Shasta County reporter says she was assaulted while covering a meeting, DA reviewing case

The Shasta County District Attorney’s office said it is reviewing allegations by a local journalist that she was assaulted last month while attempting to cover a publicly-advertised meeting of conservative organizations.

Doni Chamberlain, who publishes the site A News Cafe, said she was harassed, assaulted and ejected from the July 6 gathering at a community center in Cottonwood.

Chamberlain said she left the meeting with a concussion, whiplash and a neck injury.

The incident reflects escalating tensions between county political leadership that has tacked hard right in the Trump era and Chamberlain, 67, who has reported on Shasta for more than three decades and founded A News Cafe in 2007.

While historically red, Shasta’s politics have been overtaken by an increasingly vocal faction embracing election denialism, anti-vaccine conspiracies and at times violent rhetoric.

Since 2020, the MAGA right has claimed a majority on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, led a successful recall campaign against the board chairman, fired the county health officer, rid the county of voting machines and passed a resolution enshrining gun rights as paramount.

Supervisors’ meetings have spiraled into chaos. A measure to enact a code of conduct for board meetings failed earlier this month.

Chamberlain and her small team of journalists, one of the only news sites in the area, show up at most local government meetings. She said threats and intimidation have become commonplace.

“I’ve received death threats, people yell at me during meetings and call me names.” she said. “This situation with a physical, violent assault and reaction from this group has just rocked my world because it’s had me completely rethink everything I thought I knew about being a journalist in Redding, in California, in Shasta County, in the United States of America.”

Shasta County Supervisor Chris Kelstrom, who attended the July 6 meeting, said the organizers wanted her out because they “did not want any words taken out of context or their intentions to be misreported which Donni (sic) is famous for doing” in an email to The Bee. “Donni skirts the line when slandering local conservatives calling anyone right of Joe Biden racist, Nazis, white supremist (sic), militia members, white nationalist, terrorists and my personal favorite Shastaiban members referring to Shasta County and terrorists.”

Chamberlain said she has never described any of the individuals as racists or Nazis.

“I may have described something as racist behavior, but not from those guys,” she said.

The allegation is “a party line,” she said.

After the event, she immediately filed complaints with the Sheriff’s department. The DA’s office said they are still reviewing the case. District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett will now decide whether to open a case against the alleged harassers.

“An investigation was submitted to our office for review. It is currently still under review,” she said in an email to The Bee.

What led to the allegations of assault?

On July 6, Chamberlain arrived at Cottonwood Community Center, a nonprofit-owned venue, to attend a meeting she’d seen advertised on Facebook.

It was organized by Jesse Lane, an up-and-coming leader in the local far-right movement. The goal, as described in the Facebook post, was to reunify local conservative groups he saw as “splintered.” It invited “all leaders, presidents, hosts, owners, and anyone else with a vested interest in the community.”

In attendance were representatives from groups including Red White and Blueprint, the California State Militia and Moms for Liberty, as well as two county supervisors.

“We’re so splintered and how I look at it is we put all the splinters together and make a big two-by-four and we beat the hell out of them,” said Lane at the start of the meeting.

Roughly 200 people were in attendance, Chamberlain estimated. She stood at the back of the meeting room using her phone to stream the event for Facebook Live, something she does, she said, when she “might be unwelcome.”

Chamberlain said she recognized some of the attendees, including the leader of the Cottonwood Militia and individuals affiliated with the Proud Boys, a white nationalist hate group. Five members of the Proud Boys were convicted of multiple federal felonies earlier this year for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

Lane and other attendees asked Chamberlain to leave.

“My position is that it was on Facebook, open up to all patriots,” she said to the livestream. “Jesse Lane ordered me out, but I’m sticking with my position.”

Mark Kent, who Chamberlain said frequently appears at Shasta County Board meetings and is a local talk show host, then approached her, demanding she leave.

“You’re not a patriot,” he said. “You’re A News Cafe.”

Chamberlain alleges that he grabbed her phone, which was on a lanyard attached to her neck.

On Chamberlain’s recording, a woman is heard speaking to Kent: “We are on the same side. I don’t know you, but don’t do that.”

Kent continues speaking to Chamberlain: “You’re nothing but lies, in every publication, in everything you write about.”

In the recording, it appears he is standing very close to Chamberlain. Kent grabs at her phone again, allegedly yanking the lanyard and injuring Chamberlain’s neck.

A woman can be heard in the recording saying “stop, don’t do that” to Kent.

Chamberlain said that a ring of people surrounded her and put their hands in front of her face, blocking her view and preventing her from moving. They asked her to stop recording, so she turned off her livestream.

Attorney Lisa Jensen, a friend of Chamberlain’s, watched Kent confront Chamberlain just before the Facebook video cut out. Fearing for her safety, she said, she called Chamberlain and stayed on the line, recording the audio so she could later provide evidence if an altercation occurred.

Chamberlain, who considered the meeting public, was also recording audio for a filmmaker working on a documentary about the area’s politics. She said she assumed the people asking her to turn off the recording were referring to the livestream, and that she forgot she was still recording with the other device.

“I was so spun out and I’m not used to wearing the wire like that, I forgot I was wearing it,” she said.

In the background of a recording of the full meeting obtained by The Bee, attendees can be heard saying the Pledge of Allegiance. A speaker then leads the group in prayer, which included instruction to “pray for Doni’s salvation.”

“I don’t want you physically hurt,” a woman on the recording said to Chamberlain. “But you’re not welcome here. I don’t want you to feel physically afraid, so if you do, you should probably leave.”

Eventually, a woman named Rebecca Walker called 911 to report that Chamberlain had assaulted her.

“You know I didn’t touch you, you know that’s a lie,” said Chamberlain.

“Your whole entire thing is lying. That’s your life. You like to come to these things and you like to lie about patriots who love our country, love our families, love our children,” responded Walker. “We’ve let you guys into all of our events, we’ve tried to be fair when you guys have not, but this time we’re done. We’re done.

Neither Walker or Kent responded to multiple requests for comment by The Bee.

Twenty-three minutes after Chamberlain began recording, four Shasta sheriff’s deputies arrived in three squad cars to escort Chamberlain out.

The department sent four deputies because of the “large number of individuals” at the event, according to Tim Mapes, a spokesman for the department. The third unit responded because it was not tied up with another call, and one of the deputies was a trainee.

A separate video of the meeting was posted on Facebook by Authur Gorman, a Shasta County Office of Education board member who organized a county-wide student walk-out protesting COVID-19 mandates in 2021 and whose treatment of transgender students has inspired a movement to censure him. It shows the crowd erupting in cheers when a speaker announces that “Doni Chamberlain has left the building.”

Chamberlain went to the emergency room after the incident, where she said she was diagnosed with a concussion, whiplash and neck injuries. She is still recovering from the event, she said.

“When the sheriffs wrote this up, they said, ‘well, do you have any witnesses?’ And I just laughed. Nobody who was there would say what happened,” she said.

Did Chamberlain have a First Amendment right to attend the meeting?

Chamberlain believed she had a right to be there, claiming that it was a public meeting.

However, according to David Loy, the First Amendment Coalition’s legal advisor, organizers had the right to decide who could and could not attend.

California’s Brown and Bagley-Keene Open Meeting acts require only meetings of elected officials and government agencies, boards or committees to be open to the public.

Private citizens have a First Amendment right to determine who can and cannot attend their events. For example, political campaigns can bar individuals wearing T-shirts advocating for their opponents from attending rallies.

That the meeting was widely publicized on Facebook does “not create a legally enforceable obligation,” said Loy.

Chamberlain could still have a claim for assault, he said.