The sexual-assault allegations laid out against Manny Yekutiel in today’s San Francisco Standard are plausible and on-the-record and have induced a cavalcade of big-name endorsers to elbow past one another for the exits like a nightclub on fire.
Yekutiel announced moments ago that he will suspend his campaign, though he did not acknowledge committing assault.
“I am deeply sorry for any boundaries that I crossed,” he wrote. “I’m going to take this time to work on myself.”
This was, crucially, the second on-the-record groping allegation made against the erstwhile frontrunner in the District 8 supervisorial race.
In June, a political organizer named Brad Chapin accused Yekutiel of groping him at a 2020 party, an allegation also first published in the Standard.
Chapin’s single-sourced accusation did not move the political needle in San Francisco: It was dismissed by politicos suspicious of Chapin’s political tribalism, unclear about what constituted “assault” in San Francisco’s gay community, and ultimately unconvinced after the supposed “whisper network” of men who alleged inappropriate experiences with Yekutiel failed to immediately come forward with their own stories.
Well, that was then, and this is now. Accuser Ryan Clark is not part and parcel of any of San Francisco’s political camps; he’s just a guy. And both he and his partner claim they were aggressively groped by Yekutiel at a public party in 2023. Like Chapin, they documented this extemporaneously, in writing.
Chapin’s public ordeal following his decision to go on the record — he felt compelled to publicly denounce Yekutiel at several candidate forums and endorsement votes — was hardly an enticement for any on-the-record accuser.
Mission Local did not publish articles about Chapin’s claim against Yekutiel, which would be our approach to most any single-sourced claim against any candidate. But others did. In the end, this led to additional on-the-record allegations.
In June, Yekutiel denied Chapin’s June accusation, claiming it to be a political hit. Today, he intimated that he may have had too much to drink when he encountered Clark, said he did not recall the groping alleged by Clark and his partner and apologized if he “crossed someone’s boundary.”
Incidentally, the deadline to officially remove a candidate’s name from the ballot came and went in June. While Yekutiel has dropped his campaign, his name will still be on November’s ballot.
Today was a profoundly ugly day — not just for Yekutiel and his supporters, but for San Francisco. It was a day of public pain and personal destruction.
Beyond winning or losing political offices, I deeply hope that all of the above can pick up the pieces of their lives and achieve some manner of teshuvah — deep introspection, an acknowledgement of straying from the path of righteousness and a return to it.
San Francisco is a town deeply lacking in introspection. Today, that came due.
Today was ugly for Mayor Daniel Lurie, who prominently unendorsed Manny Yekutiel after prominently endorsing him not even a month ago.
Following his September endorsement, the mayor said he spoke to Yekutiel about the allegation, Yekutiel denied it and Lurie believed him. That’s a hell of a thing to say. Clark affirmed that the mayor’s statement that he was taking Yekutiel at face value was a factor in pushing him to go public.
“When I endorsed Manny in September, I believed he was the best candidate to represent District 8. My endorsement is a statement of my confidence in someone’s character and leadership, and in light of the additional accounts reported today, I am withdrawing it,” the mayor said on Thursday.
“Coming forward is hard, and these survivors deserve to be heard and treated with dignity and respect.”
When Lurie rescinded that endorsement, it surely legitimized and hastened the stampede to the exit. And, to be fair to Lurie, the mayor waited months to make an official endorsement following Chapin’s allegation.
But Mission Local has spoken to multiple sources throughout the city who claim they warned the mayor’s team that there were still more shoes to drop.
Either they were not taken seriously, or a calculated risk was made that no more accusers would surface before election day. Or the mayor simply felt enough investigating had been done, and he was confident sticking with his longtime colleague and ally.
Alas, hindsight is 20/20. But only if you look: After a catastrophic lack of vetting led Mayor Lurie to bring about the curtailment of his appointment of District 4 supervisor Beya Alcaraz after a scant eight days, he told the people of this city that he would do better.
“This is not the first time I’ve done something wrong; it won’t be the last,” Lurie said in November 2025. “But what I commit to the people of San Francisco is: I’m going to learn from this. We are going to thoroughly review our vetting process and we will get better. But let me be clear that this rests on my shoulders.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie is going to be fine. But it’s not him we’re worried about.
This is a hard job. One with consequences.
Today was also ugly for San Francisco’s Democratic Party, which has made a mockery of the notion of policing sexual misconduct.
Last month, following a lengthy delay while it purportedly “investigated” Chapin’s claims in an opaque and, ultimately, farcical procedure, the party voted to endorse Yekutiel. It was a bad look then — and it aged like milk.
In 2024, that very same county Democratic Party proclaimed that the era of alleged sexual predators in local political circles was over; there was a new sheriff in town, and it was the San Francisco Democratic Party.
Even then, the move seemed hopelessly self-congratulatory, political and partisan. At the time, Democratic Party members from the ascendant slate of political moderates that won control in 2024 took care to note that they would not be taking up allegations in “cases that have been previously criminally investigated or closed.”
That, notably, would exclude the accusations of sexual assault leveled at political operative Jay Cheng when he was a student at the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, which prosecutors declined to follow up on.
Cheng was instrumental not only in putting nearly $1 million behind the moderate slate that assumed control of the local Democratic Party in ’24, he was also, according to multiple sources, a key player in hand-picking the individual members of that slate.
Those members remain in control of the party. These are the people who saw fit to take up the mantle of combating allegations of sexual misconduct in San Francisco political circles.
With great fanfare, the Democratic Party in 2024 announced its new “Code of Conduct and Policies for Sexual Assault and Harassment,” riding the wave of righteous outrage over disturbing allegations leveled against charismatic Democratic politicos — most especially Mission District leader Jon Jacobo, who is presently being prosecuted on rape charges.
And yet the policy the Democratic Party created — again, with great fanfare — was so narrowly applicable that it would not have applied to Jacobo (who is, again, presently facing criminal prosecution by the district attorney). Not unless he misbehaved at an official party or club meeting — which, whatever he did in private, he did not do in public.
It certainly did not apply to whatever happened between Chapin and Yekutiel in someone’s private home in 2020.
And this is where the local Democratic party made a farce of its tough talk on predatory behavior. It could have quickly acknowledged that its policy was, by design, narrowly applicable and did not cover Chapin’s allegations. Even a non-attorney could have made this assessment rapidly.
That’s not what happened. Instead, Party Chair Nancy Tung this summer delayed the District 8 endorsement vote, citing the ongoing “investigation.”
Five weeks later, on the very day of the belated endorsement vote, party members were handed a terse, one-page letter, noting that the investigation spent more than a month determining what should’ve been apparent within minutes: The code wasn’t applicable, and the San Francisco Democratic Party couldn’t weigh in here.
The so-called investigation neither confirmed nor denied that anything untoward had taken place. It did nothing, other than provide political cover for the party to vote the way its leadership wanted.
As we wrote at the time:
Members of the local party, on the day of a vote, were handed a half-page letter announcing that an investigation determined only that there needn’t be an investigation, and they then buttressed that vote based upon the outcome of “the investigation.”
This is something you’d expect to see in “Death of Stalin,” not a Viz Valley community center.
Separate and apart from the outcome, this process strained credulity. It was a bad look then, and it’s become so much worse. It was a credibility-destroying moment for a local Democratic Party that seems dead set on destroying its credibility by any means necessary.
So, today was an ugly day. And, if no lessons are learned, no introspection is undertaken, it will be an uglier tomorrow.
I wish the centrist gang running the party would feel some shame and resign, but I will not hold my breath, we need to replace them at soonest possible time.
Stay far away from the DCCC fools.
This is an embarrassing moment for the SF Democrats. I think it’s pretty clear SF Democrats don’t represent the working class, don’t represent good character and don’t represent an egalitarian future. SF Democrats are neoliberals first and foremost; they’re there to gain political power and to enrich themselves.
These are the so called “moderates”, not the entire SF Democratic Party.
This is the London Breed / Ed Lee gang of corrupt self-servants.
Change your policy on reporting on sexual assault allegations. You acknowledge that Chapin extemporaneously documented the assault but still call this a “single source” allegation.
That doesn’t make any sense – do you really mean that if a candidate is accused of sexual assult you will not report on it at all unless they do it again to another person? Or are you saying that Chapin’s additional sources were not credible enough for you?
This is irresponsible at best and dodging responsibility at worst.
Speak to DV & assault experts and create an actually consistent sexual assault reporting policy.
This is serious and will continue to come up again and again.
Zero confidence from the top down. Leadership enema necessary.
The ‘ugly day’ list includes state assembly candidate Mandelman, according to the following comment attributed to Supervisor Melgar in the Standard and 48 Hills.
Public officials have allegedly used similar arguments to defend Yekutiel. Melgar, the supervisor who pulled her endorsement, told The Standard that Mandelman told her privately that groping is perceived differently in the gay community. Mandelman is a key Yekutiel supporter, and occupies the Board of Supervisors seat Yekutiel is running for. During their discussion, Melgar asserted that in the past she had heard from women who had suffered greatly from sexual assault and therefore takes groping allegations like Chapin’s seriously.
She recalled Mandelman replying, “For women, this is a big deal. Among the gays, it’s not a thing.”
Mandelman denied making the statement to Melgar.
“I don’t think I said that. Sexual assault is a thing. I think sexual assault occurs differently [in the gay community] and there’s a different threshold,” he said in a phone interview.
Mandelman needs to go. He was fully in support of Manny when I called his office to shout about it yesterday, so his change of heart was really a change in the political tea leaves. I’m tired of these feckless clowns pretending to be leaders. Boycott their businesses, disallow them from participating in events, sitting at restaurants, don’t let them have peace. Actions, and inactions, have consequences. I don’t care if he was elected and is terming out, I don’t feel safe being represented in my home district by someone who wants to tell me that my orientation means that I should expect to be sexually assaulted in gay spaces. Mandelman needs to be removed.
Nothing particularly surprising here –just another day in the phone booth that is San Francisco politics.
What exactly do you mean by “Chapin’s political tribalism”? Do you mean that Chapin is part of the progressive community? Is having left politics or belonging to the Harvey Milk Democratic Club tribalism? It is so interesting to me that you are able to write so much about San Francisco political figures and mention so little about their actual politics.
Chapin is a progressive activist, and like many still here in San Francisco we have some very definite political ideas: like not letting the tech and millionaire sectors govern our city; not cutting services such as health, housing and legal aid for working class people; standing up for immigrants; opposing the criminalization of our unhoused neighbors and drug/alcohol impaired people; and last but not least, opposing the US funding of Israel to carry out a genocide against Palestine. Manny and Scott Weiner are two peas in a pod with their political positions matching Mayor Lurie and the right wing (not moderate) members of the Board of Supervisors. Any discussion of these political actors should include some politics in addition to the sexual assault issue….such as that both Weiner and Manny Y support the Mayor’s efforts to pass Props D, E and F to consolidate power in the executive branch and decrease democratic participation in city government, and last but not least, that they both are supporters of Israeli apartheid and now genocide, with Weiner very recently and so reluctantly having to agree it is a genocide. Many of us are glad Manny has dropped out for so many reasons. And it’s great that we now have a chance to have a progressive Supe from D8.
And last, I would like to ask if you are going to continue holding events at Manny’s cafe?
Odious – Extremely unpleasant, repulsive, or deserving of hatred.
Heard Manny speak at several community events & supported his candidacy; believed in his capabilities, intellect and vision for District 8 and SF. This is an awful time for him and I hope he recovers. The vetting process for SF Democratic candidates needs to be stricter- so possible future debacles can be averted.
One lesson comes right to mind. For once, it’s not a left-populist candidate who withdraws because of accusations of sexual misbehavior. Franken, Platner, Grayson, Swalwell come quickly to mind, among many others. Sure, some of these guys might be arrogant, gropey jerks. An inordinate number of politicians are. It’s just that it’s invariably left-populists who pay for it. Somehow, establishment neo-lib/neo-cons like Clinton and Biden, credibly accused of the same or worse, never had to walk the plank. For once, an identity-perfect establishment darling takes the fall. Looks the tactic backfired. Woops.
“That’s one hell of an act there. What do you call it?”
“The Democrats”
Eric Swallwell drugged and raped people. Platner was also accused of rape. Other men minimizing that into being a “gropey jerk” is why rape is so common in our society.
Or maybe partisan voters choosing to disregard sexual assault accusations against their heroes, the most powerful elected people in the country – e,g, Trump, Clinton, Biden – might be an even bigger reason why rape is so common in our society.
If only we could take corruption and enabling death as seriously. What Gary McCoy has done with HealthRIGHT is a travesty, and he too should be scrutinized like Manny was. Alas that’s not ugly enough. We should hope Darshini leads in D8.
i still don’t believe any of the all too coincidentally timed allegations.
This is a curious and pearl clutching takedown of a gang of standard issue political hacks. To be fair to Lurie, he waited a long time before endorsing Manny? After he and his minions were warned that more shoes would drop? Of course he waited. Waited until he felt the coast was clear. And for this he gets the benefit of the doubt. Anybody who thinks this is a sad day for the city either hasn’t been paying attention or just chooses to ignore what’s been going on from the jump.