Meet the content creator who helped bring down Swalwell

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, April 14. You can expect aggressively nice weather (mid 70s). 

In today’s newsletter, an LAUSD strike averted, a forever home for L.A.’s beloved Bob Baker Marionette Theater and an inside look at how Coachella’s influencer class operates. But first, how Mrs. Frazzled helped reshape the governor’s race.

As Congressman Eric Swalwell’s political career and gubernatorial ambitions were cratering Friday under the weight of news stories detailing rape and sexual assault allegations against him, a former Los Angeles-area kindergarten teacher spoke emotionally on camera to her legions of social media followers about her unexpected turn as a central player in his demise. 

Arielle Fodor — a social media influencer who rose to TikTok fame doing satirical bits as “Mrs. Frazzled,” explaining issues to Donald Trump in a singsong teacher voice — detailed how for months, she had been a conduit for stories from young women who alleged that Swalwell had hit on them, propositioned them or engaged in inappropriate relationships with them, often as they were just beginning their careers in politics. 

“Since the end of March, I have just been essentially banging pots and pans trying to get people to listen. I know I appear crazy,” Fodor said in her video. 

Fodor was not the only one hearing whispers about Swalwell. For months, rival campaigns and a few legacy media outlets had been digging into allegations about Swalwell’s conduct (a frequent topic of gossip on the D.C. cocktail circuit). But it was a hard story to break. The women making claims about Swalwell were reticent, fearful that the congressman and his powerful allies could destroy their careers. 

As Swalwell rose in the polls against the backdrop of the intensifying rumors about his penchant for late-night Snapchat messages to young political staffers, Mrs. Frazzled and her circle of allied influencers turned up the heat by naming him in posts. On March 22 Fodor said “no less than a dozen people” had come to her with allegations that he had behaved inappropriately.

Before the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN broke meticulously researched stories last Friday, Fodor and her allies took to social media to tell women with claims about Swalwell they were not alone. They promised to help them find legal representation.

“As somebody who survived sexual assault and sexual harassment in my workplace with an abuse of power situation just like these women experienced, I could not and would not stay silent,” Fodor said in her Friday missive to her followers. 

Fodor — in concert with other content creators like Cheyenne Hunt, a Laguna Hills lawyer and executive director of the non-profit Gen-Z for Change, who publicly shared texts detailing the allegations — exemplifies how social media influencers are reshaping the modern political campaign. 

“They are a huge reason this story came out — they created an infrastructure, a safe place for more victims and accusers to come forward, and that’s something I could have never have created,” said Michael Trujillo, a Democratic strategist who is advising an outside super PAC that is boosting the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa. Trujillo has been outspoken about allegations of sexual misconduct against Swalwell and had begun researching the claims about his behavior after hearing about them from a friend before the East Bay congressman’s short-lived presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle.

Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna praised Fodor, Hunt and and the account Organizermemes in a Fox News interview Sunday, saying “these were content creators who exposed this disgusting behavior.”

 (In an interview with Politico, Fodor marveled at the swiftness of Swalwell’s implosion once the stories were published, but noted that it had begun with a series of text messages. “In the end, it was three women in a group chat trying everything in our power,” she said.) 

Swalwell issued a carefully worded denial on Friday night in an on-camera social media post where he said the allegations that he sexually assaulted his one-time aide while she was too intoxicated to consent were “absolutely false.” 

“They did not happen. They have never happened. And I will fight them with everything that I have,” Swalwell said. On Sunday night he suspended his campaign. 

Fodor, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in her video that her motivation came, in part, from a feeling that she needed to make amends to her followers. 

Last November, she had joined a call with Swalwell and other social media influencers as he launched his gubernatorial campaign. As time went on, she told her followers Friday evening, she realized supporting Swalwell had been a mistake. 

She noted that her focus on Swalwell had been a sharp departure from her beat of education news. “But this was more important than anything else, because if I can’t use my platform, this is for nothing,” she said. 

Swalwell resigned from his House seat Monday afternoon amid intense pressure and the threat of a bipartisan removal campaign. The already chaotic California governor’s race, meanwhile, remains thoroughly scrambled, with candidates like Tom Steyer and former Rep. Katie Porter hoping to court Swalwell’s supporters. 

-Maeve Reston

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LAUSD narrowly averted a crippling strike set to begin this morning, announcing just after 2 a.m. that a deal had been reached with SEIU Local 99, the union that represents a host of school workers. Two other unions, one representing teachers and one representing school administrators, reached deals with the district over the weekend, but they had said they would strike in solidarity if a deal wasn’t reached with Local 99. 

The fact that the nation’s second-largest school district came so close to a debilitating walkout — what would have been the third strike in seven years — speaks to a new reality for increasingly emboldened and organized teachers unions across the state. In San Francisco, teachers walked out for four days this February — the district’s first strike in nearly a half-century. In recent months, there have been strikes or walkouts at several other California school districts, plus an averted walkout in San Diego.  

The recent roiling strikes or near-strikes at districts around the state have been far from a coincidence. The California Teachers Union initiated a campaign more than a year ago to align contract negotiations across dozens of school districts — enabling the umbrella union to flex its political muscles and amplify local fights into a larger wave.  

These coordinated tactics might be new for California educators, but it’s a strategy that has long been utilized elsewhere in the labor movement “to have deeper leverage across industries and sectors,” said UCLA Labor Center project director Janna Shadduck-Hernández.

Bob Baker Marionette Theater has been a civic treasure and L.A. institution for more than six decades. Now, fans of the strange and wonderful puppets cherished by children and adults alike can breathe a sigh of relief. After years of uncertainty, the nonprofit theater has made an agreement to purchase its rented Highland Park home, the Los Angeles Times’ Todd Martens reports. 

The news comes after the theater’s emotional 2019 move to a York Boulevard rental from their decades-long downtown L.A. home, then rising rent and an unsettled future. 

“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater’s co-executive director told Martens. “It’s been decades of us struggling to survive. Now we’re at this moment where it’s not a struggle.

DR. PATRICK’S NEW BOOK: Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is launching a book imprint with Skyhorse Publishing, and biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong will be one of the inaugural authors. Along with Soon-Shiong’s forthcoming book “Killing Cancer,” Carlson will also be publishing work by Russell Brand and Milo Yiannopoulos. 

L.A.’S EMPANADA SCENE: From Mexican-influenced Colombian fried empanadas in Westlake to classic Chilean empanadas in East Hollywood to Bolivian-style stew-based pastries in Van Nuys (technically those ones are salteñas, not empanadas), LAist rounds up L.A.’s standout crusty delights.

NO PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN SPACE: Despite what some earthlings might have thought watching a lone jar of Nutella spread float through space in the Artemis II stream, NASA has assured the public that this was not product placement. (The astronauts just really love the chocolate hazelnut spread.) 

HOW INFLUENCERS GET FREE TRIPS TO COACHELLA: Forget music, the festival is the “influencer Olympics.” The New York Times’ Madison Malone Kircher details what partnerships look like for the content creators getting tickets (or all-expenses-paid trips) from various brands.

For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, @CFelder brings the flavor to #vanityplates.

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “What Does the Political Scientist Know?” by Artur Międzyrzecki, translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

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