Part 51: What is Whistleblower Journalism? The Most Unique Career Choice in Los Angeles

Published December 14, 2023. Updated August 23, 2024.

Dec 15, 2023

Photo of Downtown Los Angeles, California, by author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

Last night, I had a question. I’d thought about it before at the outset of writing 50 Parts to date in this investigative series. What is Whistleblower Journalism? At the outset, I thought: here’s a cool concept, the whistleblower does the journalism; the story gets told. That’s not so simple in Los Angeles, but just over a year into this project, I’ve developed some impressions about how someone might define this term. Doing so, I hope, will help this burgeoning field of journalism and advance practice while telling my story.

I did what you do when you first have a question as a journalist. I looked for the answers online, in JSTOR, in Whistleblower Network News, and in Google Scholar too and beyond, but although there were some usages of the terms and indeed even descriptions, no one had attempted to offer a comprehensive definition that I could identify yet be completely available to the public. Some decried it, others praised it, but no one, not the least a whistleblower journalist themselves, sought to offer an explanation and describe their actions in great detail. It’s a self-consuming process!

Tentatively, I’m going to offer the following definition: Whistleblower journalism is the practice of using both open-source and established media channels to share a story of whistleblowing while disclosing facts or secrets; that a whistleblower reasonably believes constitute wrongdoing or a violation of laws or regulations enforced by a governmental or non-governmental organization. The intention of this is not only to provide this information to the public via the press but also to shield the whistleblower from further retaliation and, in this process, to have the press itself act as an entity of changemaking, whether for profit or non-profit purposes. Retaliation is a common experience.

This is different from, say, yellow journalism, where the press intentionally offers fictitious or outlandish accounts in the hope of generating public anger. It’s also different from what one commentator described as “leak journalism,” where the account is fully anonymous and no information is given that would describe an actual whistleblower as being behind it or taking any form of accountability. Perhaps the most famous case of the nexus between leaks and whistleblowers, what some describe as a paradigm, is the notorious case of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, along with the related cases of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. What you say and how you say it matter’s just as much as the evidence that you present to the public for persuasive efficacy.

The recent disclosure of United States National Security Secrets online in an anonymous chat forum by Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, for which 15 people have now been disciplined as a result of the investigation for their lax oversight, according to the December 11 report by Dan Lamothe in the Washington Post. On June 15 of this year, Teixeira was indicted, and on June 21, he pleaded not guilty. The newspaper that uncovered Watergate doesn’t describe this as whistleblowing, but rather as the actions of a leaker. Teixeira undermined national security; he didn’t expose abuses, nor has any press statement appeared proclaiming his motives.

The LA Fed Tapes scandal, which I have extensively covered as a journalist, is slightly different. In this case, the alleged leaker did post a statement online on Reddit with the illegal recordings of Nury Martinez, Kevin de León, Gil Cedillo, and Ron Herrera of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, the “LA Fed.” The center of the investigation to date, which was returned by the District Attorney’s office to the Los Angeles Police Department before October 10, swirls around Santos Leon, the former Director of Finance for the organization. Through his attorney’s, Leon has declined to comment to the press. The case remains an ongoing criminal investigation and is now the subject of civil court litigation by two of the participants, de León and Cedillo, in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

I wish to distinguish these cases of leak journalism from whistleblower journalism, where the person behind them openly makes the claim to being a whistleblower, versus someone who simply leaked information without any purposeful communication of intention. Perhaps the most famous recent case of whistleblower journalism is that of Frances Haugen of Facebook, who, with the assistance of the Wall Street Journal, published “The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation.” Haugen would later come forward as the whistleblower in a 60 Minutes interview on October 3, 2021, and subsequently appear before the U.S. Congress to speak.

Now one man’s leaker is another man’s whistleblower, as they say, or one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, as the aphorism says. Repeating this phrase of unclear origin in 1986, the year of my birth, U.S. President Ronald Reagan quipped That’s a catchy phrase, but it’s also misleading.” The question of whether you are breaking the law yourself in impermissible ways that draw criminal and civil action against you is always a difficult one to be faced for some whistleblowers. Earlier in my journey, I attempted to do as Haugen had done and posted a series of emails that I named for online purposes “The USC Files,” but later removed them from Twitter after failing to attract major attention.

So there is a slippery slope; I’ve lived it, and while my former employer undoubtedly will continue to insist they had just cause in firing me, it’s my clear opinion that in doing so they clearly crossed the line into whistleblower retaliation, which is actually quite illegal. People think that by writing about the LA Fed Tapes, about the trial of prominent African-American Los Angeles politician Mark Ridley-Thomas, and disgraced, and now deceased University of Southern California campus gynecologist George Tyndall, I’ve breached confidentiality, a great mortal sin in the tribe. The LA Fed Tapes explicitly discuss the Mark Ridley-Thomas bribery and fraud case in relation to the USC School of Social Work as well as the Tyndall sex abuse scandal.

I worked at USC for the Office of the Provost for nearly 7 years as an assistant for the Vice Provost’s dealings with academic operations and legal matters. I know extremely well what confidentiality is, and rest assured that if I broke confidentiality with this series, USC would undoubtedly file a lawsuit against me. I’ll tell you, though, that they sure tried to silence me prior to terminating me, but only the termination planning didn’t go according to plan. I was one step ahead of USC, and I knew the termination procedures, the attendees, and the setup of the hearing.

USC’s plan to threaten and intimidate me with an apparently long-held-back Title IX complaint from a year-old minimal relationship ended with me holding them to account in person with the assistance of a senior campus security official. I am not naming this individual in order to protect them from retaliation, for which I have a reasonable basis, which has already occurred on some level at USC. This individual had law enforcement experience and was a highly sought-after corporate investigations expert. I knew he would be there, and I knew what USC would try to do to me to kill my story.

Ask most any survivor of such an assault, even as something like that is happening to you, it’s known as Title IX Retaliation in federal civil rights law and university policy. You fight back with all of your strength and energy! As I’ve described in this series to date, after being rendered into a brief state of psychosis in the presence of a campus physician the day prior to termination, my law enforcement instincts had kicked into play. I was a park ranger, and I was a trained civil process server in Honolulu, Hawaii, taught by one of the best to go into neighborhoods and find people in order to serve them court papers for litigation. I’m not afraid of people, and have been in situations.

USC got royally busted on August 26, 2022 by me, and they had no answer. The allegations of a still anonymous whistleblower who filed a lawsuit against USC in July 2020 that would be publicized by KCET, our local PBS station and other legal news outlets continues. These extensive claims assert that USC engages in corrupt business practices exactly of this nature including misclassifying and mishandling investigation reports and documents intentionally to silence campus critics and dissidents. I had a unique position in observing these claims as I was raising them at exactly that same time in the Spring and Summer of 2022 within the university.

USC through its General Counsel Beong Soo-Kim, a former Federal prosecutor and Kaiser Permanente Executive denied the validity of these claims in August 2022 to the USC Academic Senate, which is the university’s faculty leadership entity. The Provost’s Office is the leader of all things faculty at USC, and I was determined to figure out just what was going on at USC to determine whether these claims were true. So I did. After reviewing the lawsuit, I strategically shared it with USC’s newly hired Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Dr. Christopher Manning who recently announced is impending departure from USC to join San Diego State University.

I always admired Dr. Manning even as I knew that he alone could not move the dial at USC on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and most importantly on the corruption that infects their operations within their Human Resources Division under Senior Vice President Felicia Washington, a close ally of USC President Carol Folt who in inheriting the mess left behind by former AVP Janis McEldowney has failed to lead USC to full compliance with its Resolution Agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights in regards to the many hundreds if not thousands of victims of Tyndall, the lead campus gynecologist for several decades. HR had tried to cover-up the scandal in part by intimidating whistleblower nurse Cindy Gilbert.

USC failed to issue its required Title IX Notice at the start of the 2021–2022 academic year as required by the Agreement. After noticing the lapse in the return to campus pandemic era, I took action and confronted by USC’s Title IX Coordinator, Vice President for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX to have the Notice sent out. They almost reluctantly agreed, but they didn’t forget, and in turns they would have their chances at retaliation . When USC failed to update numerous of its websites to reflect the newly named Title IX office, I worked with colleagues to have them updated.

This drew praise from the then leader of the USC Staff Assembly, and even my bosses had to reluctantly accede that this project, inspired in part by Frances Haugen was worthwhile. You have to provide the correct reporting information to the campus community, it’s more than an email and few webpages, rather its’ the basics of compliance. USC’s General Counsel is no dummy, I give him that, and in the presence of USC’s Chief Compliance Officer Stacy Giwa he questioned my motives, asking who had directed me to make the changes. They know that these are requirements!

What I didn’t know at the time, was that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights was also after USC, and they highlighted the same issue in regards to Keck Medicine of USC and the availability of correct, up-to-date reporting information online. Told the General Counsel a simple story, that after having been at USC for so many years I knew to be alert after the graduation period, “for many things have happened,” in oblique reference to the George Tyndall case and that I was a “good shot” giving him my best salute. After that, when I would encounter him, he would look at me like a spy, and I would get the same thing from USC’s Vice President for Professionalism and Ethics, attorney Michael Blanton would threaten me later on August 22, 2022 in creating a false pretext for termination, a disqualifying incident. USC still insists that this was somehow appropriate disciplinary action.

“Your week is about to get worse. What happened with your girlfriend, have a break-up?” he began our Zoom meeting. I had rejected his proposal for an in-person hour-long in their offices. Mike’s anger at the idea of me being a whistleblower, that I might have something to say about the hostile termination planning, and that I might try to expose it simmered under his skin. After it became evident that there was no purpose other than intimidation, I rebuked Blanton for this comment. So when they came at me just 4 days later with an elaborately, lawyerly crafted termination letter using this as its chief basis, the dirty tricks simply just didn’t work on me that day to USC’s surprise.

USC’s expert security official grew irate as I confronted my former supervisor and the brand new HR AVP about the intentionally, and purposively concealed Title IX file and its usage as a threat. It was no act, and after I finished accosting them to no reply other than guilty faces, we got down to business. Attempted extortion, whistleblower retaliation, a culture of obstructing justice. Sadly everything that the Cardinal and Gold “mafia” as many tell me has been known to act, a case of illegality worthy of “RICO” as one fellow journalist replied totally unprompted to me recently on point.

What happened next is straight out of a Hollywood movie directed by a USC alumnus, or Spielberg or Lucas, but the week prior, I had seen USC’s SVP of University Relations Sam Garrison speaking and it was the strangest thing. Now I know Sam since real estate developer and shopping magnate Rick Caruso became Chairman of the USC Board of Trustees in May 2018 following the Tyndall scandal and before Caruso would direct USC to turn Mark Ridley-Thomas into the U.S. Attorney’s office.

I’ll never forget when in December 2018, after promising the USC community a report on the abuses committed by Tyndall, our new Chairman had hired two attorney’s from the firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP to investigate. That summer there were the appearances of an investigation unfolding, they came and met with people and gathered evidence. Then report was snuffed, so I confronted Sam in the hallway of the Bovard Administration building to ask him about that after USC had instead targeted USC Marshall School of Business Dean Jim Ellis to great outcry from his constituents. Ellis would write about this experience later in the Los Angeles Times.

These even included one business journalism publisher running an entire series on the imbroglio as it happened, with Caruso leading the effort to terminate Ellis on the basis that he had mishandled Office of Equity and Diversity complaints, including Title IX complaints on the spurious basis movedforward by the firm Cooley LLP with USC’s Michael Blanton newly hired to create the office envisioned after the Dean Carmen Puliafito scandal involving drugs and a circle of young consorts. Blanton was the one who led the effort to deliver these articles against Ellis, which led to a blowout in the Bovard Administration Building with Caruso delivering such a sharp rebuke to fellow Trustee Ming Hsieh for objection that the former Chairman of USC, fellow real estate developer and U.S Marine Ed Roski rebuked him for it in an open letter.

Sam Garrison was a former VP at Caruso, and a founder of Operation Progress which provides LAPD officers as mentors to young people in Watts, and an expert political strategist. When I saw Mr. Garrison speak on August 18, 2022 at the USC Community House it was the most suspicious thing in my life I’d seen. He interrupted himself to mutter “nobody cares what you think” while speaking to a diverse audience of stakeholders like he was repeating others. When I was a child, my ear drums were so pock marked that I learned to speak by reading lips. I know what I saw that day.

I thought something was up. It wasn’t just the $104 million dollars in advertising pumping him up that day. Garrison realized I was watching him I think glibly and glared at me, and he glared again after another constituent told him how helpful I had been to her project and I smiled just a little bit. So after the confrontation over USC’s alleged “hit team” that I experienced personally, I changed the subject to the election and what I feared was about to happen to change the political landscape. A clear warning was issued that I would go public about the discussion if the leak happened.

My concerns were specific that audio recordings illegally made with “bugs” were going to be used to execute a political influence operation in Los Angeles by sowing chaos. I reiterated this concern to the senior security official after we left the room. On August 26, 2022, I thought we were going to see something acoustically spectacular happen in Los Angeles based on that power of observation and as I had left the event I could feel my neck straight as an arrow. My mother has worked in telecommunications her entire adult life and before that she wanted to be a police officer. I thought something was up, and more than just the usual USC phone games.

Beginning on September 19, 2022, the LA Fed Tapes began to be posted on Reddit by “Honest-Finding-1581” and after being ditched by a moderator they still didn’t attract attention. So they were Tweeted at journalists and a local elected official to draw the press. When I sat down and listened to the recordings, there it was, Caruso’s guy Garrison right at 13:44 on Kevin de León’s tongue in the recording posted by Knock LA. My prediction that he would appear right in the middle of this scandal was right on the dot, and soon I was able to connect him to the writing as well through his former supervisor Martin Ludlow on the LA City Council who would later join the LA Fed before being convicted of misusing union funds and workers by prosecutors.

One source told me that this story and the journalism that I am doing are the most “gonzo” thing he’s ever seen in reference to the gonzo journalism style developed by the late Hunter S Thompson. I might say that for all whistleblowers the experience is pretty gonzo, bizarre feeling, a trip, but for a whistleblower journalist must less whistleblower journalism the concept is embedded in the press. So we have our definition, and if I may add one postulation, the source who came forward with her story of sexual assault and the cover-up she experienced is a whistleblower too.

She is brave beyond belief, and I salute her, and that’s why I’m doing whistleblower journalism. Dr. Christopher Manning is also a brave person, he met with me on my final day to receive my spreadsheet on coordinating USC’s reporting and support resources, which also documented inconsistent DEI content development at USC. My friend Chris was afraid for me, for what would happen even as I assured him I fully intended to “let the dogs out” with a nod to campus law enforcement. If you ask me, any person in any situation can be a leader, and a whistleblower by circumstance.

I’m indebted to two fantastic whistleblower organizations for their support in this project. First, to Naomi Seligman the Chief Strategy Officer at Whistleblower Aid acting in her personal capacity for her expert storytelling advice, who readers may know from the Rick Jacobs/Mayor Eric Garcetti sexual harassment scandal involving an LAPD officer. Second, to Whistleblowers of America in Pensacola, Florida led Jackie Garrick, which has helped me by providing peer support from a Masters of Social work student. Please stay tuned for more stories, and this is a work in progress!

Part 51: What is Whistleblower Journalism? The Most Unique Career Choice in Los Angeles

Published December 14, 2023. Updated August 23, 2024.

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