California
Ex-girlfriend of boy band member charged with trying to hire a hitman to kill him
The former girlfriend of a member of the boy band Why Don’t We has been charged with trying to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill him as part of a custody dispute over their now 7-year-old daughter, prosecutors said.
Gabriela Gonzalez, a 24-year-old with a large social media following, was charged Tuesday with one count of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder in the alleged plot to kill Jack Avery, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said. Gonzalez’s father, Francisco Gonzalez, 59, and her then-boyfriend Kai Cordrey, 26, face the same charges.
“This is a case where the defendants are accused of going to great lengths to find someone to commit murder,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a news release.
He said the charges were the result of a lengthy investigation that was initiated by the FBI and eventually turned over to the district attorney’s office.
Avery thanked prosecutors and law enforcement for their support in an Instagram post Thursday and said his focus is on “being the best father I can be.”
Prosecutors say Gonzalez is accused of seeking the help of Cordrey to hire someone to kill Avery between 2020 and 2021. Then, in April 2021, her father allegedly sent Cordrey $10,000 as front money in the plot, prosecutors said. Two months later, prosecutors said, Cordrey allegedly requested and got $4,000 more from Francisco Gonzalez when the alleged hit man asked for more money.
In September 2021, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a hitman spoke with Cordrey about the murder-for-hire plot. Cordrey is accused of telling the undercover officer that Avery was the target and discussed payment and proof of death, prosecutors said.
Gabriela Gonzalez, who has over 450,000 followers on Instagram, was being held in a Los Angeles-area detention facility on $2 million bond on Thursday. Her attorney, Elliot Zarabi, did not immediately return a call for comment.
Francisco Gonzalez was arrested in Florida and is awaiting extradition. He was being held in a jail in Florida in Seminole County on Thursday. It was unclear if he had an attorney to speak on his behalf on the charges.
Los Angeles County jail records show that Cordrey was arrested Thursday. His bail was set at $2 million, according to a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office. Jail records did not show an attorney for him.
If convicted, all three defendants face up to life in prison.
The boy band Why Don’t We released their debut album in 2018, which included the song “8 Letters,” and a sophomore album three years later. They have since disbanded, and Avery released the single “XOXOX” on his own this year.
Florida
Biologist fired over Charlie Kirk post wins $485,000 settlement
Florida officials will pay nearly half a million dollars to a biologist who was fired by a state agency for criticizing conservative activist Charlie Kirk on social media after his death.
The state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fired biologist Brittney Brown in September after she reposted a meme on her personal Instagram account that claimed Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot in their classrooms. She filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement, saying she struggled to find other work because the state agency is the regulatory body for her research specialization in bird conservation.
Brown on Thursday signed a $485,000 settlement agreement with agency directors that covers backpay, damages and attorney costs. She agreed as part of the deal to not seek future employment at the agency.
Fish and Wildlife officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brown was among a wave of workers in both the public and private sector who lost their jobs over comments about Kirk’s assassination on a Utah university campus. Lawsuits are pending over many of those firings.
Before his death, Kirk and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA, galvanized the conservative youth vote to help President Donald Trump win a second term.
Kirk’s supporters combed social media after the Sept. 10 shooting for posts they viewed as celebrating his death. Influencers like Laura Loomer pledged to ruin the careers of people who made light of the killing, and the conservative social media account Libs of TikTok shared the identities and workplaces of many who posted with its audience of millions.
Libs of TikTok posted about Brown, and she was fired the next day, according to her lawsuit. Brown said someone then alerted Libs of TikTok about her termination only about 10 minutes after it happened and before it was made public.
In a rare instance in Tennessee, a retired police officer was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post joking about Kirk’s assassination. Tennessee officials agreed Wednesday to pay $835,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the man, Larry Bushart. While behind bars, Bushart lost his postretirement job and missed the birth of his granddaughter before authorities eventually dropped a felony charge against him, he said in the lawsuit.
Before her termination, Brown worked for Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for about seven years and studied shorebirds and seabirds on the panhandle, according to court documents.
Carrie McNamara, an attorney with the ACLU of Florida, called Brown’s settlement deal “a hard-won vindication” that sends a message to Florida officials that they cannot punish speech they dislike.
“The First Amendment does not disappear when someone accepts a government job,” McNamara said.
Brown’s former supervisor at the agency, Habitat and Species Conservation Director Melissa Tucker, had claimed that Brown’s post generated hundreds of formal complaints and caused significant disruption. Discovery in the case later revealed that the agency only received about 50 complaints.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker imposed sanctions against Tucker last week for exaggerating the amount and then not correcting the record.
Illinois
Charges dropped against activists in Chicago immigration crackdown
CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago’s top federal prosecutor abandoned a closely watched case Thursday against four activists who protested outside a federal building during last year’s immigration crackdown in the city, after a judge scrutinized allegations of grand jury misconduct by the prosecutor’s office.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros announced the decision to dismiss the remaining charges in court following a closed-door meeting over redacted grand jury transcripts. He told U.S. District Judge April Perry he was unaware until recently of the alleged misconduct, including a prosecutor meeting with a grand juror outside proceedings and other jurors who disagreed with the case being dismissed prevented from participating. Boutros did not dispute the allegations, saying the conduct was upsetting and the reason the case was being dismissed.
“No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Boutros said.
Boutros, who was appointed by the Trump administration last year, declined to comment further Thursday through a spokesman.
The case, slated to go to trial next week, is among the most high-profile cases out of the crackdown that rippled across the nation’s third-largest city and suburbs last year. It is also the latest example of how the Justice Department has struggled to prosecute people accused of assaulting or hindering federal officers while protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Defense attorneys for the activists, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, said they would seek copies of the unredacted transcripts to learn more.
“The revelations of the grand jury misconduct that led to the dismissal of the charges is sadly not surprising,” said Abughazaleh’s defense attorney Josh Herman. “This misguided case should have never been brought against Kat Abughazaleh or any of her co-defendants for exercising their protected First Amendment rights.”
In October, Abughazaleh was among six people initially charged with conspiring to impede an officer, a felony. Prosecutors alleged they surrounded an immigration agent’s van with other protesters at a federal facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, which was central to the Trump administration’s aggressive operation.
Charges were later dropped against two of the people.
Last month, prosecutors scrapped the felony conspiracy charge altogether amid questions about the grand jury transcripts. Prosecutor’s fresh charging documents last month did not detail further allegations against the activists.
Despite objections from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and other news media outlets, Perry closed part of the hearing to the public because of the discussion of grand jury proceedings, which are kept secret.
The others charged were Andre Martin, who was on Abughazaleh’s campaign staff; Oak Park village trustee Brian Straw; and Michael Rabbitt, a Democratic committeeperson. Each faced a single misdemeanor count of forcibly impeding a federal agent.
The charges were dismissed with prejudice on Thursday, preventing them from being refiled. Perry also floated the idea of a separate hearing on possible sanctions for the U.S. Attorney’s Office over their actions.
The case is not the first time during the Trump administration that prosecutors have faced scrutiny over their conduct before grand juries.
In November, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia accused the Justice Department of having engaged in a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” in the process of securing an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey.
Those problems, a magistrate judge wrote, include “fundamental misstatements of the law” by a prosecutor to the grand jury that indicted Comey in September, the use of potentially privileged communications during the investigation and unexplained irregularities in the transcript of the grand jury proceedings.
The case was later dismissed after a judge determined that the prosecutor who filed the false statements prosecution was illegally appointed. Comey in April was newly indicted over a social media photo of seashells arranged on a beach that officials said constituted a threat against Trump.
Kentucky
Meta settles social media addiction case
Social media companies including Meta have settled the first of many lawsuits brought by hundreds of school districts seeking compensation for costs they say they incurred dealing with harms to children’s mental health from social media addiction.
The lawsuit brought by a small, rural Kentucky school district was set to go to trial next month in federal court in Oakland, California. The judge and the parties selected it as a bellwether case — essentially a test for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury — out of 1,200 similar cases. The settlement only applies to the Breathitt County School District.
Meta reached a settlement with the district Thursday, following settlements earlier this week with the other defendants in the case — TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube.
The financial terms of the settlements were not disclosed. The school district had sought more than $60 million to create a 15-year program it said would help counteract mental health and learning issues caused by social media.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys said in a statement that their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”
The settlement follows court losses earlier this year for Meta and YouTube in social media harms lawsuits in California and New Mexico.
In March, Meta and YouTube were found liable for designing addictive features following a trial in Los Angeles. The plaintiff, known by her initials KGM, claimed she became addicted to social media as a child and that it exacerbated her mental health struggles.
A jury sided with her and awarded about $6 million in damages.
And in New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta harms children’s mental health and safety, in violation of state law.
Ex-girlfriend of boy band member charged with trying to hire a hitman to kill him
The former girlfriend of a member of the boy band Why Don’t We has been charged with trying to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill him as part of a custody dispute over their now 7-year-old daughter, prosecutors said.
Gabriela Gonzalez, a 24-year-old with a large social media following, was charged Tuesday with one count of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder in the alleged plot to kill Jack Avery, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said. Gonzalez’s father, Francisco Gonzalez, 59, and her then-boyfriend Kai Cordrey, 26, face the same charges.
“This is a case where the defendants are accused of going to great lengths to find someone to commit murder,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a news release.
He said the charges were the result of a lengthy investigation that was initiated by the FBI and eventually turned over to the district attorney’s office.
Avery thanked prosecutors and law enforcement for their support in an Instagram post Thursday and said his focus is on “being the best father I can be.”
Prosecutors say Gonzalez is accused of seeking the help of Cordrey to hire someone to kill Avery between 2020 and 2021. Then, in April 2021, her father allegedly sent Cordrey $10,000 as front money in the plot, prosecutors said. Two months later, prosecutors said, Cordrey allegedly requested and got $4,000 more from Francisco Gonzalez when the alleged hit man asked for more money.
In September 2021, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a hitman spoke with Cordrey about the murder-for-hire plot. Cordrey is accused of telling the undercover officer that Avery was the target and discussed payment and proof of death, prosecutors said.
Gabriela Gonzalez, who has over 450,000 followers on Instagram, was being held in a Los Angeles-area detention facility on $2 million bond on Thursday. Her attorney, Elliot Zarabi, did not immediately return a call for comment.
Francisco Gonzalez was arrested in Florida and is awaiting extradition. He was being held in a jail in Florida in Seminole County on Thursday. It was unclear if he had an attorney to speak on his behalf on the charges.
Los Angeles County jail records show that Cordrey was arrested Thursday. His bail was set at $2 million, according to a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office. Jail records did not show an attorney for him.
If convicted, all three defendants face up to life in prison.
The boy band Why Don’t We released their debut album in 2018, which included the song “8 Letters,” and a sophomore album three years later. They have since disbanded, and Avery released the single “XOXOX” on his own this year.
Florida
Biologist fired over Charlie Kirk post wins $485,000 settlement
Florida officials will pay nearly half a million dollars to a biologist who was fired by a state agency for criticizing conservative activist Charlie Kirk on social media after his death.
The state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fired biologist Brittney Brown in September after she reposted a meme on her personal Instagram account that claimed Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot in their classrooms. She filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement, saying she struggled to find other work because the state agency is the regulatory body for her research specialization in bird conservation.
Brown on Thursday signed a $485,000 settlement agreement with agency directors that covers backpay, damages and attorney costs. She agreed as part of the deal to not seek future employment at the agency.
Fish and Wildlife officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brown was among a wave of workers in both the public and private sector who lost their jobs over comments about Kirk’s assassination on a Utah university campus. Lawsuits are pending over many of those firings.
Before his death, Kirk and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA, galvanized the conservative youth vote to help President Donald Trump win a second term.
Kirk’s supporters combed social media after the Sept. 10 shooting for posts they viewed as celebrating his death. Influencers like Laura Loomer pledged to ruin the careers of people who made light of the killing, and the conservative social media account Libs of TikTok shared the identities and workplaces of many who posted with its audience of millions.
Libs of TikTok posted about Brown, and she was fired the next day, according to her lawsuit. Brown said someone then alerted Libs of TikTok about her termination only about 10 minutes after it happened and before it was made public.
In a rare instance in Tennessee, a retired police officer was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post joking about Kirk’s assassination. Tennessee officials agreed Wednesday to pay $835,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the man, Larry Bushart. While behind bars, Bushart lost his postretirement job and missed the birth of his granddaughter before authorities eventually dropped a felony charge against him, he said in the lawsuit.
Before her termination, Brown worked for Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for about seven years and studied shorebirds and seabirds on the panhandle, according to court documents.
Carrie McNamara, an attorney with the ACLU of Florida, called Brown’s settlement deal “a hard-won vindication” that sends a message to Florida officials that they cannot punish speech they dislike.
“The First Amendment does not disappear when someone accepts a government job,” McNamara said.
Brown’s former supervisor at the agency, Habitat and Species Conservation Director Melissa Tucker, had claimed that Brown’s post generated hundreds of formal complaints and caused significant disruption. Discovery in the case later revealed that the agency only received about 50 complaints.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker imposed sanctions against Tucker last week for exaggerating the amount and then not correcting the record.
Illinois
Charges dropped against activists in Chicago immigration crackdown
CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago’s top federal prosecutor abandoned a closely watched case Thursday against four activists who protested outside a federal building during last year’s immigration crackdown in the city, after a judge scrutinized allegations of grand jury misconduct by the prosecutor’s office.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros announced the decision to dismiss the remaining charges in court following a closed-door meeting over redacted grand jury transcripts. He told U.S. District Judge April Perry he was unaware until recently of the alleged misconduct, including a prosecutor meeting with a grand juror outside proceedings and other jurors who disagreed with the case being dismissed prevented from participating. Boutros did not dispute the allegations, saying the conduct was upsetting and the reason the case was being dismissed.
“No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Boutros said.
Boutros, who was appointed by the Trump administration last year, declined to comment further Thursday through a spokesman.
The case, slated to go to trial next week, is among the most high-profile cases out of the crackdown that rippled across the nation’s third-largest city and suburbs last year. It is also the latest example of how the Justice Department has struggled to prosecute people accused of assaulting or hindering federal officers while protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Defense attorneys for the activists, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, said they would seek copies of the unredacted transcripts to learn more.
“The revelations of the grand jury misconduct that led to the dismissal of the charges is sadly not surprising,” said Abughazaleh’s defense attorney Josh Herman. “This misguided case should have never been brought against Kat Abughazaleh or any of her co-defendants for exercising their protected First Amendment rights.”
In October, Abughazaleh was among six people initially charged with conspiring to impede an officer, a felony. Prosecutors alleged they surrounded an immigration agent’s van with other protesters at a federal facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, which was central to the Trump administration’s aggressive operation.
Charges were later dropped against two of the people.
Last month, prosecutors scrapped the felony conspiracy charge altogether amid questions about the grand jury transcripts. Prosecutor’s fresh charging documents last month did not detail further allegations against the activists.
Despite objections from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and other news media outlets, Perry closed part of the hearing to the public because of the discussion of grand jury proceedings, which are kept secret.
The others charged were Andre Martin, who was on Abughazaleh’s campaign staff; Oak Park village trustee Brian Straw; and Michael Rabbitt, a Democratic committeeperson. Each faced a single misdemeanor count of forcibly impeding a federal agent.
The charges were dismissed with prejudice on Thursday, preventing them from being refiled. Perry also floated the idea of a separate hearing on possible sanctions for the U.S. Attorney’s Office over their actions.
The case is not the first time during the Trump administration that prosecutors have faced scrutiny over their conduct before grand juries.
In November, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia accused the Justice Department of having engaged in a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” in the process of securing an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey.
Those problems, a magistrate judge wrote, include “fundamental misstatements of the law” by a prosecutor to the grand jury that indicted Comey in September, the use of potentially privileged communications during the investigation and unexplained irregularities in the transcript of the grand jury proceedings.
The case was later dismissed after a judge determined that the prosecutor who filed the false statements prosecution was illegally appointed. Comey in April was newly indicted over a social media photo of seashells arranged on a beach that officials said constituted a threat against Trump.
Kentucky
Meta settles social media addiction case
Social media companies including Meta have settled the first of many lawsuits brought by hundreds of school districts seeking compensation for costs they say they incurred dealing with harms to children’s mental health from social media addiction.
The lawsuit brought by a small, rural Kentucky school district was set to go to trial next month in federal court in Oakland, California. The judge and the parties selected it as a bellwether case — essentially a test for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury — out of 1,200 similar cases. The settlement only applies to the Breathitt County School District.
Meta reached a settlement with the district Thursday, following settlements earlier this week with the other defendants in the case — TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube.
The financial terms of the settlements were not disclosed. The school district had sought more than $60 million to create a 15-year program it said would help counteract mental health and learning issues caused by social media.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys said in a statement that their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”
The settlement follows court losses earlier this year for Meta and YouTube in social media harms lawsuits in California and New Mexico.
In March, Meta and YouTube were found liable for designing addictive features following a trial in Los Angeles. The plaintiff, known by her initials KGM, claimed she became addicted to social media as a child and that it exacerbated her mental health struggles.
A jury sided with her and awarded about $6 million in damages.
And in New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta harms children’s mental health and safety, in violation of state law.
