Manny Yekutiel, the frontrunner for District 8 supervisor, was accused of sexual assault again this morning. Endorsers, including Mayor Daniel Lurie, have rescinded their support while others are calling for him to drop out.
“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. Coming forward is hard and these survivors deserve to be heard, and treated with dignity and respect,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said. “I will not be making another endorsement in District 8. The voters of the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park will decide this race.”
The San Francisco Standard reported that two men, Ryan Clark and his partner, accused Yekutiel of groping them without consent outside a Pride event in 2023, grabbing one’s testicles outside his pants and putting his hand down the other’s pants.
Members of the San Francisco Democratic Party, which backed Yekutiel in a razor-thin vote in late August, are exploring how to pull its endorsement from Yekutiel, a party representative told Mission Local.
District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill and District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter said they would pull their endorsements. State Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, the advocacy group AbundantSF, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Joe Sangiardi of the San Francisco Democratic Party, and activist Honey Mahogany also said they had done so.
Others are calling for him to drop out of the race, including Supervisor Connie Chan, the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee and State Sen. Scott Wiener, who previously held the District 8 seat.
Clark and his partner are the second and third person to accuse Yekutiel of sexual assault. In June, the Standard reported allegations from progressive political organizer Brad Chapin, who accused Yekutiel of painfully grabbing his testicles at a house party in 2020.
Yekutiel had denied both Chapin’s allegations and the newest ones. “I may have had too much to drink. I remember running into Ryan at parties and being physically affectionate with each other, though I have no memory of the specific encounter he describes,” Yekutiel told the Standard.
When only Chapin was on the record, most of Yekutiel’s endorsers stuck with him. Just a handful pulled their endorsements, and Yekutiel even picked up a few hefty ones: He got the Democratic Party’s endorsement five weeks ago, and in early September secured perhaps the most valuable endorsement of all: Mayor Lurie’s.
Clark said he was spurred in part by Lurie’s endorsement to come forward with his account.
Members of the local Democratic party are now working on calling a special meeting to revoke the group’s endorsement of Yekutiel. It appears there would be enough votes to do that. (During the last endorsement vote, Yekutiel won the endorsement thanks to Matt Dorsey’s deciding vote).
District residents, by and large, also stuck with Yekutiel after Chapin’s allegations. In mid-September, Mission Local informally surveyed 30 voters in the Castro, Noe Valley, Duboce Triangle and Cole Valley. Only half were familiar with the allegations. All but one of those 15 voters said it would not affect their vote — they still backed Yekutiel or had never been planning to vote for him.
The one exception said he had moved to being undecided.
Yekutiel’s supporters gave a variety of explanations. They said people in gay spaces commonly do what Yekutiel is accused of or that they had heard he was cleared of wrongdoing. Others said they still trusted Yekutiel because his endorsers and their friends were sticking with him.
Yekutiel’s case has not been adjudicated by any law enforcement agency. The San Francisco Police Department put Chapins’ allegations into “inactive status” in June, indicating there was not enough evidence to move forward with criminal charges. It did not immediately say whether it would investigative the new allegations.
The San Francisco Democratic Party, meanwhile, decided that it did not have jurisdiction to investigate because the alleged incident did not take place at an official party event. Its terse, one-page letter said the case could not be “substantiated” but then acknowledged, “This is not a determination on the merits of whether a sexual assault occurred.”
Yekutiel had been considered the frontrunner in the race prior to Clark and his partner’s accusations on Thursday. He had raised the most money (so much that he reached campaign spending limits and stopped fundraising), had valuable endorsements and was running in a district that tended to elect moderate politicians like himself.
Many District 8 voters had also already heard of him — he founded the eponymous political salon and cafe, Manny’s, in 2017.
This is a developing story that will continue to be updated.
Anyone paying the least bit of attention saw this coming. The Castro whisper network has been going for years. Never let Lurie or the cowards on the DCCC wash off this stink. And frankly, that goes for both Scott Weiner (abstained) and Connie Chan (skipped the meeting).
There is one candidate in the race who has not been accused of sexual assault, is not a stooge for Aaron Peskin, and has never been affiliated with the dangerous Harm Reduction Industrial Complex, and that is Darshini Patel.
It’s a no-brainer! Darshini for D8!
The biggest surprise is how many of these endorsers decided that two allegations were enough, but one wasn’t. I don’t give a damn about your rescinding endorsements, because the initial endorsement proves that SF DCCC does not vet its candidates, and y’all got CLOWNED.
This city’s elected leadership doesn’t care about the citizens of SF beyond whether the city can still support their businesses. It’s past time for a few good boycotts and new leadership from the top down. We need a leadership enema.