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An ugly day for San Francisco — and not just for Manny Yekutiel
District 8 front-runner pulls the plug on his campaign after more on-the-record sexual assault allegations. And, today, misery loves company.
by JOE ESKENAZIOctober 1, 2026, 4:08 pm
From left to right: Mayor Daniel Lurie, District 8 supervisor candidate Manny Yekutiel, and DCCC Chair Nancy Tung. Photo illustration by Mission Local.Play
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The sexual assault allegations laid out against Manny Yekutiel in today’s San Francisco Standard are plausible and on-the-record and have induced a cavalcade of big-name endorsers to elbow past one another for the exits like a nightclub on fire.
Yekutiel moments ago announced he will suspend his campaign, though he did not acknowledge committing assault. “I am deeply sorry for any boundaries that I crossed,” he wrote. “I’m going to take this time to work on myself.”
This was, crucially, the second on-the-record groping allegation made against the erstwhile frontrunner in the District 8 supervisorial race.
In June, a political organizer named Brad Chapin accused Yekutiel of groping him at a 2020 party, an allegation also first published in the Standard. Chapin’s single-sourced accusation did not move the political needle in San Francisco: It was dismissed by politicos suspicious of Chapin’s political tribalism, unclear about what constituted “assault” in San Francisco’s gay community and ultimately unconvinced after the supposed “whisper network” of men who alleged inappropriate experiences with Yekutiel failed to immediately come forward with their own stories.
Well that was then and this is now. Accuser Ryan Clark is not part and parcel of any of San Francisco’s political camps — he’s just a guy. And both he and his partner claim they were aggressively groped by Yekutiel at a public party in 2023. Like Chapin, they documented this extemporaneously, in writing.
Chapin’s public ordeal following his decision to go on the record— he felt compelled to publicly denounce Yekutiel at several candidate forums and endorsement votes — was hardly an enticement for any on-the-record accuser.
Mission Local did not publish articles about Chapin’s claim against Yekutiel, which would be our approach to most any single-sourced claim against any candidate. But others did. In the end, this led to additional on-the-record allegations.
In June, Yekutiel denied Chapin’s June accusation, claiming it to be a political hit. Today, he intimated that he may have had too much to drink when he encountered Clark, said he did not recall the groping alleged by Clark and his partner and apologized if he “crossed someone’s boundary.”
Incidentally, the deadline to officially remove a candidate’s name from the ballot came and went in June. While Yekutiel has dropped his campaign, his name will still be on November’s ballot.
Today was a profoundly ugly day — not just for Yekutiel and his supporters but for San Francisco. It was a day of public pain and personal destruction. Beyond winning or losing political offices, I deeply hope that all of the above can pick up the pieces of their lives and achieve some manner of teshuvah — deep introspection, an acknowledgement of straying from the path of righteousness and a return to it.
San Francisco is a town deeply lacking in introspection. Today that came due. Brad Chapin, a political organizer who accused Manny Yekutiel of sexual assault, speaks to the San Francisco Democratic Party on Aug. 26 at the Asian Pacific American Community Center at 66 Raymond Ave. Photo by Junyao Yang.
Today was ugly for Mayor Daniel Lurie, who prominently unendorsed Manny Yekutiel after prominently endorsing him not even a month ago.
Following his September endorsement, the mayor said he spoke to Yekutiel about the allegation, Yekutiel denied it and Lurie believed him. That’s a hell of a thing to say. Clark affirmed that the mayor’s statement that he was taking Yekutiel at face value was a factor in pushing him to go public.
“When I endorsed Manny in September, I believed he was the best candidate to represent District 8. My endorsement is a statement of my confidence in someone’s character and leadership, and in light of the additional accounts reported today I am withdrawing it,” the mayor said on Thursday. “Coming forward is hard and these survivors deserve to be heard, and treated with dignity and respect.”
When Lurie rescinded that endorsement, it surely legitimized and hastened the stampede to the exit. And, to be fair to Lurie, the mayor waited months to make an official endorsement following Chapin’s allegation. But Mission Local has spoken to multiple sources throughout the city who claim they warned the mayor’s team that there were still more shoes to drop.
Either they were not taken seriously, or a calculated risk was made that no more accusers would surface before election day. Or the mayor simply felt enough investigating had been done and he was confident sticking with his longtime colleague and ally. 
JOE ESKENAZIMANAGING EDITOR & COLUMNISTGet everything Joe writes for Mission Local every week — plus moreMission Local DailyJoe EskenaziMore newsletters▾Subscribe freeUnsubscribe anytime.
Alas, hindsight is 20/20. But only if you look: After a catastrophic lack of vetting led Mayor Lurie to bring about the curtailment of his appointment of District 4 supervisor Beya Alcaraz after a scant eight days, he told the people of this city that he would do better.
“This is not the first time I’ve done something wrong; it won’t be the last,” Lurie said in November 2025. “But what I commit to the people of San Francisco is: I’m going to learn from this. We are going to thoroughly review our vetting process and we will get better. But let me be clear that this rests on my shoulders.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie is going to be fine. But it’s not him we’re worried about.
This is a hard job. One with consequences. Manny Yekutiel outside the entrance to the mayor’s office, where a crowd gathers after Daniel Lurie’s swearing-in on Jan. 8, 2025. Photo by Abigail Van Neely.
Today was also ugly for San Francisco’s Democratic Party, which has made a mockery of the notion of policing sexual misconduct.
Last month, following a lengthy delay while it purportedly “investigated” Chapin’s claims in an opaque and, ultimately, farcical procedure, the party voted to endorse Yekutiel. It was a bad look then — and it aged like milk.
In 2024, that very same county Democratic Party proclaimed that the era of alleged sexual predators in local political circles was over — there was a new sheriff in town and it was the San Francisco Democratic Party.
Even then, the move seemed hopelessly self-congratulatory, political and partisan. At the time, Democratic Party members from the ascendant slate of political moderates that won control in 2024 took care to note that they would not be taking up allegations in “cases that have been previously criminally investigated or closed.”
That notably would exclude the accusations of sexual assault leveled at political operative Jay Cheng when he was a UC Irvine student in 2010, which prosecutors declined to follow up on.
Cheng was instrumental not only in putting nearly $1 million behind the moderate slate that assumed control of the local Democratic Party in ’24, he was also, according to multiple sources, a key player in hand-picking the individual members of that slate. Those members remain in control of the party. These are the people who saw fit to take up the mantle of combatting allegations of sexual misconduct in San Francisco political circles.
With great fanfare, the Democratic Party in 2024 announced its new “Code of Conduct and Policies for Sexual Assault and Harassment,” riding the wave of righteous outrage over disturbing allegations leveled against charismatic Democratic politicos — most especially Mission District leader Jon Jacobo, who is presently being prosecuted on rape charges.
And yet the policy the Democratic Party created — again, with great fanfare — was so narrowly applicable that it would not have applied to Jacobo (who is, again, presently facing criminal prosecution by the district attorney). Not unless he misbehaved at an official party or club meeting — which, whatever he did in private, he did not do in public.
It certainly did not apply to whatever happened between Chapin and Yekutiel in someone’s private home in 2020. The exterior of San Francisco City Hall on August 21, 2026. Photo by Zoe Malen.
And this is where the local Democratic party made a farce of its tough talk on predatory behavior. It could have quickly acknowledged that its policy was, by design, narrowly applicable and did not cover Chapin’s allegations. Even a non-attorney could have made this assessment rapidly.
That’s not what happened. Instead, Party Chair Nancy Tung this summer delayed the District 8 endorsement vote, citing the ongoing “investigation.” Five weeks later, on the very day of the belated endorsement vote, party members were handed a terse, one-page letter, noting that the investigation spent more than a month determining what should’ve been apparent within minutes — the code wasn’t applicable, and the San Francisco Democratic Party couldn’t weigh in here.
The so-called investigation neither confirmed nor denied that anything untoward had taken place. It did nothing — other than provide political cover for the party to vote the way its leadership wanted.
Members of the local party, on the day of a vote, were handed a half-page letter announcing that an investigation determined only that there needn’t be an investigation, and they then buttressed that vote based upon the outcome of “the investigation.”
This is something you’d expect to see in “Death of Stalin,” not a Viz Valley community center.
Separate and apart from the outcome, this process strained credulity. It was a bad look then, and it’s become so much worse. It was a credibility-destroying moment for a local Democratic Party that seems dead set on eroding its credibility by any means necessary.
So, today was an ugly day. And, if no lessons are learned, no introspection is undertaken, it will be an uglier tomorrow.
JOE ESKENAZIMANAGING EDITOR/COLUMNIST
Joe is a columnist and the managing editor of Mission Local. He was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
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8 Comments
Love San Franciscosays:October 1, 2026, 4:56 pm at 4:56 pmI wish the centrist gang running the party would feel some shame and resign, but I will not hold my breath, we need to replace them at soonest possible time.+5-1votes. Sign in to voteReply
Samsays:October 1, 2026, 4:28 pm at 4:28 pmStay far away from the DCCC fools.+3-1votes. Sign in to voteReply
Billysays:October 1, 2026, 5:53 pm at 5:53 pmZero confidence from the top down. Leadership enema necessary.+1-1votes. Sign in to voteReply
h. brownsays:October 1, 2026, 7:45 pm at 7:45 pmYour comment is awaiting moderation.Joe, This is baby stuff. Harvey Milk’s assassination along with Mayor Moscone was “profoundly ugly”. Jim Jones’ murder of 900 of his parishoners was “profoundly ugly”. This MannyGate is a fart in a hurricane and just shows how deeply the SF War on Fun has cut. One thing that seems connected to my demented mind … The City is paying people to take down all flyers and to paint over graffiti art. The streets look so boring without the thousands of pieces of individual pics and signs and symbols and calls to arm and to disarm or shake hands or make a fist. Visitors from London or Berlin could walk around our downtown and think that nothing was happening here. But, of course there is. There’s Manny’s you tell them and that’s a really big scandal involving the Mayor and most of the City council and … Really important historically, you explain. There’s ‘Watergate’ which brought down a presidency. And, ‘Irangate’ which caused a war. And, even … ‘Fajitagate’ where the Police Chief resigned and half of the top brass were indicted. Now we have ‘MannyGate’ where the big clickbait is Pocketpool. lol go Niners !! h.
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