As the petition to recall Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin approaches the deadline, a recall proponent claimed she was attacked after her personal information was disseminated on social media.
Recall proponent Katrina Schmitt said she was at home around 8:40 p.m. on Sept.16 when two large rocks were allegedly thrown through her glass front door.
A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times that a vandalism report had been completed for the incident.
“Mike Bonin is directly responsible for this act of political terrorism. He has been telling lies about us, riling his mob into a frenzy, and then gives out our home addresses. This is unacceptable. He has put our lives and the lives of our families in danger. He should resign immediately,” recall proponent Nico Ruderman, whose home address was also posted on social media, told The Epoch Times.
“Publishing our names and home addresses is a blatant attempt to intimidate us and has now resulted in violence against us.”
On Sept. 15, a Twitter account self-proclaimed to be used by Bonin’s committee to oppose the recall posted a screenshot of an official copy of the notice of intent to recall Mike Bonin. The document includes the contact information of the authorized representative of the recall team as well as five proponents’ home addresses and signatures.
The Twitter account, dubbed Stop the Right-Wing Recalls, was created in September 2021 and has been recruiting volunteers and raising funding against the Bonin recall effort. Although this account has only more than a hundred followers, Bonin was one of them.
The account later rescinded its original post, saying it “inadvertently disclosed personal information.”
A spokesman for the Twitter account, Jesse Zwick, told the Los Angeles Times that “I did not intend to reveal anyone’s personal information. I took the post down the minute I was made aware of the error.”
According to a statement released by the recall proponents, the attack occurred just a day after Bonin allegedly disseminated all of the recall proponents’ home addresses on social media, his fundraising page, and through emails to his supporters.
Bonin was served with a recall notice on June 15, and the organizers need to gather more than 27,000 signatures by the Nov. 10 deadline to move the recall forward.
Recall organizers have listed 31 reasons to recall Bonin on their Recall Bonin 2021 webpage. They allege Bonin broke promises he made about maintaining children’s safety, reducing crimes and homelessness, and so on.
Ruderman, who serves on the Venice Neighborhood Council (VNC) and runs the recall operations with Schmitt, claimed Bonin told his supporters that the recall proponents are “right-wing MAGA racists and extremists.” However, Ruderman and Schmitt are both lifelong Democrats with no political involvement until they were negatively impacted by the failing policies in Venice, Ruderman said.
Venice resident and recall volunteer Rick Swinger told The Epoch Times that Bonin failed to do his job and has been hiding information from the public. In addition to growing homelessness, drug addicts, and crimes, Venice is also facing sanitation challenges. Swinger said needles were often dumped in the storm drain near a kids’ playground and that rodents can often be sighted at night.
“Rodents are all over place! You can ask any homeless, everybody’s been out at night because they are nocturnal. ... In fact, we actually saw a Norway rat or roof rat at a VNC meeting a few years ago; it was inside the elementary school,” said Swinger.
“We’ve got to really bring awareness to this problem because this is the start of a medieval epidemic that we don’t need during a pandemic.”
Bonin didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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