bar association dismisses my complaints against Ann Davison and Natalie Walton-Anderson for false statements about Judge Vaddadi’s rulings

Backstory in previous posts:

• In February 2024, then-City-Attorney Ann Davison issued a press release (written by Natalie Walton-Anderson, who later became Bruce Harrell’s public safety director) accusing Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi of mis-handling certain court cases, but the press release oddly declined to specify which cases they were referring to; the judge repeatedly said publicly she had been asking Davison’s office for clarification on the case numbers, but Davison never provided them.
• In late 2024 I filed multiple public disclosure requests to get the case numbers from the City Attorney’s office, and then obtained the audio of the cases. It was apparent that Davison’s statements about Vaddadi’s handling of the cases were incorrect (e.g. claiming Vaddadi “dismissed” a case when Vaddadi never dismissed it and actually issued a bench warrant for the defendant).
• I filed separate bar complaints against Davison and Walton-Anderson in December 2024 for the false statements they had made which impugned the judge’s reputation.
• Davison and Walton-Anderson filed nearly identical responses in March 2025 (written by these same lawyer) saying they admitted the statements were false but the false statements had not been made “intentionally” or “recklessly”.
• I filed my own response to their response in May 2025, saying basically they should still be held accountable because the errors only went unchallenged for so long because they withheld the case numbers (otherwise people would have looked at the cases and pointed out the errors sooner).

Today, the bar association emailed me that they had dismissed both complaints, agreeing that the statements were false but they had not been made “intentionally” or “recklessly”.

This, I think, misses the point that I made in my most recent response. Even if Davison and Walton-Anderson didn’t intentionally lie about the facts of the case, by putting out their press release and refusing to provide the case numbers, that was a deliberate choice, and it vastly increased the chance of a false statement going uncorrected. If they had provided case numbers, perhaps someone in the office would have cross-checked the cases and noticed the false statements earlier, or (more likely) someone in media would have gotten the information sooner and publicly called out the errors. Instead, they refused to provide the case numbers for basically no reason, and the false statements propagated further as a direct consequence of that, and that’s what I think qualifies their action as reckless.

Meanwhile, Judge Vaddadi also filed her own bar complaint against Ann Davison in May 2025 for the press release; I don’t know if that has been dismissed as well.

I met the newly elected City Attorney Erika Evans at the celebration party for the city’s new officials, and I said if she ever has to put out a press release trashing the way a judge handled some cases (which is sometimes justified), she’s gotta at least say what cases she’s talking about; she said that sounds fair.