In Bar Complaint, Municipal Court Judge Vaddadi Accuses City Attorney of Improperly Barring Her From Hearing Cases
Vaddadi says City Attorney Ann Davison's office made "counterfactual, false, and defamatory" statements to justify a decision to prohibit the judge from hearing misdemeanor cases last year.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi has filed a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against City Attorney Ann Davison and her former criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson, over their decision last year to preemptively disqualify her from hearing any criminal cases by filing a Affidavit of Prejudice in every case that lands in Vaddadi's courtroom, disqualifying Vaddadi from hearing these cases.
The bar association has the authority to take disciplinary action against any state-licensed attorney, up to and including disbarment.
By prohibiting Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases, Davison effectively overturned the 2023 election in which voters elected her to the bench. Davison announced her decision in a memo and press release last year.
Davison's decision prompted the Seattle Times to publish a contemptuous editorial excoriating the "uninformed voters" who elected Vaddadi and calling her a biased ideologue—a term they never used to describe the conservative firebrand Municipal Court Judge Ed McKenna, whom the editorial board described as a victim when progressive city attorney Pete Holmes called him out for blatantly political rulings and public statements.
For more than a year, Vaddadi's job has consisted primarily of reviewing traffic tickets. That changed somewhat in February, when the City Attorney's Office stopped disqualifying her automatically from cases that don't involve allegations of domestic violence or DUIs. When these cases come up, a pro tem judge or magistrate usually has to sit in, at the city's expense. "It's almost like paying an eighth judge to preside in criminal court," Vaddadi said.
Davison and Walton-Anderson—who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell's chief public safety advisor—claimed last year that Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing several cases in which, they alleged, Vaddadi had improperly released a defendant, failed to find probable cause when probable cause existed, and showed what they described as "a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”
Vaddadi's complaint eviscerates those claims, calling them "counterfactual, false, and defamatory."
"The statements were untethered to a specific proceeding and published in part to provide political cover for a far-reaching blanket [Affidavit of Prejudice] policy of unprecedented scope," Vaddadi wrote. "The effect of the policy was to exclude me from hearing all misdemeanor cases for most of 2024, which strained court resources and resulted in litigation against the City of Seattle."
The Washington Community Alliance and three Seattle voters sued the city for disenfranchising voters by disqualifying Vaddadi last year.
"It was a tough year," Vaddadi told PubliCola on Thursday. "There's this scathing piece of writing that’s published [and repeated] in the media, to my colleagues and the people I respect, and I know it’s full of lies. And what is awful is, because she's the city attorney, and Natalie Walton-Anderson is now head of public safety at the mayor's office, they have a powerful voice. And they've used it to spread these lies about me, and people believe them—and that's really hard."
Vaddadi said that, contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, no one from the city attorney's office ever reached out to her to discuss their concerns, or took any of the other other avenues that were available to them before announcing she would be disqualified from all misdemeanor cases.
Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, speaking on his own behalf and not as a representative of the court, said the decision to completely exclude Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases appears to be unprecedented. "In the history of the state of Washington, no prosecuting attorney has ever used the affidavit of prejudice to this decree—not even close," Shadid said. "This blows every other blanket AOP situation out of the water. And it’s worse, because they never came to Judge Vaddadi with their concerns."
"This feels to me like they are exploiting a loophole in the democratic process and the legal process in general," Vaddadi said. "There are avenues to complain about judicial conduct," such as the Commission on Judicial Conduct and the court process itself. But "they've only appealed one case that I’ve ruled on"—a case in which Vaddadi disqualified an assistant city attorney, Victoria Pugh, from prosecuting a case in which she was also a witness. (The city attorney's office appealed that decision and a Superior Court judge sided with Vaddadi.)
It was that case, Vaddadi believes, that made Davison and Walton-Anderson come gunning for her. "Such retaliation is improper use of the City Attorney’s authority and was calculated to damage my reputation and to chill judicial independence and integrity," she wrote in her complaint.
A spokesman for Davison's office said they had not yet seen Vaddadi's complaint and therefore could not respond to it before publication.
A key claim in Vaddadi's complaint is that Davison and Walton-Anderson fabricated or misrepresented cases Vaddadi heard in order to make her sound incompetent, then refused to provide case numbers in response to requests, including media requests. (The city attorney's office did not provide these case numbers when PubliCola asked for them last year).
This made it hard for her to prove she did not do the things the city attorney's office accused her of doing, Vaddadi said, such as as improperly dismissing a DUI case, allowing someone who had committed domestic violence to go free, and dismissing a case against someone who failed to comply with treatment—claims Vaddadi says are inaccurate or misleading.
Shadid confirmed that the city attorney's office "refused to produce the case numbers to me" when he asked on three separate occasions.
Vaddadi disputes the city attorney's characterization of several cases Davison and Walton-Anderson described in their memo, something she said she was unable to do until members of the public managed to figure out which cases Davison was describing and show that the facts didn't match the city attorney's descriptions.
"I knew from the moment they filed [the blanket affidavit of prejudice] that everything in that statement was false, but at this point, I've got the cases that they described, with the actual case numbers, and nothing really matches up," Vaddadi said.
"By comparing the actual records to the summaries in the Memo, it is a trivial exercise to demonstrate that the Memo’s description of my record contains factual statements that Ms. Walton-Anderson and Ms. Davison knew were false at the time the Memo was published," her compalint says.
Vaddadi said "the most egregious fabrication" of several "directly falsifiable" cases was a case in which, according to the city attorney's memo, she dismissed a domestic violence case "even though it was clear that the defendant never got on the transport van to [American Behavioral Health Services] to fulfill his residential treatment requirement that was part of dispositional continuance.”
According to Vaddadi's complaint, almost everything about this description was false or misleading, including the gender of the defendant (she's a woman), the reason she "never got on the transport van" (she was in a wheelchair and the van driver "refused" to take her), and the disposition of the case (it was continued, not dismissed, and Judge Faye Chess later dismissed it.)
In a letter responding to a bar complaint by Seattle resident Bennett Haselton, an outside attorney for Walton-Anderson said the original order didn't rest on any specific cases, but acknowledged that the city attorney's office had some of their facts wrong in the van case. Shadid said the city attorney's office should have corrected their original memo and redacted their claim that Vaddadi mishandled this case, but they have not done so.
Reiterating the arguments she made in a statement published by the Stranger last year, Vaddadi wrote that contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, they never met with her to discuss any concerns about her rulings or purported bias toward defendants.
Vaddadi said Davison and Walton-Anderson's statements closely resemble the "actual malice" standard required to prove libel against a public official—a high bar that requires proof that someone made a false statement, knowing it was false or with "reckless disregard" for the truth, in a way that harmed the person the statement was about.
According to Vaddadi, the city attorney's statements didn't just damage her reputation, making it harder for her to be reelected or get other jobs in the future; they also made her the target for "a barrage of vile, racist, and threatening communications directed personally to me," forcing her to take steps to protect herself and her family from threats.
Presiding Municipal Court Judge Anita Crawford-Willis declined to comment on Vaddadi's bar complaint. "Judge Vaddadi is a duly elected judge and valued member of the Seattle Municipal Court bench,” she said.
Shadid, who has picked up some of Vaddadi's cases and administrative work, said that seeing "a promising young judge, a woman of color, being attacked in this way has really affected other women of color and other people in our court."
Vaddadi said she wants more than just the ability to preside over cases as an elected judge; she wants to fix the damage to her reputation Davison's office has caused over the past year.
"I’m looking for the truth to come out and for my reputation to be restored ... and I'm looking to do my job that I was elected to do," Vaddadi said. "I have never filed a bar complaint in my life, and I would hope that I don’t ever have to do it again ... but at some point, bad conduct needs to be addressed."