January 30, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO, California—When 69-year-old Ahn Lê filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin on Tuesday over an alleged 2019 attack against him in Chinatown, the details highlighted sounded appalling.
The headlines also sounded horrible, “69-year-old man beaten with a baseball bat by a father-son duo while walking in Chinatown.” People were angry Boudin refused to file hate crime charges against the culprits.
Lê stated in a press conference earlier this week, “It was the most brutal, terrifying and humiliating experience of my life.”
However, it was Boudin’s predecessor Suzy Loftus who filed the charges and it was Suzy Loftus who chose not to prosecute the attack as a hate crime.
According to KPIX5, Chesa Boudin’s office released a statement, stating the baseball bat used to “beat” Lê was a toy plastic baseball bat. It wasn’t wood or aluminum and the alleged co-attacker (the father) was in a wheelchair.
Boudin’s press release stated Lê “wanted [the alleged attacker’s] child to be prosecuted,” the child is only 11-years-old and photographs taken by police at the scene did not show any physical injuries to Lê.
The core of Lê’s complaint is that he was not informed of any plea deals.
“In his lawsuit, Mr. Lê falsely asserted that our office settled the case without consulting him or receiving any input from him. This is not accurate,” the release continues. “Mr. Lê and the [DA’s] advocate communicated many times, but for a period of weeks, Mr. Lê did not respond to repeated messages from the advocate,” Boudin’s press release stated.
The San Francisco Chronicle obtained documents and found that “The records detail how a victim advocate from the office reached out to the victim, Ahn Lê, more than two dozen times, leaving several messages in the week leading up to a plea deal.”
Although Chesa Boudin has done more than enough things to justify the latest recall, one can’t stop wondering if this latest lawsuit and its publicity were meant to influence the Chesa Boudin Recall Campaign.
Feature Images via KPIX5 & Instagram