By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader
On the first Saturday of spring in a small Silicon Valley town, Little League games filled nearby fields and residents drifted between shopping plazas under the California morning sun. Along Los Gatos Boulevard, stretching from a gleaming new Tesla dealership to a soon-to-open Whole Foods, roughly 1,250 people gathered for a “No Kings” protest. Classic rock drifted through the air as retirees, tech workers, attorneys, grandparents, and high school students stood shoulder to shoulder. Every few passing cars was a Tesla. The signs targeted Trump, Musk, and the billionaire class surrounding them on all sides.
By noon, it was over. No arrests, no property damage, no confrontations. Just a fleeting exhale of dissent in one of Silicon Valley’s most picturesque towns.
Los Gatos Mayor Rob Moore had taken the stage that morning to applaud the crowd. He had no reason to think this was anything other than what it looked like: democracy, peacefully expressed.
What almost no one there knew was that one of the event’s own organizers was already facing a felony charge.
Not for violence. Not for destruction. For something that had happened nine months earlier, a few feet from where they now stood: words written in chalk on the street in front of that same Tesla dealership, during one of the smaller weekly protests that had been a fixture on the boulevard for nearly a year.
The words: “Tesla Funds Fascism.”
The cleanup bill from Los Gatos Public Works: $722.
The bail: $10,000.
The charge: a felony.
Los Gatos Mayor Rob Moore in the Dark
Los Gatos Mayor Rob Moore came to the No Kings rally to stand with his constituents. He praised the crowd and told protesters that Tesla had refused to set aside any public-facing community space — not even a dog park — for the town it moved into.
He stepped off the stage to applause, then shook hands with protesters, petted dogs, and smiled for photographs.
When asked if he knew the police department he oversees had investigated the protest’s organizer, classified chalk markings on the street as felony vandalism, and forwarded the case to the District Attorney (DA), resulting in a criminal complaint, a felony warrant, and a $10,000 bond the organizer was required to post, Moore’s expression shifted. He said he was not aware of the case.
His own police department — Los Gatos-Monte Sereno PD, funded by the Town Council he sits on — had opened the investigation, authored two formal criminal reports, and sent the case up the chain to DA Rosen’s office.
Officer Christopher D’Anza wrote the reports. Officer Manny Respicio assisted. Sergeant Gregory Borromeo approved. On January 13, 2026, Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Officer Daina Higbee submitted the complaint to Santa Clara County Superior Court. Judge Franklin Bondonno signed the arrest warrant the same day.
The protest organizer has since hired a private attorney to defend him.
A year earlier, Mayor Moore had Los Gatos taxpayers cover his legal bills after being sued for allegedly defaming a Los Gatos Trump supporter on social media.
The “No Kings” organizer has no such safety net.
Tesla Becomes a Crime Victim
The protest’s location is not incidental. The “No Kings” gatherings in Los Gatos have taken place weekly in front of a new Tesla dealership — a company founded and led by Elon Musk, one of the most prominent targets of the protest movement.
Musk, who has become the public face of illogical, gratuitous federal government spending cuts under Trump’s second term, is the most vilified figure in the weekly demonstrations held outside the Los Gatos Telsa dealership.
Rosen himself has been regularly supported by the very Silicon Valley billionaires who are the subject of the “No Kings” protest. He has raised nearly $300,000 for his 2026 re-election campaign and secured endorsements from Sen. Adam Schiff, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Rep. Sam Liccardo, Rep. Ro Khanna, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, and police unions across the county.
The San Jose Mercury News — which has endorsed Rosen’s political campaigns since 2010 and provided mostly favorable coverage for his office for more than 16 years — has a symbiotic relationship with the same institutional donors and Silicon Valley power structure that Rosen’s office has repeatedly chosen to protect rather than investigate.
Rosen, and the District Attorney’s Public Information Officer, Sean Webby, a former Mercury reporter, have regularly declined comment to this news organization on multiple occasions, including for recent reporting on the “Secrets of a Child Molester at City Hall” series.
Victims in a Los Gatos child sex abuse prosecution, commonly known as the Los Gatos Party Mom case, complained Rosen’s office ignored them for years and only moved the case to trial in 2026 as he was running for re-election.
The connection between the Tesla dealership, the protest organizer who targeted it in chalk, and the DA who accepted a felony referral over a $722 cleanup bill raises a question that local critics are asking bluntly: Is the Santa Clara County DA functioning as an enforcement arm for the billionaire class his donors belong to?
Business Owners: Real Crime Gets Nothing. Chalk Gets a Felony.
When Los Gatos business owners learned about the chalk case, several expressed outrage — and demanded anonymity, wary of antagonizing local law enforcement.
“My windows were broken. Police came, took a report, and I never heard from them again,” said one downtown retailer who has operated in Los Gatos for more than a decade. “Now I’m supposed to believe they had the time and resources to run a felony investigation over writing on the street in front of Tesla? Who exactly are they protecting?”
A local hair stylist reported her shop was regularly subjected to harassment and police repeatedly refused to show up or take a report. She was outraged that Los Gatos police provided excessive resources to Tesla over chalk on a public street.
Others noted the same pattern: actual vandalism, break-ins, and theft against small businesses and residents go unanswered, while a chalk message targeting a politically connected corporation produces criminal reports, supplemental reports, a complaint to the DA, a bail warrant, and a felony case number.
In 2024 Transparent California reported Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen earned $579,214 in pay and benefits. His wife, a former federal prosecutor, earns in the mid $200’s as a Santa Clara Superior Court Judge. However, Rosen’s required financial disclosures suggest why he might be beholden to Silicon Valley billionaires.
Rosen was first elected as Santa Clara County DA in 2010. Since 2017 he has held financial interest in stocks including Google (now known as Alphabet), Facebook, Apple, PayPal, Nvidia, Visa, Disney, Palo Alto Networks, JP Morgan Chase, Norfolk Southern Corp., Honeywell, Microsoft and Amazon.
He invested in Zoom as court proceedings moved online and has owned stock in United Health Care, a controversial health care provider.
Rosen’s 700 Form reads more like that of a day trader, than a public servant. During his time in public office, he has also taken gifts and payments from local attorneys, golf courses, nonprofits and organizations that sent him on a paid trip to Israel.
Math is stark. The Los Gatos Public Works Department estimated cost to remove street chalk outside the Tesla dealership to be $722.06. Under Penal Code section 594(a), property damage of $400 or more can be charged as a felony.
The DA’s office filed a felony complaint.
The No Kings rally organizer has now had to pay a $10,000 bond and a criminal defense attorney for what one prominent Los Gatos retired attorney, whose wife was also involved in organizing the protest, said could have been done for free with his pressure washer.
Stanford University Playbook — Same Statute, Same District Attorney
The Tesla chalk case does not exist in isolation. It is happening as the DA’s office is simultaneously running one of the most controversial political prosecutions in California, commonly known as the Stanford University Protester case.
Santa Clara County DA Jeff Rosen is the only prosecutor in the nation to bring felony charges against pro-Palestinian student protesters following the wave of campus demonstrations in 2024.
He charged Stanford students and student journalists with felony vandalism and conspiracy to trespass for occupying the Stanford president’s office for three hours in June 2024. A case that has since consumed months of court time, produced a mistrial, a retrial and is now facing a motion to disqualify Rosen’s entire office from the case.
DA Rosen is also now facing a state bar complaint based on misconduct alleged in the case.
In the first trial, the jury in the Stanford case deliberated for eight days and came back deadlocked — 8-4 on the conspiracy charge, 9-3 on the vandalism charge. A mistrial was declared February 13, 2026.
Similar cases at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and UCLA were either dismissed or never prosecuted criminally at all.
Despite the mistrial, Rosen pressed forward, committing tens of thousands of dollars in court costs and legal expenditures to retry the case.
After Rosen declared he would retry the case, the Santa Clara County Public Defender filed a motion to have Rosen and his entire office removed from prosecuting the case. The recusal motion is pending and will be decided after Rosen’s office has produced additional information he was ordered to produce for the defense the second time around.
The defense in the Stanford case has argued in support of recusal, citing widespread media coverage, Rosen’s apparent efforts to use the case for his political fundraising during a re-election campaign, as well as his personal and professional conflicts of interest.
The deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute the Stanford case is Rob Baker, North County Felony Prosecution. Baker is the same DDA whose name appears in discovery correspondence connected to cases originating in the Palo Alto region — the same district that overlaps with the Los Gatos chalk case referral.
Court documents recently filed in the Stanford Protester case point to Rosen’s own political website and campaigning activities as highly problematic.
On the 2026 campaign website, under a page titled “DA Rosen Fighting Anti-Semitism,” Rosen had featured the Stanford prosecution alongside donation buttons. Public defender Avi Singh, who is representing one of the defendants, argued that Rosen was “monetizing criminal prosecution” and that “if you go ask people for money and say it’s because I’m fighting antisemitism by prosecuting these defendants, it doesn’t matter whether anybody gave you money.”
Singh also noted that Rosen’s website described the defendants’ prosecution as part of a “fight for America”, rhetoric that, the defense argued, revealed not judicial neutrality but political positioning.
Specifically, Singh pointed to Rosen’s speeches that happened out of public view. Court documents for the defense contain a transcript from a speech Rosen delivered with his wife, Amber Rosen, in attendance. Amber Rosen was appointed to the Santa Clara County Superior Court bench in 2018.
“Recognizing that we are one people with a common history and a shared destiny. We’re gonna fight for Jewish people, whether they’re in San Jose or they’re in Isreal, or they’re in Paris or they’re in Syria, or they’re in Australia. We’re gonna fight for Jewish people everywhere. We’re gonna fight for Isreal. And by doing that, we’re gonna fight for America, be strong, be strong., And together that.”- Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County District Attorney
Court files in the Standford Protester case indicate DA Rosen was using the prosecution to increase donor support on his political website in a manner that appears highly unethical.
Under California’s Rules of Professional Conduct, prosecutors face heightened ethical obligations that go beyond those applicable to ordinary attorneys.
Rule 5-110 requires prosecutors to seek justice rather than merely secure convictions, and Rule 3.6 restricts trial publicity that could prejudice a proceeding, prohibiting statements that go beyond basic case information and that a reasonable person would expect to materially affect the outcome. Rule 3.5 further bars conduct intended to influence jurors or the public in ways that compromise fairness.
Defense attorneys argue that Rosen — who has publicly and passionately declared his commitment to fighting for Jewish people globally — had a disqualifying personal and religious interest in prosecuting pro-Palestinian students who were protesting Stanford’s alleged financial ties to Israeli military-related companies.
Further, Rosen’s own 2026 campaign website prominently features “The Stanford Protest Case” as a headline topic, with dedicated pages bearing titles like “Dissent is American, Vandalism is Criminal” and “Charges against Stanford Students: A Closer Look”, posts that critics say crosses the line from law enforcement into political self-promotion, potentially violating the spirit of Rule 3.6 and raising due process questions about whether the defendants could receive a fair prosecution untainted by their DA’s publicly declared loyalties.
On March 26, 2026, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Kelley Paul ordered the DA’s office to turn over records sought by defense attorneys trying to remove Rosen from retrying the case. The recusal issue will be decided in April.
The charge in the Stanford case: felony vandalism. The charge in the Los Gatos chalk case: felony vandalism. The statute in both cases: Penal Code 594(a). The DA in both cases: Jeff Rosen, who is running for re-election in June 2026.
Questions Adults Can’t Answer: A District Attorney’s Legacy
Three seniors from Los Gatos High School and a 10-year-old middle schooler attended Saturday’s No Kings protest outside the soon-to-open Whole Foods Market on Los Gatos Boulevard. They came because of immigration enforcement sweeps, civil rights rollbacks, and what they saw as a dismantling of democratic norms under the current federal administration.
None of them had heard of Jeff Rosen. None knew the protest organizer had been charged with a felony connected to the very rally they were attending.
“Wait — charged for what? Chalk?” one student asked.
The answer may lie in what Rosen has shown voters he values over sixteen years in public office.
Rosen’s record includes prosecutions of journalists and protesters, repeated failures of crime victims — particularly in cases involving child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, and white-collar crime — and public corruption cases that critics say were more political than safety-driven. In 2017, during the MeToo movement, as victims began speaking out that his office had failed them, Rosen flew to Israel on a “solidarity mission” funded by a nonprofit claiming to serve the poor and vulnerable.
In 2020 Rosen filed a “whistleblower” complaint against Public Defender Sajid Kahn in connection with the protests related to George Flyod. Following media pressure and being mocked as “DA Karen” online and on social media, Rosen withdrew the complaint.
Rosen faced his first competitive re-election in 2022. Sajid Khan challenged Rosen’s treatment of people of color and those from the county’s vulnerable communities. Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Daniel Chung challenged him over his handling of crime victims and people with mental illness caught in the criminal courts. Rosen won — but Chung returned four years later.
Now, as Chung runs against Rosen in one of the county’s only contested races in 2026, the two are also tangled in litigation rooted in Rosen’s efforts to push out a political rival. Chung remains employed as a prosecutor under Rosen’s supervision, but Rosen and his senior staff have defied court orders, blocking Chung from working or even entering the office.
Days before the No Kings protest, a taxpayer waste lawsuit was filed naming Rosen for using public funds to pay Chung — while refusing to let him do his job. The complaint calls it what it appears to be: politically motivated waste.
“There are supposed to be No Kings in America, but DA Rosen has been acting like one in Silicon Valley for 16 years. He is happy to waste millions of dollars to pursue overzealous felony charges that are politically motivated. Instead of standing up for our community’s values and fighting against injustice, DA Rosen stands up for big corporate interests that fund his political ambitions.” – Daniel Chung
In the name of public safety, Rosen’s prosecutions in the Stanford Protester, and No Kings protest organizer case, have made Stanford University and the Los Gatos Tesla dealership modern-day crime victims in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.
Employees of the Tesla dealership told this news outlet that weekly No Kings protests have hurt their sales, indicating the case might be brought in what could be considered First Amendment retaliation.
The “No Kings” protesters plan to be back next Saturday. The music starts at 9. The signs go up by 9:15. And just before noon, they will pack up and go home past the Tesla dealership — its asphalt clean, its windows gleaming, its political patron facing no charges — and wonder, some of them for the first time, whether their presence on a public sidewalk is enough to make them criminals in Jeff Rosen’s Santa Clara County.
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“The Los Gatos Public Works Department estimated cost to remove street chalk outside the Tesla dealership to be $722.06. Under Penal Code section 594(a), property damage of $400 or more can be charged as a felony.”
Good, it’s about time protesters pay for the damages they incur.
“it’s about time protesters pay for the damages they incur.”
So you think people who write on sidewalks with chalk should be charged with felonies?
And yet, nothing but crickets from the Vanguard regarding these same industries funding the YIMBYs. (The same industries which created the “housing crisis” in Silicon Valley in the first place.)
Truth be told, the protestors themselves also seem blind to this (and are instead focusing on issues that are entirely out of their control/influence – e.g., Trump/Musk).
“Truth be told, the protestors themselves also seem blind to this (and are instead focusing on issues that are entirely out of their control/influence – e.g., Trump/Musk).”
Maybe because most of the No Kings protesters appeared to be of the geriatric age therefor already privileged and housed.
I’m guessing neither of you actually read the article
Your guess is incorrect (and if one looks at my comment – you’ll see evidence of that).
Maybe you didn’t read my comment. :-)
I see nothing to indicate you did
“Maybe you didn’t read my comment. :-)”
I see nothing to indicate that he did.
Noted that the same industry that’s being “protected” by the DA according to this article, is the same industry that’s funding the YIMBYs (as I and others have previously noted).
Not sure how I’d know that they’re the same industries, unless I read the article.
I understand the intent was to rail against the elites and Rosen but I am glad you also discussed good public servants like Adam Schiff – Net worth $2.2M; Zoe Lofgren Net worth $5.6M; Sam Licardo Net worth $8.4M; Ro Khana Net worth $27M; Robert Rios Net worth $1M..the signs should read too many kings to mention
Timmy, they don’t like to write about that stuff on the Vanguard.
They mostly just concentrate on bashing conservatives.
Thank you for your article. Having used chalk myself on occasion, I read it with keen interest. DA Rosen is being challenged for his job by Danial Chung during this primary. We need to hold our elected officials accountable. It is telling that I am reading about this in the Davis Vangard and not The Mercury News. Media capture is real and the fact that the Vangard is locally owned and operated and the Mercury News is owned by Alden Global Capital is a lesson for us all. Davis is lucky to have you.
White (“supremacist?”) crosswalks are the safest, most-visible of all. There’s a reason they chose that color against a “black” asphalt background – other than racism.
But seriously, stop messing with traffic safety controls to make political statements of any kind. And stay out of the street (and off of freeways) – it’s not safe, and it sometimes incites road rage as a response. The Internet is chock-full of examples of that – with many comments in support of that type of response.
“White … crosswalks are the safest, most-visible of all.”
There’s actually no evidence of that.
https://assets.bbhub.io/dotorg/sites/43/2022/04/Asphalt-Art-Safety-Study.pdf
At the very least one has to question a study by a left leaning organization conducted during the COVID outbreak when traffic was much less than normal.