Jon Jacobo, a Mission District community leader who faced a series of allegations Tuesday of rape and abusive behavior toward multiple women, has resigned from his executive position at affordable-housing developer TODCO.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen has since called for a hearing on the handling of sexual assault cases by the police department; Jacobo was first publicly accused of rape in August 2021. In the months following that charge, three separate woman filed police reports against Jacobo for a range of crimes, including domestic violence, sexual assault and rape, the women told the San Francisco Standard.
It is unclear what, if any, action the San Francisco Police Department has taken regarding the three separate reports filed years ago.
TODCO’s CEO Anna Yee said the company conducted an internal review of Jacobo’s work after the initial allegations, and found no issues. “We were not aware of the issues raised today,” Yee said, adding that law enforcement is responsible for investigating such allegations.
“We can, and do, believe in two deeply held convictions equally; we must listen and hear the voices of women when they speak out, and we must remember everyone deserves due process.”
Mission leaders who have had close working relationships with Jacobo declined to comment on the rape allegations or distance themselves from the longtime neighborhood figure who many still hold close.
After Jacobo was first publicly accused of rape by Sasha Perigo in August 2021, Mission community leaders were split on how to respond. Some remained silent or appeared to stand by the once-rising political figure, while others spoke out — and faced repercussions, as in the case of employees at Mission Girls, who were fired.
Jacobo was listed on the Calle 24 website as its vice president on Monday, but resigned from the board following the new allegations.
He was heavily involved in the Latino Task Force during the pandemic. More recently, he has served as the spokesperson for Mission street vendors as they fight a ban on street vending. Last month, Jacobo posted on his Facebook page that he was the keynote speaker at a young entrepreneur event hosted by Bay Area Community Resources.
Jacobo’s Facebook posts were made private as of this afternoon.
It is unclear if anyone on the Latino Task Force knew that police reports had been filed. Since Perigo first came forward in 2021, but declined to file charges, some community leaders have tried to normalize Jacobo’s position within the community. As part of an effort of restorative justice, Jacobo participated in men’s groups and began returning to different local events, including taking up the cause of the street vendors.
He also recently became engaged to his partner, Gabriela Lopez, the former president of the school board who was ousted in a recall last year. The couple is expecting a child in June.
Calle 24 co-founder John Mendoza declined to comment and asked Mission Local to refrain from publishing any story. Susana Rojas, executive director of Calle 24, did not return calls.
Even if Jacobo’s friends and colleagues have stuck with him, the apparent inactivity by the San Francisco Police Department has elicited criticism.
Jackie Fielder, a candidate for District 9 supervisor, wrote in a Twitter post that she was “sickened” reading the allegations against Jacobo.
“Calls to SFPD unreturned? Massive failure. How does SFPD expect anyone to come to them with stories like this?” Fielder wrote.
Other community leaders, reached by phone, did not want to speak about the new accusations, with some saying that they would wait for the legal process to play out.
But San Francisco law enforcement has had a history of brushing off sexual assault victims, leading Supervisor Ronen to spearhead a new Office of Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) in 2018 to help victims through the process of reporting assaults.
Also today, in response to the allegation that three women had filed separate police reports accusing Jacobo of different abuses since 2021, Chief Bill Scott thanked the Standard “for shedding light on this important issue.”
But the women who came forward in today’s article said their calls to police went unreturned, or that they were discouraged by the process.
“The SFPD is working diligently on these open investigations,” Scott said in a statement today. “We take sexual assault cases very seriously, and we work closely with our victims. We urge anyone who is a victim of sexual assault to come forward and report your case to the SFPD.”
What investigative work has occurred over the past two and a half years is unclear.
One woman who accused Jacobo of rape told the Standard that she filed a police report in October 2021, two months after Perigo publicly accused him, and the other two women filed reports close to the same time. Jacobo’s ex-girlfriend also filed a civil lawsuit anonymously in San Mateo County in 2022, accusing him of choking her, threatening her with a knife, and stalking her.
Though Perigo published a well-documented report including text messages with Jacobo, contemporaneous corroboration from friends she confided in at the time, and documentation from a rape kit, she refused to report the encounter to the police.
This story has been updated to reflect that Jon Jacobo resigned from Calle 24 Latino Cultural District’s board since publication.
So, Calle 24 “asked Mission Local to refrain from publishing any story” about one of its officers being a rapist. Very glad that you did not honor this request. And, of course, the bigger picture is that Calle 24 cannot be considered a serious organization.
I suggest you cite the facts as reported. Your spin is potentially defamatory, I will add.
Sam Singer, line 1.
Now we have Calle 24 lawyers threatening people.
Simple subject/predicate agreement tells us Mendoza asked ML to refrain.
You work for us. We pay Calle24’s freight.
Mara,
I agree with you.
h.
This guy is a textbook predator.
“ Calle 24 co-founder John Mendoza declined to comment and asked Mission Local to refrain from publishing any story” … sickening
And Jane Kim et co. who continued to lift this guy up after the initial allegations show you just how protected you are if you’re in with the local politico stalwarts of the “progressives.”
Maybe the next large investigative report should concern exactly how all of the entrenched “affordable housing developers” like TODCO are spending the millions in public money that they receive every year. Unlike government agencies, those organizations are not required to comply with public records laws. It also looks like some of the people managing all of that money might have questionable judgment.
Would be interesting to get an explanation of how TODCO, the SF “housing nonprofit”, has been getting millions from the city – and had half a million to sponsor a ballot initiative for an Amazon that was so poorly thought out they had to withdraw it – yet, despite all this, seemingly hasn’t even built a single unit of housing in well over a decade.
It’s like what George Carlin said about politics. “If honesty were introduced into the system, the whole thing would collapse!”
Ditto for the SF Nonprofit Industrial Complex.
Very disturbing story. This guy sounds like a total creep and I can’t believe he was let off the hook so easily. He must have many friends in high places who are helping encourage the police and others to look the other way. And isn’t “restorative justice” supposed to involve the victims to be a valid process?
Police need no encouragement to mistreat victims of sexual violence, unfortunately.
Let’s see, there has been extortion in collusion with an elected official, as in 1979 Mission.
There has been intimidation as we saw at St. John’s church in December and whenever anyone crosses the cartel.
There has been decades of money laundering where city funded nonprofits cash checks and mark time while making no perceptible progress on ending injustice.
We see association with sidewalk vendors who’ve claimed that they must contend with organized crime, gangs and fencing.
One nonprofiteer tried to silence Mission Local’s reporting on Jacobo’s alleged sexual abuse, assault and rape.
Now the omertà is revealed, where the cartel continues to pay, offer positions of power and cover individual racketeers from accountability for their crimes because Their Good Thing is more important than any apparent progressive/left values.
When the outcomes of a political system are inexplicable on the merits of the inputs and known dynamics governing the system, there is probably something else going on behind the scenes. That Jacobo was the ONLY person capable of working for TODCO, leading C24, LTF, LDC and working as supe aide was one of those inexplicable outcomes. Lately, Jacobo has been repping the vendors, replete with the alleged nexus to organized crime. How did this sociopathic self serving physically abusive nut job keep getting sinecures thrown at him?
Looks like the cartel made the error of pinning its hopes on Freddo to replace Ronen, who is less Vito Corleone and more Sal Tessio.
Then there is the issue of the Mission’s permanent political class in good standing with the cartel mentioned in the article, where the same people rotate through the revolving door of nonprofiteer, civil service and supe aide with the ease of a slug going over a razor blade. Who but the connected ease in and out of jobs like that? They refer to this in terms of “hats” they wear, as if progressive politics were some sort of millinery convention.
Remember when Joe Rivano Barros wrote the seeming straightforward article last year on the mass shooting during Carnaval weekend? The cartel flipped the fuck out.
They all knew. They knew. TODCO knew. I don’t know how these people look at themselves in the mirror. And how do they get away with blatantly lying?
https://twitter.com/nadiarahmansf/status/1780356342508585116
Fielder pointing the finger at police and not her political allies who protect this guy. Gross SF politics.
Hmm. The SFPD did not respond to calls. Sound familiar? They don’t respond to rape calls, they don’t do any traffic control, they throw up their hands with property crime, and say there’s nothing they can do about it, they let corruption run rampant in a nonprofit for which they are responsible. I guess it must be Chesa Boudin’s fault. Law and Order makes a great campaign slogan as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with reality.
This man recently posted on Instagram that he is looking forward to being a “girl dad” as he is expecting a baby soon.
Imagine someone who treats women with such contempt boasting about becoming a father to a little girl.
No one in his life cares about him enough to tell him the truth; he’s entitled scum and needs help.
This isn’t the white man’s fault. This isn’t white supremacy. This isn’t a problem created by San Francisco moderates. It’s Jacobo’s own entitled, arrogant, abusive, macho pathology. He’s a rapist and abuser.
“This isn’t the white man’s fault. This isn’t white supremacy.”
Uh, when did anyone say it was?
You may not be familiar with the activist world. Consider yourself fortunate.
Looks like sometime between when this article was published and now, Jon and John became Juan and Juan.
https://www.calle24sf.org/es/team
They took them off the English language page for the team (along with Roberto Hernandez, oddly), and kept them on the Spanish one. Was it just sloppiness, or are they still keeping them on board but trying to be quiet about it? Guess we’ll see.
Hernandez doesn’t have the gumption to address the issue, which is telling. Fielder knows where she stands and is unencumbered.
It’s almost as if Jon thought we would just forget about this, after the initial allegations broke in 2021. These SF Latino men in community work and their sexual shenanigans are fun to watch, exposed in the local headlines for all to see. They never learn: that’s the machismo and the toxic masculinity for you. And the organization who stay local and protect these clowns are completely disgusting, and should be called out and have their funding cut off. What is Calle24 thinking keeping him on the board? And what the hell does Gabriela Lopez see in him by getting pregnant with his child? Does she think she’s more special than the women who came forward to expose this rat? Any political aspirations he had for D9 are permanently off the table: if he has any sense of decency left, he will retire from all community work linked to Latino Task Force, and find a job in a different line of work. He’s a blight and embarrassment to our community, and anyone continuing to stand with him will soon fall on their own sword.
He ruined his own chances for any D9 political aspirations. He’s a loser, a creep, a stalker and a rapist. He thought the community would just forget after the 2021 shockwaves rippled through the Mission: his ego and hubris is limitless. Any and all accomplishments he gathered during the last ten years (and especially during the pandemic) are now but a shadow in these recent allegations. He should be ashamed and disgusted with his behavior, but these types never are: they just keep moving forward, never apologizing and never looking within to heal from their predatory manner.
I wonder when male sexual predators will finally not be able to get away with this behavior after getting caught.
All too often these men get accused, get away with it somehow and then keep doing the same and still not stopped. Time to stop them.
What Jacobo did in the past is very bad and he should be held accountable in the courts as any other person should be. However, an organization like Calle 24 who’s mission is to ensure that gentrification does not displace or erode Latin people and their culture in our neighborhood is an important thing. The guy is/was a turd. But everything he touched along the way was not necessarily complicit nor responsible. This matter and the innocent victims involved should not be used as a political tool by pro-gentrification groups in our city. Address the man and the law enforcement problem. Let’s not conflate that with other organizations that are assets to our community.
Their bullying behaviors ( Mendoza, Erick Arguello) to business owners like Arcana and Sirron Norris say otherwise. They don’t get to decide for everyone what establishments come to the area.
Calle 24 has harassed businesses owned by people they consider to be “outsiders” – and fought their permits – over things as arbitrary as the color they painted a wall, just in the name of flexing power. That’s the MO of a protection racket, not a cultural organization.
Both things can be true. Calle24 has done some good work, but let’s not pretend they’ve done anything substantial around gentrification. It happened. They also allowed Jacobo to run again, they platformed him. Calle24 deserves to be called out for this. This was a major failure of leadership. As it was for the Latino Task Force and any other organization that allowed him into their spaces or made him a spokesperson. And we need to start naming the names that continued to shield him from actual accountability: Valerie Tulier-Laiwa, Tracy Gallardo aka Tracy Brown, Roberto Hernandez (please do not vote this egocentric thug as supervisor), John Mendoza, Susana Rojas, Sam Ruiz, Erick Arguello, Venecia Margarita. Photos from just last year show these folks smiling brightly with Jacobo. Whatever the solution is moving forward, THESE PEOPLE CANNOT BE INVOLVED!!!!!