but last week he got an emotional public statement of support from his wife in the pages of the city’s biggest newspaper.
In a first-person article published Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eliana Lopez poured out her heart. “My dear Ross, they do not let us talk but you can read here from me that I love you,” she wrote. “Be strong, my dear, knowing that my heart is next to you.”
Mirkarimi is under a court order that forbids him to have any contact with his wife. They have not been able to speak since mid-January.
Mirkarimi’s troubles stem from a New Year’s Eve argument with his wife during which he grabbed her arm and bruised it. In her published letter, Lopez said the dispute was “a very emotional misunderstanding about custody issues at a time when our relationship was struggling.” But she said she never feared for her safety. “What I do fear is the mischaracterization of the events as a basis to remove my husband from elected office.”
Mirkarimi pleaded guilty last month to a misdemeanor offense of false imprisonment (for grabbing his wife and restraining her). Mayor Ed Lee then suspended Mirkarimi from office—without his salary of $199,000 a year—and sent his case to the five-member city Ethics Commission, accusing Mirkarimi of misconduct
The Ethics Commission will hold a hearing and then vote on a recommendation to remove Mirkarimi from the office of sheriff. If it so recommends, the case will then go the 11-member Board of Supervisors, of which Mirkarimi was a member for seven years until he became sheriff in January. It will take nine of the 11 supervisors to oust Mirkarimi, a high hurdle.
Mirkarimi is fighting to keep his job. He has filed a suit arguing that the city’s misconduct law is unconstitutionally vague. Furthermore, he argues that he cannot be guilty of misconduct in office since his crime was committed December 31 and he was only sworn in as sheriff January 8 and the crime has no bearing on his duties as sheriff.
“One cannot abuse an office one does not hold,” Mirkarimi’s lawyer wrote in a court filing.
Mayor Lee says the city charter does not require that the “wrongful conduct” occur while in office. He also argues that Mirkarimi’s conviction puts him in an impossible position since the sheriff oversees the probation office that now has charge of his probation.
The last time the city ousted an office holder was in 1980. A state appellate court overturned that decision, ruling that, “quite clearly, official misconduct requires a direct relationship of the alleged wrongdoing to the office held.”
Lopez and their son, Theo, who turns three this month, are currently in Venezuela visiting Lopez’s ailing father. Ironically, it was a dispute over Lopez’s wish to take their son to Venezuela that appears to have sparked the New Year’s Eve argument; Mirkarimi feared Lopez would not return to the United States and did not want her to take the boy to Venezuela.
The court order that bars Mirkarimi from seeing Lopez also guarantees him daily visitation rights with the boy. Therefore, for Lopez to go to Venezuela, Mirkarimi had to give up his visitation rights and approve Lopez’s trip, which he did last month. She is due to return April 28.
Mirkarimi started out in politics a decade ago on the far left of politics in a city that is usually rated the most leftist in America. He helped found the Green Party in the city and only later switched to the Democratic Party. The liberal community of which he is a part feels very strongly about the issue of spousal abuse. As a result, he has lost a lot of support within the city. Aaron Peskin, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, has shunned Mirkarimi and has publicly called on him to resign.
The main support he has going for him is his wife’s. With the victim in the case so strongly backing Mirkarimi, progressives in the city may feel they have to take a second look at Mirkarimi’s fate.
Mirkarimi, 50, was born in Chicago to a 19-year-old mother descended from Russian Jews and a Muslim father who had emigrated from Tehran. They divorced when he was five, and his mother moved them to Rhode Island. He rarely saw his father.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, his mother took him to Vietnam War protests and rallies for women’s rights, and, as a teen, Mirkarimi subscribed to the Democratic Socialists of America newspaper.
He graduated from St. Louis University with a major in political science and a minor in Russian literature and language, reflecting his mother’s background.
He interned with consumer rights trailblazer Ralph Nader in Washington, DC, before moving to California in 1984 to study Russian literature at the Mon-terey Institute of International Studies. He quickly fell in love with California’s
environmental activism and settled in San Francisco.
He’s a Navy Reserve veteran who earned two master’s degrees—one in international affairs from Golden Gate University and one in environmental science from the University of San Francisco.
His first political job was as legislative aide to Terence Hallinan, then a San Francisco supervisor; he later served as campaign manager for both of Hallinan’s successful runs for district attorney. Hallinan hired Mirkarimi as an investigator in his office, for which Mirkarimi enrolled in the San Francisco Police Academy and became a state-certified peace officer.
Hallinan said Mirkarimi was always a “real efficient, businesslike guy”—but said he didn’t know his own strength. “He’s really strong, you know,” Hallinan said, telling the Chronicle how during a celebration Mirkarimi “picked me up by the armpits. I said, ‘Put me down!’ “
Described universally as incredibly hardworking and productive—leading the charge on everything from the city’s plastic bag ban to the decriminalization of medical marijuana—Mirkarimi’s style often rubbed his colleagues at City Hall the wrong way.
The Chronicle reported that Mirkarimi rarely returned colleagues’ phone calls, would demand meetings with them and then brush them off, and never gave fellow supervisors a heads-up on how he planned to vote.
The newspaper said his own aides often complained about him yelling at them, and one City Hall regular said his voice could be heard screaming through the walls.