Fired from the California state Capitol after reporting a rape, a Latina leader rises

When Catalina Sanchez left Sacramento in 2017, her dream of a career in California politics seemed dead.

Fired from her job as a legislative aide to a Democratic legislator — nine months after telling police she had been raped by another Capitol staffer — Sanchez returned to her small hometown in Butte County.

In 2020, she ran for a seat on the city council in Gridley, population 7,224. Her campaign was a tough slog against a slate of white male incumbents. Facebook trolls spread racially-tinged rumors, casting the daughter of Mexican immigrants as a George Soros-funded Black Lives Matter activist from Sacramento who wanted to “convert Gridley into another Chico,” Sanchez said.

She deflected the attacks with a grassroots campaign centered on “economic freedom” — an astute messaging choice in a conservative county. She won.

In early December, Sanchez took the oath of office. Three incumbent councilmen lost their seats to challengers in 2020. Sanchez and another candidate, J. Angel Calderon, became the first Latina and the first Latino to get elected in a city where Latinos make up approximately 45% of the population.

Sanchez, a 32-year-old who graduated from California State University, Chico, is now the sole woman on the council.

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“We haven’t had any female representation for many years — since the former mayor, Jerry Fichter,” she said.

Councilwoman Sanchez has thoroughly embraced her new role. During a tour of Gridley’s struggling downtown, she outlined the existential crisis facing small Central Valley towns.

“We’ve seen a lot of small businesses close,” Sanchez said. “For example, once Starbucks came into town a couple of years ago … we had about three or four other coffee shops and they all closed. Demand shifted. That’s one of the reasons I ran for city council. What can we do to help ensure that everyone thrives equally, as much as possible, especially when a large corporate chain like that comes into small rural communities?”

Sanchez’s policy knowledge will prove advantageous as she helps to govern her city. But her time in the California State Legislature nearly ended in her death.

She arrived at the Capitol as an intern. After graduation, she was hired as a legislative aide for Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont. Immersed in state politics, Sanchez felt at home in the corridors of power and planned a long career there. When Wieckowski won a seat in the state Senate, she went with him.

It all came crashing down on Friday, Dec. 16, 2016. After going out for drinks with colleagues from work, Sanchez alleged she was raped by an acquaintance who worked for another Democratic legislator. In shock and unsure of what to do, Sanchez said she waited two days to seek medical attention. The clinic administered a rape kit and called the Sacramento Police Department.

Sanchez, who said she was a virgin until that night and believes one of her drinks may have been drugged, told me she asked to press charges during a police interview in January 2017. But on March 25, Sanchez said, a Sacramento police investigator told her the case was closed.

When I contacted the Sac PD for this column, a spokesperson said Sanchez had declined to pursue charges. Sanchez and her attorney, Micha Star Liberty, say that’s not true.

“That makes me so angry I want to cry,” Sanchez said. “I never said that to them. I felt so dismissed.”

“She was desperately searching for justice,” Liberty said.

A Sac PD spokesperson responded to follow-up questions by saying, “If the victim would like detectives to investigate this case further she can contact detectives, or we could have detectives re-contact her. “

Sanchez’s desire to pursue charges against her alleged attacker seems clear because, days after hearing from the police, she filed a complaint with the California State Assembly. The Assembly launched an investigation into her allegations against the man, who worked for Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, at the time.

Yet Sanchez said the Assembly’s investigators made her feel accused and ashamed. Traumatized, she struggled at work. On April 29, 2017, after what she described as harsh interrogation conducted by an Assembly investigator, she attempted suicide.

She survived, ending up in a hospital. On June 26, the Assembly notified Sanchez that the investigation had found no evidence that her alleged rapist had violated Assembly policies. A letter signed by Assembly Human Resources Director Tosha M. Cherry informed Sanchez that her allegations “could not be substantiated.”

“Investigations conducted by the California State Assembly review violations of Assembly policy,” wrote Cherry, adding that her office could not determine whether a violation of the law had occurred. With both the police and the Assembly dismissing her claims, Sanchez had reached a dead end.

She tried to put her life back together. In Sept. 2017, however, Wieckowski’s office fired Sanchez for what she called “minor work performance issues.” Her firing came just one month before rape allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, along with social media posts from celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan, sparked the global #MeToo movement. It created a new sense of public awareness about rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

In California, a letter signed by over 140 women with the tagline “We Said Enough” brought the movement to the Capitol, eventually resulting in the resignations of multiple legislators accused of sexual misconduct. The Legislature hired lawyers to investigate claims and passed laws to ban retaliation against victims and bar the state from imposing secret settlements.

This revolution arrived too late to save Sanchez’s job, but she fought for her rights. In 2019, she received a $350,000 settlement from the California State Senate after filing a workplace discrimination lawsuit. The lawsuit claimed the state Senate had “failed to accommodate her emotional disabilities and fired her in retaliation after she claimed that she was sexually assaulted by an Assembly staff member,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which called it “one of the largest settlements the state Legislature has negotiated in recent history.”

By this time, her alleged rapist had left his job in the Legislature. Before agreeing to settle, however, the state Senate’s lawyers spent months fighting Sanchez.

“Records show that the Senate filed subpoenas seeking personal, employment and disciplinary records from the plaintiff’s former workplaces and her law school,” reported The Sacramento Bee. “Attorneys for the state also sought information about her academic background dating back to high school.”

Afterward, Sanchez tried to find another job in state politics but said she felt “blacklisted” after being rejected for multiple positions.

“I felt like the rug was pulled from under me, professionally,” Sanchez said. “That’s a very tough position to be in when you have worked so hard to be in a place like state politics in Sacramento and you want to continue to serve your community and you feel like that is no longer an option.”

Samantha Corbin, a co-founder of We Said Enough, eventually hired Sanchez as a legislative manager and lobbyist at her government affairs firm.

“Still waters run deep,” Corbin said of Sanchez. “She’s so thoughtful … she’s never the first person in the room to speak, she’s never the person who needs to command a spotlight for herself or speak over others in a meeting. She’s constantly listening and analyzing and thinking, and then acting.”

Sanchez’s rise from the ashes to elected office provides a powerful lesson.

“The important thing to remember is to never give up,” said Sanchez, her voice breaking. “I think the first thing to do is to put your mental well-being first.”

“Even in your darkest moments … you need to just continue pushing forward.”

Reflecting on the changes that have taken place since she left the Capitol, Sanchez thinks Democrats must do more to change the culture and protect people.

“It’s one step forward and we have to continue to build upon that,” Sanchez said of the #MeToo movement. “Especially with situations like this where there’s still a lot of stigma. There’s still a lot of accountability that needs to take place for there to be structural and permanent change.”

Those changes will only happen with help from leaders like Sanchez, whose path in politics could bring her back to Sacramento one day.