The town of Los Gatos will fund legal defense for Vice Mayor Rob Moore and council member Maria Ristow after weeks of closed session meetings discussing the matter.
Lynley Kerr Hogan, a local activist known for her involvement with a far-right group that disrupted local meetings for months in 2021, sued Moore, Ristow and Los Gatos resident Lee Fagot on Nov. 14, alleging that they conspired to defame her and keep her from attending the regular meetings of the local group Democracy Tent. The town in December authorized legal defense for Moore and Ristow, but Hogan dropped that lawsuit in January of this year and filed a nearly identical case that eliminated any mention that Moore and Ristow were members of the Los Gatos Town Council, which some have said was a “clear and uncontestable” effort to get the town to drop its legal support for the two council members.
At a closed session town council meeting on Feb. 21, Mayor Matthew Hudes and council members Mary Badame and Rob Rennie voted unanimously to authorize the town to defend Moore and Ristow in the second lawsuit that Hogan filed.
According to meeting minutes from the closed session meeting, the council “reserves the right not to indemnify the councilmembers,” meaning that the town would not compensate Hogan if Moore and Ristow were found liable, leaving that up to the defendants themselves. If the court finds that Moore and Ristow were not “acting within the course and scope of their employment,” the town would also stop providing their legal defense.
“The decision to expend town resources is a serious matter, as defending a lawsuit can be time-consuming and expensive,” town attorney Gabrielle Whelan said at the meeting, according to the minutes.
Lawyers representing Moore and Ristow, along with Fagot himself, denied the allegations that Hogan made in her original suit by early January, and called for the case to be dismissed.
Dozens of community members wrote to the council and spoke during public comment at town council meetings calling for the town to maintain its legal defense for the two council members. They argued that not doing so would set a “dangerous precedent” that would discourage people from running for local office in the future.
“Los Gatos already saw no non-incumbents file to run in the last election,” Cupertino City Council member J.R. Fruen wrote to the council. “For the sake of a reasonably functioning local democracy, please support the defense of your colleagues and prevent the legal equivalent of a heckler’s veto on public discourse.”
Hogan spoke on the matter in person during public comment at a council meeting on Feb. 11, saying that the town shouldn’t fund Moore and Ristow’s legal defense because she had no intention of suing the town of Los Gatos itself.
“It was my mistake, apparently, to mention the public official part,” Hogan said. “But unless Democracy Tent is an official public meeting, which it is not, there’s no reason to think that they were acting in their official capacity.”
