Jeffrey Ray
Nielsen–the Orange County Republican activist, close Washington, D.C., aide to
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and convicted pedophile–is out of prison and
living in Laguna Beach, according to a California Attorney General's website
that tracts the whereabouts of sex predators.
Twenty months
ago, in March 2008, a judge sentenced Nielsen to serve 36 months in prison
after he reluctantly acknowledged that he was guilty of targeting seventh,
eighth and ninth grade middle school boys as his sex partners.
I previously reported that Nielsen landed in a private prison. He was also
charged with possession of a huge cache of man-boy and boy-boy sex pornography, but
a bonehead mistake by prosecutors allowed that count to expire before taking
necessary court action.
]
Getting justice
in the case was never a sure thing. The 39-year-old Nielsen, once an intern for
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, liked to brag about his personal connections that extended to then-Sheriff Mike Carona. Indeed, thanks to his
friendship with OC Republican Chairman Scott Baugh, he landed a well-paying job at a large
law firm and a gig representing a local government agency as a lobbyist.
With the aid of
high-powered criminal defense lawyer Paul S. Meyer, Nielsen spent nearly five
years viciously attacking his accusers and portraying himself as a persecuted
Christian conservative who was being smeared by a liberal press, naming this
paper. (While he awaited trial, the Orange County Register wrote a story about how Nielsen
loved puppies and, oddly, didn't mention the pending sex crimes charges.)
At one point,
Meyer attempted to derail the Weekly's investigation by alleging to the FBI
that I was part of blackmail scheme against his client. The laughable tactic
didn't work. Nielsen ultimately pleaded guilty after I found a second boy in
Virginia who backed up his story with love notes Nielsen had sent him. The
State Bar of California revoked his license to practice law.
As he's prone
to do, Rohrabacher disingenuously attempted to downplay his ties to Nielsen
after the Weekly reports. But it was the Huntington Beach Republican who brought
the Fountain Valley resident with him to the nation's capital for more than two
years. Nielsen's father Ben served as the mayor of Fountain Valley.
To read the Weekly's 2005 cover story, “NAMBLA Fantasy,” go HERE.
–R. Scott
Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.