clear,” testified a girl known as Jane Doe 7, who dated O’Connor’s son.
The accounts were given to a grand jury last year that fueled a criminal indictment of Shannon O’Connor, who is accused of brazenly providing alcohol to her teen son and Los Gatos High School classmates at parties during which she also goaded them into having sex and elsewhere engaging in reckless behavior.
On Friday, transcripts from those October 2023 grand jury proceedings were released. They contain testimony from nearly three dozen witnesses, including investigators, parents, and the teens who participated in the parties. The young people broadly described an aggressive manipulation effort by O’Connor as she allegedly tried to hide the illicit gatherings from her husband and the greater Los Gatos community.
“She would often bring up the idea of where, if we ever told on her, what’s happening, that she would go to jail and it would be … really bad — it would be bad for everyone, not just her but everyone else and, like, there’s no — there’s no option of us to not lie,” testified a teen known as John Doe 1, who was deeply involved in the parties and was close friends with O’Connor’s son. “She really hardily persuaded us to lie numerous times.”
That prompted Deputy District Attorney Rebekah Wise to ask, “Did she ever tell you to lie to the police, for example?” to which John Doe 1 replied, “Yes.”
The indictment — containing 20 felony counts mostly covering child endangerment and aiding and abetting sexual assault, and 43 misdemeanor counts alleging she furnished alcohol to minors — was handed down in November, two years after she was initially charged by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.
Multiple accounts from the teens portrayed O’Connor as having made her home a drinking haven for her son and his friends when they were still in middle school, and ramping it up the summer heading into his freshman year.
By and large, the friend group of more than a dozen young teens, split mostly evenly among boys and girls, gave corroborating accounts of O’Connor encouraging them to imbibe and engage sexually with each other, followed by her probing them about their experiences for — as Wise put it — her own sexual gratification.
In some instances, such as a New Year’s Eve party at her home in 2020, O’Connor was described by John Doe 1, as being present when he sexually penetrated an inebriated Jane Doe 3 in a hot tub.
“She was just, like, right outside the hot tub,” John Doe 1 testified. “Like, standing right next to all of us.”
Jane Doe 3 would later testify that she was nearly drowning in the tub at the time, struggling to keep her head above water. She firmly blamed O’Connor for that ordeal, for “letting us get to that level of drunkenness.”
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Regarding an infamous incident in December 2020 — contained in a preceding criminal complaint — in which John Doe 1’s brother suffered a concussion after falling off the back of O’Connor’s SUV during a joyride in the high school parking lot, several of the teens who were present recalled O’Connor passing herself off as the injured teen’s mother when confronted by police.
O’Connor has been held in a Santa Clara County jail without bail since her October 2021 arrest and accompanying revelations that sent shockwaves through the affluent Los Gatos community where she and her family resided.
Prosecutors turned to a criminal grand jury after bemoaning repeated delays leading up to a preliminary examination in which a judge would have been tasked with determining whether the charges would hold up for trial. O’Connor’s defense attorney at the time balked at the move, noting that grand jury hearings only hear prosecution evidence without cross-examination.
An indictment also bypasses the need for a preliminary examination, putting the case directly on track for trial. But the trajectory for a trial still seems far off, with O’Connor’s current attorney saying earlier this year that he did not expect a trial start in 2024, citing more than 40,000 pages of documents to review, including social-media communications and testimony from the month-long grand jury hearing.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
