SF Dems’ sexual-misconduct inquiry puts politico Jay Cheng back in the spotlight

Content warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault and attempted rape.

As the San Francisco Democratic Party begins taking a hard look at sexual misconduct in city politics, it may have to focus close to home: A man instrumental in the election of the party’s new leaders was accused of the attempted sexual assault of a college ex-girlfriend some 14 years ago.

Jay Cheng, the head of the well-funded and politically influential Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, a nonprofit that has directed millions of dollars toward moderate candidates and causes across San Francisco, was arrested for suspected sexual battery in 2010 as an undergraduate at the University of Califorinia, Irvine. Cheng, whose legal name is Jesse, denied the accusations and was never charged.

Ahead of the local Democratic Party’s first meeting tonight on sexual misconduct in city political circles, Cheng emailed a letter to Nancy Tung, the new head of the party. In the email, sent last night, Cheng reiterated his innocence, and said he supported the party’s look into sexual assault allegations. He then forwarded that email to a sizable list of “friends and colleagues” on Thursday morning. Cheng’s email was widely recirculated.

“I want my son, the public, and this committee to know the facts, and that is why I am putting them in this letter,” he wrote. “I both want the public to know the truth, and I support your efforts to hold people accountable for validated claims of sexual abuse and misconduct.”

In a similar statement that he sent to Mission Local, Cheng noted that he was never criminally charged, nor was a civil lawsuit filed against him, and that he “would never engage in behavior” like what he was alleged to have committed.

“I’ve done my best to move forward from the alleged incident with humility,” he added. “I’ve dedicated myself to the community and San Francisco, and now raising my young family in San Francisco.”

The Orange County district attorney declined to press charges in 2010, saying it could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, but a university body found Cheng had engaged in “unwanted touching.” Cheng said the allegations were false, and made by an ex-girlfriend after a breakup.

At the time, Cheng sent an email to the alleged victim, apologizing, in writing, “for sexually assaulting” her. He has subsequently said he wrote this email under duress. Cheng resigned his position as a University of California student regent in May 2011, four months after the accusations against him were made public.

After the Democratic County Central Committee on April 26 announced the formation of a committee to investigate sexual misconduct within city politics, following media reports naming progressive politico Jon Jacobo in an alleged incident, the 14-year-old allegations against Cheng were thrust back into the spotlight.

Multiple people resurfaced the allegations online, and they became an overt topic of political discussion. The discussion around the 2010 allegations grew widespread enough that the Neighbors for a Better San Francisco board of directors found it necessary to issue a statement on Wednesday. 

In an email sent to an undisclosed list, the Neighbors board wrote that it “concluded that Jay should remain executive director.”

“While the accusations made against Jay in 2011 were of a serious nature, we believe that because neither criminal nor civil charges were filed, and no further accusations have occurred, that this matter is behind him,” the board wrote.

In addition to the sexual-assault allegations from his college days, Cheng also found himself in the news on Monday for a possible campaign-ethics breach. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Cheng presented himself as a decision-maker behind the choice for Mark Farrell’s political consultant, putting him at the center of a leading mayoral campaign and raising questions about his organization’s independence from it.

How city’s ‘worst-kept secret’ became news

Cheng’s extensively documented history of sexual-assault allegations has been “the worst-kept secret in San Francisco politics for a very long time,” as one political insider put it. And it may have stayed that way, if not for a series of accusations against other Democratic Party figures that led the local branch of the party, the Democratic County Central Committee, to announce last week that it would form a task force to look into sexual assault allegations.

Tung, a prosecutor and the new Democratic Party chair, explained on Wednesday that the committee’s work will be to “understand the scope and breadth” of sexual assault within the city’s political circles, research “best practices,” and then create and promulgate a code of conduct throughout the city’s chartered clubs. 

“We will not be making judgments on the truth of any individual incident or accusation, nor will this be a forum for gossip, rumor or slander,” she wrote. No mention was made of accusations against political funders, and Tung wrote that the “jurisdictional power of the Party is limited.”

The statute of limitations for misdemeanor sexual battery in California is a year, and 10 years for felony sex crimes. It’s unclear what a committee can do regarding any allegations, as it has no legal standing, and the committee has said it will not look at individual cases. 

The decision to form a committee came after news broke in April that Jacobo, a once-prominent Mission leader who had previously been accused of sexual assault, was accused of similar behavior by three more women; the three filed police reports against him in 2021.

The allegations led Jacobo to resign from his position at the politically influential nonprofit housing developer TODCO. More allegations of an unspecified nature were posted online about another Mission leader — and, soon thereafter, Cheng.

Less than two months ago, Cheng was being privately hailed for a successful political campaign that put the moderate San Francisco Democrats for Change slate in control of the local Democratic Party. 

He was behind nearly a million dollars in funding for mailers advertising the slate, and multiple sources said Cheng was also a key player in picking the individuals who would run for office.

Now, members of the slate that Cheng heavily funded — and allegedly helped to handpick — have chosen to focus on accusations of sexual assault leveled against local politicos. The Democratic County Central Committee will hold its first meeting on the matter Thursday night.

Admission, retraction, denial

Cheng’s alleged attempted sexual assault occurred on Oct. 3, 2010, when Cheng was a fifth-year senior at UC Irvine majoring in Asian American Studies. His alleged victim, a 22-year-old University of California, Los Angeles student who remained anonymous but went by the name “Laya,” went to the police on Oct. 26, and Cheng was arrested on Nov. 4.

He was released from custody, and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges. After the alleged assault but before the arrest, Cheng sent a series of emails allegedly admitting his guilt to Laya, writing: “I am sorry for sexually assaulting you … I tried to rape you, and I thank you everyday for not letting me do that to you.”

The alleged victim reported the incident to the university at the time, but only went public months later on Feb. 15, 2011, after the school’s investigation lagged, according to Jollene Levid, then an organizer with the advocacy group AF3IRM, which helped lead the campaign calling for Cheng’s resignation as student regent.

After the public allegations, the district attorney’s office told reporters they had dropped the charges because the misdemeanor sexual battery charge would not stick: “We’re not saying it didn’t happen,” said Susan Kang Schroeder, the district attorney’s office chief of staff, on Feb. 16. “We’re just saying that we cannot file a case unless we can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

A media firestorm followed the victim’s first interview, and Cheng denied the assault days later, saying he was “innocent of all accusations made.” Cheng said he admitted, in writing, to the attempted sexual assault only after being hounded by the alleged victim with “as many as 50 calls a day,” and said his admission was false: “She demanded that I write e-mail apologies to her … Exhausted, I sent out those e-mails,” he wrote at the time.

“What I said in those e-mails are not true, and did not reflect my behavior … I regret lying to her in those e-mails, and it was a mistake to capitulate just so she would stop calling me incessantly,” he added.

The alleged assault spurred a protest movement that dogged Cheng across multiple UC campuses, demanding he resign as student regent. 

He stepped down in May 2011, giving up his position as the sole student member of the University of California Board of Regents. Cheng said at the time that he was not admitting wrongdoing, but that his tenure had become a distraction.

After a brief stint in Massachusetts, he moved to San Francisco in 2011, rechristened himself “Jay,” and began a new life in politics here.

In San Francisco, Cheng has amassed power and influence

Since his move to San Francisco, Cheng has climbed the political ladder to a high rung. No new allegations have been publicly made against him since his arrival in the city. 

A tall, bald and bespectacled man, Cheng is a behind-the-scenes operative, more involved in steering well-heeled donors toward campaigns and choosing candidates for office than delivering stump speeches or working the room.

Cheng came to San Francisco to join Mayor Ed Lee’s 2011 mayoral campaign as a lowly staffer, driven to elect the city’s first Asian mayor. He described his first role on the campaign in a 2020 webinar: Driving around Lee’s wife, Anita, which he called the “best job I’d ever had.”

“When I asked how I got that job … they said: ‘You smiled a lot, and you didn’t talk a lot,’” he said. “People were like, ‘That seems like a nice person. We’ll go with that guy.’”

The campaign was Cheng’s first time alongside Mary Jung, one of Lee’s closest allies, who would go on to chair the Democratic County Central Committee and was influential in mentoring a generation of political operatives.

“He was young, and friendly, and energetic, and nice,” said Jung. For the following decade, Cheng became Jung’s protege and close personal friend; Cheng once described her as like a “mother.”

According to longtime political observers, Cheng also benefitted from Jung’s protection.

“What really set him apart [from other political newcomers] was that Mary Jung took him under her wing,” said one political insider. “She basically saved him from disgrace.”

Jung, for her part, said that could not be further from the truth: Cheng was “smart” and “extraordinary,” she said. “Anyone would have noticed his talent.”

Jung said she first heard of the allegations against him after the Lee campaign, but investigated for herself and was comforted by the lack of criminal charges.

“I googled his name, I spent quite a lot of time reading through everything, and I had that ‘Aha!’ moment: He was exonerated,” she said. “It was a relief. There’s no ‘there’ there.”

In 2013, Cheng and Jung both joined the San Francisco Association of Realtors as lobbyists on the same day, according to Jung. Cheng was Jung’s assistant, and spent years accompanying her to meetings with politicians, developers, and others across the city. He also served as a spokesperson for the Realtors, denouncing policies like a tax to disincentivize apartment flipping and an anti-eviction ordinance.

“Those first three to four years, we were working on a lot of campaigns together,” said Jung. “It could be seven days a week, starting at seven or eight in the morning until 10 o’clock at night. There’s a lot of close bonds that are formed.”

In September 2020, alongside Jung, Cheng helped launch Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, now the pre-eminent funder of candidates and causes on the city’s anti-progressive wing. It supplied the majority of funds to the recall of then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022, which was started by Jung, and bankrolled the school board recalls that year, too.

Neighbors has spent at least $8.7 million in direct political contributions since 2020, making it the top-spending organization active in city politics today. The group’s patron is a Republican mega-donor and billionaire, William Oberndorf, and the group counts dozens of wealthy individuals in tech, real estate and banking as donors. 

Cheng, as the group’s top leader, can direct donors’ money towards his preferred candidates and causes, and did so during the March 5 election. According to state filings, Neighbors gave at least $911,100 to slate mailer organizations promoting the Democrats for Change candidates, who trounced their opponents and now head the Democratic County Central Committee. Two of those slate mailers are run by Jung.

Cheng is also married to Kanishka Cheng, the head of the political-pressure group TogetherSF and a former aide to both Mayor London Breed and then-District 2 Supervisor Mark Farrell. 

For moderates, an open question

For politicos across the city, the question will be whether to distance themselves from Cheng and Neighbors’ money.

Lily Ho, one of the newly-elected members to the DCCC who will sit on the sexual-assault committee, said for her part that she is satisfied, as criminal charges had not been filed and no civil lawsuit was launched. Ho added that she has worked with Cheng over the years, and “never once ever smelled” any untoward behavior from him.

“These conversations around sexual assault and abuse and harassment … are really difficult,” she said, adding that the committee was seeking to “make the room a safe place for survivors and witnesses to speak freely.”

“We’re really looking to create a space for survivors, as well as signal to the Democratic clubs, that sexual assault and violence won’t be tolerated,” added Carrie Barnes, another newly elected DCCC member who will serve on the sexual assault committee.

Other members of the committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nadia Rahman, a local political activist and organizer who wrote an op-ed last week calling for “not just a reckoning for one faction, one tribe or one group of allies in San Francisco” but a “reckoning for everyone,” said she hoped that the DCCC’s code of conduct would come with real follow-through.

“There needs to be some enforcement mechanism and consequences with that code of conduct, so it’s not just an empty policy without teeth,” she said. Rahman, who did not speak on Cheng specifically, agreed that individual cases should not be adjudicated and such an approach would become politicized.

But, she said, she hoped that the party’s actions would be consequential.

“What I’m looking for is for them to not only set that direction now, to carve all of that out, but also to walk the walk,” she said.

Additional reporting by Joe Eskenazi.

This article has been updated to clarify a second set of allegations referenced in the Democratic County Central Committee’s announcement of its task force.

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