LOS ANGELES (AP) – Larry Elder’s former fiancé said Thursday that the Conservative radio talk show host, now running for governorship in California, showed her a gun during a heated argument in 2015.

Elder, widely regarded as the leader of the Republicans running to succeed Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in next month’s recall election, made a statement saying, “I’ve never thrown a gun at anyone.” Elder , who aspires to become California’s first black governor, noted that he grew up in South Los Angeles, an area with high levels of violent crime.

“I know exactly how destructive this type of behavior is,” he said.

Alexandra Datig’s accusation, first reported by Politico, comes less than four weeks until the election on September 14th and at a time when the postal ballot papers have already reached the voters. Elder said he intended to “focus on the issues” that inspired the recall of Republicans who were angry with Newsom’s progressive policies and handling of the pandemic.

His campaign said he was planning weekend rallies.

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Datig, 51, a longtime Los Angeles resident, said she worked on Elders Show and they lived together during their 18-month love affair from 2013 to 2015. A letter and other records from Datig to The Associated Press – including a 6th 2015 email writing about the breakdown of their engagement – outlined a portrait of an emotionally abusive relationship in which Elder routinely used medical marijuana in excess.

Datig claims Elder got high during the 2015 argument and went to a cabinet where he kept his weapon “and made sure it was in my sight”.

“He didn’t point it at me, but he wanted to make sure I knew he was looking,” to see if it was loaded, she told the AP.

Threatening another person with a gun could constitute a criminal offense, but Datig said she never reported it to the police.

Elder did not specifically address the cannabis use claim in the questions AP asked of his campaign. His testimony in response to Datig’s allegations of abuse was broadly based on “lewd allegations.”

“It is precisely because of this kind of politics of personal destruction that people do not come into public life. I will not honor that with an answer – it is below me, ”Elder wrote. A short time later he tweeted: “They come up to me with every dirty trick because they know what’s coming on September 14th.”

Datig supports one of Elder’s Republican rivals, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer. Earlier this week, Faulconer began criticizing Elder and specifically questioning his attitudes towards women. He noted, among other things, that Elder had written that employers should be able to ask women if and when they plan to become pregnant.

“Larry Elder has neither the judgment nor the character to run our state,” Faulconer said in response to Datig’s allegations.

Another Republican in the running, State Representative Kevin Kiley, said in a statement that he found Datig’s claims worrying.

“I believe that every woman who comes up deserves to be heard and Mrs Datig’s deeply troubling report should be treated with the utmost seriousness. Mr. Elder should be given every opportunity to comment, ”he said.

In a televised debate on Thursday evening with Faulconer, Kiley and his GOP colleague John Cox, however, the topic never came up.

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Elder took part in the race in July, and Datig said she had waited until now to come forward because at first she didn’t think he would be competitive.

“I didn’t take it seriously, but when Larry started to be on trend and become the front runner, I was very worried,” she said.

The documents made available by Datig describe months of emotional stress caused by the escalating romantic and business relationship. “I feel trapped and scared,” she wrote in the mail.

Datig also provided the AP with a copy of a confidentiality agreement she signed in 2014 prohibiting her from discussing the “personal and business matters” of Elder and his business, Laurence A. Elder & Associates, Inc., from going with their allegations to the public.

A letter from her attorney dated March 31, 2015 to Elder asked for $ 6,000 in monthly support for Datig for one year to cover expenses such as rent, auto, and health care expenses. She also asked for $ 195,000 for public relations, marketing, and other services that she allegedly provided for his show.

The two eventually signed an agreement on April 13, 2015, under which Elder would pay Datig $ 20,000 and pay for her legal maintenance of $ 5,000 and $ 185 for dry cleaning her wedding dress. Elder agreed that he and his assistant would sign a non-disclosure agreement on anything related to Datig, that he would write her a letter of recommendation for her work, and that they would both “stop insulting each other.”

Datig describes herself as a survivor of the sex trade and has publicly announced that she is working for the so-called former Hollywood woman Heidi Fleiss, who was convicted in the mid-1990s for running a high-priced call girl ring, a conviction that was later overturned. Fleiss was later sentenced to federal prison for defrauding her taxes and laundering call girls’ profits. In an interview with KCAL-TV in 2013, Datig described that he became an informant at Fleiss.

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SACRAMENTO (AP) – Critical care nurse Meynard Villa was on the verge of losing his family’s $ 150,000 investment in his new retirement home because he could not hire workers while grappling with a flawed government system designed to automate verification of the criminal background.

The California Department of Social Affairs’ new portal is designed to help home and community care providers, foster families, and even nannies and babysitters who apply for approval under the state background check system.

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But only 38% of the nearly 60,000 licensed facilities in California have used the Guardian tool since it went live in January, while the rest find workarounds or remain frustrated. The department had promised that the $ 788,650 portal “will ensure background checks are done faster and more efficiently while making the process easier for applicants and agencies.”

Villa said he lost two clients for his six-bed home in the city of Arcadia, Los Angeles because he couldn’t hire the staff to look after them.

“This problem is really annoying and really disappointing because you are trying to start a business, create jobs and help people at the same time,” said Villa.

The self-service tool is designed to enable employers and employees to enter the identification information of potential employees in order to conduct background checks on crime and child abuse databases. Request exceptions for minor or obsolete issues that shouldn’t preclude their from being discontinued; and add or remove employees associated with their agency.

Instead, frustrated employers said they couldn’t sign up, couldn’t get answers through the Guardian as to why the portal wasn’t working, and couldn’t get help from equally stunned government officials. Employees were able to perform separate fingerprint checks, but these could not be linked to the correct employee files.

“When I try to hire someone, I can’t verify that they’re on the system or not,” said Ara Postaldjian, who owns the Redell Pines nursing home in Monrovia, northeast Los Angeles.

He wasn’t able to hire six people until late March because he couldn’t do their background checks through Guardian.

He checked two others the old way, calling the Department of Social Services and reading out their names and Social Security numbers – the kind of practical process the Guardian was supposed to replace. Government officials were able to log into a database to delete these two employees but were unable to give him definitive answers as to whether the other six could be safely hired.

Navigating Guardian is almost a full-time job for a recruiter at the home care provider. Instead, said HR manager Vera Davidson, who works in Pasadena for the Omaha, Nebraska-based national provider.

The Guardian’s communications are “little to nothing,” and government officials are also at a loss, she said. “So if we get an answer to one of our questions, we took care of it ourselves months ago.”

However, turnaround time for completing background checks has dropped from weeks to days, largely due to “things we figured out for ourselves,” Davidson said.

Scott Murray, spokesman for the Department of Social Services, said in a statement that the new portal will quickly process and delete most applications received, while the agency “is actively working with our provider to resolve some early technical issues … so that all applications are in a period can be edited on time. “

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The California Assisted Living Association has improved Guardian since January, said President and CEO Sally Michael.

“Our experience is that problems brought to their attention are resolved in a timely manner,” she said.

That wasn’t Villa’s experience. It took weeks for a senator’s staff to gain access to the portal.

“After investing more than $ 150,000 of my family’s hard-earned money in my business, we run the risk of going bankrupt without ever caring for a resident, solely due to the high level of incompetence and red tape.” , Villa wrote to local, state and federal officials in February.

Desperate, Villa turned to his district director, congresswoman and senator Susan Rubio. Four weeks after contacting Rubio’s office, he received a call from the department and was able to log into the Guardian in mid-March. But he said he still had delays.

It is the latest in a pattern of troubled government IT systems in recent years. During the pandemic, the California Unemployment Service’s database was overwhelmed and there was a data error that overloaded nearly 300,000 coronavirus records and cost the state’s top health authority their jobs last summer.

The auditor said in January that the nearly $ 1 billion, 16-year financial information system project for California missed four consecutive deadlines to standardize the state’s accounting systems amid rising costs.

Democratic MP David Chiu suggests centralizing IT projects under the California Department of Technology to address what he calls “disjointed, duplicate” websites and reporting systems that have “resulted in many confusing and stressful user experiences.”

Applicants can still submit fingerprints separately from the Guardian portal, said Murray, spokesman for the Department of Social Services. Villa said he was never told that.

A naturalized American citizen, Villa came to the United States from the Philippines as a teenager. He said he worked in several nursing homes to graduate from college. In 2013, he graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

He spent the pandemic in coronavirus intensive care at the University of Southern California’s Keck Hospital. But what kept him up at night was the impending collapse of his business, which received his state license in early January.

“It took me seven months to license my only house – seven months. You are bleeding money, you have a day job as a nurse and you have been bleeding money for seven months, ”he said. “And when you finally get a license, you can’t hire staff because there’s no way to check them in the background.”

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