Lopez Hit With Unpayable $2.824M Legal Judgment

The court proceedings involving Montclair City Councilman Ben Lopez, two of the city’s employees and the city itself wound down today, closing out with what ostensibly is a judgment leaving Lopez on the hook for $2,823,942.32 in damages there is virtually no prospect he will ever be in a position to pay.
The cases against Lopez were chock full of contradictions and a confusing mash of details that defied any simple or cogent description. The two underlying cases filed in 2021 by the city’s director of economic development, Michael Fuentes, and Edmund Garcia, one of the city’s information technology specialists, originally named the city as a defendant along with Lopez. Ostensibly, then, the litigation pitted Fuentes, on one side, against, on the other side, Lopez and the entire weight and substance of the city and its taxpayers and also set up 15 rounds of legal fisticuffs between Garcia, in one corner, against Lopez and the power and authority of the city and its residents in the other corner. As the cases progressed, however, both inside and outside of court, the relationship between Lopez and his city council colleagues and the remainder of City Hall deteriorated, descending into enmity which resulted in the city suing Lopez. Ultimately, it was as much the case that the city made against Lopez that led to the legal victories ultimately scored by Fuentes and Garcia earlier this month than the prosecution of the matter by the common legal team that represented them.
From the outset and even the circumstances leading up to it, the matter involving Lopez and both Fuentes and Garcia consisted of highly contradictory and inconsistent elements.
Lopez, a lifelong resident of Montclair was the son of Tony Lopez, a member of the local establishment as a board member of the Monte Vista Water Agency. Ben Lopez had political aspirations from an early age, studying political science, with an emphasis on political campaigns and strategy, when he was attending Cal Poly Pomona after graduating from high school in 1994. Thereafter, he ran, unsuccessfully, for a position on the Montclair City Council in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2014. 2016 and 2018. He gravitated, by his late twenties, toward conservative politics, affiliating and aligning himself with Republicans.
To establish his bona fides as a rock-ribbed Republican, he signed on in 2003 as an advocate for the conservative Christian lobbying group, the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition. That organization, headed by the Reverend Louis Sheldon, adhered to a philosophy that society was being harmed by permissiveness and a deviation from Christian fundamentals. From shortly after his first affiliation with the Traditional Values Coalition and over the next 13 years Lopez functioned first in the capacity of a policy
analyst, then its legislative advocate and what was essentially its official spokesman and then as its director of California operations. On dozens of occasions over that time Lopez uttered statements in keeping with Sheldon’s views, asserting the illegitimacy of homosexual marriage, questioning the wisdom of allowing homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians or transsexuals to teach in public schools and spoke in opposition to permitting the display of so-called pride flags or banners in classroom settings or on public school campuses as well as school-based counseling services which, in his phraseology, “encouraged” homosexuality. He also articulated the Traditional Values Coalition’s position that there should be no public funding of medical procedures, surgeries or the provision of medication or hormones to facilitate gender transitions.
Despite the consideration that Montclair was a solidly Democratic-leaning town in which the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was approximately two-to one, as 46 percent of its registered voters were Democrats and 23 percent of its voters identified as members of the GOP, Lopez pursued fitting into the Republican fold.
This included supporting two of the higher profile Republicans on the west end of San Bernardino County over the last two decades, those being one-time Chino Hills may, former Assemblyman and current Fourth District San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman and one-time Fontana Councilwoman and former Second District San Bernardino County Supervisor Janice Rutherford. He aspired for and made multiple applications for appointments to positions with or committees/boards tied in with the local government, obtaining berths on the Montclair Youth Accountability Board, the Montclair Fire Department Citizens Advisory Commission and San Bernardino County’s West End Mosquito and Vector Control Board. He ran successfully for a position on the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.
By 2020, Lopez had come to embody a noteworthy illustration of an individual with the determination to construct oneself into a politically relevant entity among the county’s officeholders. He had by that point over a period of 22 years vied for a position on the Montclair City Council six times, losing in each attempt. That year, in his seventh run, he achieved victory.
In 2021, Lopez would reach his high water mark. That January, Phil Cothran Sr was elected chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. Ultimately, Cothran chose Lopez to serve in the prestigious position of the central committee’s parliamentarian. For the last several years, Lopez has orchestrated the county Republican Central Committee’s monthly meetings.
Ironically, it was just as Lopez was coming into his own as a political force to be reckoned with, having at last established himself as a holder of public office, and was able to, at least potentially, vie for higher public office, that events would unfold which have now devolved not only into a state in which his future as a politician appears to have been foreclosed to him but he is being pushed into a state of personal financial impoverishment from which it will take the remainder of his life to recover.
Even worse is that the most noteworthy achievement of his career in politics and public life is that his negative example is about to set a precedent that will disempower and hamstring elected officials going forward.
Before the entirety of the calendar had run in 2021, both Garcia and Fuentes sued both Lopez and the City of Montclair in San Bernardino County Superior Court. Garcia, represented by Brian Hannemann and his Upland-based law firm, filed his complaint on December 7, 2021, naming Lopez, the city and 50 so-called “Does,” or potential defendants who were at that point unidentified. Seven days later, on December 14, 2021, Fuentes, who was also represented by Hannemann, lodged his suit, also naming Lopez, the city and the 50 unidentified potential defendants.
There were remarkable similarities to the Garcia’s and Fuentes’s suits. In their complaints, both declare that they are openly homosexual and that they each found themselves the target of sexual harassment by Lopez, they were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation and gender, they were retaliated against by both Lopez and the city and that the city failed to protect them from Lopez’s retaliation.
Contained in the complaints were allegations that were both contradictory and shocking. Garcia’s suit makes reference to Lopez’s role as the director, lobbyist and spokesman for the Traditional Values Coalition, which Hannemann and Doherty characterize as an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” In that capacity, according to Garcia’s lawsuit, Lopez “publicly advocated against and attacked same-sex marriage,
LGBTQ history curriculums, and the legal recognition and protections of transgender people” and “made highly exclusionary and rejectionist anti-LGBTQ remarks.”
Nevertheless, according to both suits, Lopez was himself engaged in queering off.
According to Garcia’s suit, “Lopez, who presents and acts as a heterosexual male holding staunch anti-LGBTQ [lesbian gay bisexual transsexual queer] views, said to plaintiff [Garcia], who is openly homosexual, all of the following sexual comments inviting plaintiff to engage in homosexual acts with defendant Lopez:
• ‘I’m definitely interested in playing.’
• ‘I love eating ass.’
• ‘I prefer to top, but I don’t have to top to have fun. Love getting my dick sucked all the time.’
• ‘Definitely into oral, love rimming. Jerking is always a given. Lol. Love sucking nips. More top than bottom here. Masc guy.’”
According to Garcia’s lawsuit, “Lopez pressured and cajoled plaintiff to accompany Lopez out for dinner” and “subjected plaintiff to unwanted verbal harassing conduct in the form of impermissible non-job related questions, in particular, questions regarding plaintiff’s sexual preferences and sexuality.”
Fuentes’s suit maintains that in the course of his employment in Montclair, “Lopez engaged in continuous, unwanted harassing conducted directed at plaintiff, that was visual, verbal, physical and included unwanted sexual advances, and occurred without plaintiff’s consent and was at all times unwanted. The unwanted harassing conduct was severe and pervasive, occurring regularly and directed at plaintiff.”
Fuentes’s lawsuit spelled out that Lopez made sexual advances toward him that consisted of “come-ons in the form of unwanted email messages of a sexual nature” and that Lopez bedeviled him with “unwanted verbal harassing conduct in the form of impermissible non-job related questions, in particular, questions regarding plaintiff’s sexual preferences and sexuality. Lopez pressured and cajoled plaintiff to accompany Lopez out for lunch, which was a thinly veiled attempt to get plaintiff alone so that Lopez could further engage in unwanted harassing conduct towards plaintiff.”
According to both lawsuits, when the plaintiffs brought Lopez’s conduct toward them to the attention of their higher-ups on city staff, i.e., within city administration, no action was taken and both remained exposed to Lopez’s depredations.
“Plaintiff opposed and complained about Lopez’s unwanted harassing conduct directly to Lopez as well as to employer’s [City of Montclair’s] city manager, Edward Starr,” Garcia’s lawsuit states. “Despite plaintiff’s complaints, employer failed to take an immediate and appropriate corrective action. Instead, employer required plaintiff to continue to work alongside Lopez.”
According to Fuentes’s lawsuit, Lopez turned vindictive when he rejected the councilman’s sexual advances. In addition, according to Fuentes’s suit, after Fuentes requested that he not be forced to interact with Lopez and the councilman learned about his complaints, Lopez “glared at plaintiff in an intimidating manner” and “otherwise treated plaintiff in an unfair manner so as to punish plaintiff form complaining against Lopez.”
Furthermore, according to the lawsuit, in June 2021, when Fuentes was being considered for advancement to department head status at City Hall, “Lopez actively opposed plaintiff’s appointment to the position of director of economic development, stating as much in a public meeting.” Fuentes was given the promotion on a 4-to-1 vote of the council, with Lopez dissenting.
Despite both Garcia and Fuentes remaining as employees in good standing with the City of Montclair, they filed their separate but very similar suits in in December 2021. The primary reason for naming the city, according to Hannemann and Doherty, was that the city had been indifferent in the face of Garcia’s and Fuentes’s reports of the way they were being treated by Lopez. This led to what Hanneman and Doherty maintain was a hostile work environment for both of their clients.
An identically worded passage in both lawsuits states, “Employer by and through the acts of Lopez and others, created the hostile work environment, and knowingly allowed it to persist, over plaintiff’s objections and complaints that the unwanted harassing conduct was offensive to him and was causing him emotional distress and anxiety.”
As is virtually universally the case whenever a governmental entity and one or more of its officials or employees is sued, the agency or governmental entity reflexively indemnifies the employee[s] or official[s] involved and employs legal counsel to answer the suit with court filings and the formulation of a legal defense.
The reasons for this are manifold. Under long established law and case law, an entity has or shares liability for the actions of its principals, employees and agents. It is thus in the institution’s interest to prevent a plaintiff from establishing liability on the part of one of its employees, agents or principals, as culpability on the part of individual will lead to a legal conclusion of liability on the part of institution. In addition, the principals of an institution, as in this case the mayor and city council members, have control over the institution and its decision-making processes. Out of base self-interest, such principals have long moved to make certain that they themselves bear no financial liability for the harm visited upon others as a consequence of their decisions or actions on behalf of the institution or while acting in their official capacity. Another rationale for indemnifying the principals of an institution is the argument routinely made that if those who head an institution or governmental agency are made personally liable for their actions on behalf of that entity, people in general will be unwilling to take on the role of a decision-maker. In the case of employees or agents employed by an institution or governmental entity, they are represented by powerful public employee unions, the leadership of which insists upon their members being protected from personal liability if action they engage in during the performance of their duties while in the employ of a public agency goes awry.
This virtual blanket indemnification has traditionally been given, even in cases where the offense in question was one made entirely at the personal discretion of the official, employee or agent and outside the knowledge and consent nor at the behest of the agency or governmental entity, its leadership, chain of command or supervisorial personnel. The rationale for the granting of this indemnification stems from the theory that if an entity affiliated with it or acting on its behalf wreaks damage, the entity was in some fashion, at the very least, negligent if not deliberately destructive.
Initially, in late 2021 and into 2022, Ben Lopez was a beneficiary of the presumption that as a principal with the City of Montclair, he merited indemnification and legal representation in the face of the two lawsuits. As part of the city’s legal defense strategy it hired a third-party investigator to look into Garcia’s and Fuentes’s allegations. After examining the findings in the investigator’s report, however, Mayor John Dutrey and council members Bill Ruh, Tenice Johnson and Corysa Martinez reached the conclusion that there was substance to the accusations. As a consequence, the council in April 2022 voted to censure Lopez.
In the face of that setback, Lopez was not contrite, stating both privately and publicly that Garcia and Fuentes were on a politically- and ideologically-motivated mission to discredit him and destroy his electoral viability while earning themselves a fat paycheck at the expense of Montclair’s taxpayers.
As early as April 11, 2022, Lopez was being represented by separate counsel from the city. While the city’s legal defense was being handled by Dana McCune and Steven Taylor of the law firm McCune & Harber, Lopez was represented by Steven Baric.
He remained defiant in the face of the lawsuits, but ultimately had a falling out with the attorney, Steven Baric, who was representing him independently from the city. Baric was relieved as his counsel on August 4, 2022. Subsequently, Lopez acted as his own counsel and was for a time represented by Jonathan Ziprick.
On December 28, 2022, the city filed a cross complaint against Lopez.
On February 9, 2023, Doherty informed Judge John Pacheco, who was overseeing the case brought by Garcia, that the city had settled the matter. On March 13, 2023, Hannemann informed Judge Thomas Garza, who was overseeing the case brought by Fuentes, that the city had settled the matter. Information available to the Sentinel is that city made a combined $550,000 payout to both defendants.
On February 21, 2024, the two cases, in which Lopez remained as a defendant and the city had joined in as a cross-complainant, were consolidated and assigned to Judge Pacheco.
On March 27, 2024 the case was reassigned from Judge Pacheco, whose courtroom is located within the 11-story courthouse in San Bernardino, to Judge Kory Mathewson at the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse.
Difficulties in the progression of the suit toward trial ensued. Lopez, who was representing himself, was not present for some scheduled hearings on the matter, including ones where arguments on motions before the court were heard. He also failed to respond in a timely manner or at all to some of the plaintiffs’ requests or demands for the production of exhibits and evidence as part of the discovery process, resulting in monetary sanctions being imposed on him by the court.
Despite both Garcia and Fuentes having demanded a jury trial in their original lawsuits, they and their attorneys, as did Lopez, consented to the matter being conducted as a bench trial before Judge Mathewson, with him serving as the judge and jury. After a minor delay, the trial was held on December 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2025. At trial, Doherty represented both Garcia and Fuentes, Taylor represented the city and Lopez served as his own attorney. Among the witnesses called to testify were Montclair City Manager Ed Starr, Montclair Mayor John “Havier” Dutrey, Montclair Administrative Services Director Jon Hamilton and Xavier Mendez, a 29-year employee with the City of Montclair, whose final seven years ending in 2020 were in the capacity of supervisor in the public works division, ran unsuccessfully for city council 2022, served as a member of the Montclair Planning Commission and was elected to the city council in 2024. Also testifying were Garcia, Fuentes and Lopez. Lopez handled the cross-examination of the witnesses and, after being examined by Doherty and Taylor as a witness for the plaintiffs and the cross-complainant, offered testimony as a defense witness.
Following that testimony on December 2, 3 and 4, late in the afternoon of December 4, between 3:50 p.m. and 4:11 p,m, Doherty made a 21 minute closing argument on behalf of Garcia and Fuentes. On the morning of December 5, Taylor, representing the city, gave an eight-minute closing argument. Lopez followed that with a 15 minute closing argument. Doherty then made her rebuttal to Lopez’s argument, taking ten minutes to do so.
After less than hour, during which he conferred with Doherty, Taylor and Lopez, Judge Mathewson rendered his tentative decision in which he awarded Garcia and Fuentes each $350,000 in past damages and $50,000 in future damages for a total of $800,000 in total damages plus punitive damages to be determined in the punitive phase. He then awarded the City of Montclair, as the cross-complainant an indemnity to be paid by Lopez in the amount of 100 percent of the $550,000 settlement paid to Garcia and Fuentes in 2023, plus attorneys fees and costs. He scheduled a hearing at which he was to make a determination as to punitive damages and finalize his tentative ruling for December 12.
On December 12, Judge Mathewson assessed Lopez to be responsible for paying punitive damages in the amount of $176,000, which is to be split evenly between the two plaintiffs.
The city has no up-to-date tally of the lawyer’s fees and legal costs it has sustained throughout the 48 months during which the Garcia and Fuentes suits were active. Extrapolating on legal billing documentation more than three weeks into January 2024, the city was paying the lawyers working on the case an average of roughly $27,040.46 per month. It thus appears that the city has thus expended somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,297,942.32 in legal fees on the cases.
Thus, Lopez is looking at a financial burden of, it would appear at least $2,823,942.32 [$1,297,942.32 + $176,000 + $800,000 + $550,000].
At present, Lopez’s yearly income consists of the $22,200 he makes in his stipend and pay add-ons as a councilman and the less than $60,000 generated by his notary business. It would therefore take him a third of a century, at his present rate of yearly compensation, to pay off the debt he has accumulated as a consequence of the Garcia and Fuentes lawsuits.
From a gross monetary perspective, the victory the City of Montclair achieved with the resolution of its cross-complaint against Lopez on December 5 was a Pyrrhic one, as there is little prospect that the city will recover from Lopez the $1,297,942.32 in legal fees he owes it or be recompensed by him for the $550,000 settlement conferred upon Garcia and Fuentes in 2023. At the same time, the city did avoid having to put up the $800,000 assessed against Lopez as his share of the real damages sustained by the plaintiffs and the $176,000 in punitive damages that have been assigned to Lopez.
Still, the way in which Montclair gradually evolved toward parting legal company with Lopez, refusing to indemnify over his own personal actions despite his status as a city councilman and then, in essence, filing suit against him in the form of a cross-complaint represents a departure, indeed a radical departure, from the way in which city’s automatically accept on their part and on the part of their taxpaying citizens financial responsibility for the actions of their elected officials.
Whether the way Montclair handled this particular case, with its idiosyncrasies and somewhat atypical circumstances, will serve as a precedent for itself or other cities to distance themselves from politicians who utilize their authority in ways that outsiders find objectionable to the point that they take the official and the agency or governmental entity the official represents into court to seek redress is, of course, unknown at this point. Montclair did explore that option and probably was no worse for the wear than it would have been had it stood by Lopez right down the line.
What the city’s approach in this case did do was to alert officeholders not just in Montclair but in San Bernardino County, Southern California and perhaps the entire State of California that there exists a chance, however slim, that they cannot arrogantly comport themselves in ways that presume governmental authority relieves them of personal responsibility and potential liability.
For Lopez, who spent more than two decades longing and striving to be accepted into the governmental inner sanctum before succeeding in 2020 and then parlayed that into a vaunted position among the county’s brotherhood and sisterhood of politicians in the Republican Central Committee as that institution’s parliamentarian, he not only faces the bleak prospect of not being able to accrue any personal wealth for a very long time but now being considered a pariah among the class of officeholders he was privileged to join with his election to the Montclair City Council in 2020 and his reelection to that panel as the top vote-getter in 2024. Those politicians with whom he as been hobnobbing and rubbing elbows as an equal for the last five years now see him as that member of their legion who managed to destroy the presumption of indemnification they all enjoyed as public officials elevated to their positions of authority by those who had voted them into office. While the honor of being elected a civic leader will remain for those officials, the ability to comport themselves boldly with no fear of any financial consequence if a legal challenge arises may very well not. For that, the taxpayers have Lopez to thank and the solons have Lopez to blame.