By St. John Barned-Smith Feb 5, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
A progressive San Francisco neighborhood activist stepped into a cafe in the Richmond District for a beverage Saturday when she spotted a sign for a moderate supervisorial candidate who is running against an incumbent in a race that’s already heated. As Julie Pitta was leaving Royal Ground Coffee, by her own admission, the journalist and community organizer quietly peeled the sign for candidate Marjan Philhour from the window, and then walked outside.
A fellow customer snapped a photo of Pitta getting into the car with the sign, however, and shared it with a friend, who posted it to social media on Sunday. Pitta, who has written favorably about the incumbent, Supervisor Connie Chan, and criticized Philhour, apologized for removing the sign, but that did little to quell the controversy.
By Monday afternoon, Philhour issued an angry denunciation of the moment, calling it “election interference, plain and simple.” Pitta’s publisher at the Richmond Review newspaper canceled her column. Chan’s campaign issued a statement distancing itself from the incident, saying the supervisor and her campaign “do not condone the removal of campaign signs without permission.” And police said they were investigating.
The latest episode of San Francisco’s heated politics comes as the city gears up for what promises to be a tense election season heading into November, when there will be races for the mayor and supervisors. In addition to conflict in the District 1 race, candidates in District 9, which includes the Mission, have already clashed repeatedly, trading attacks and accusations.
The animosity between moderates and progressives was on view last month when tech executive and moderate political donor Garry Tan posted a menacing tweet that the city’s progressive supervisors should “die slow,” referencing a Tupac Shakur song. Tan later deleted the tweet and apologized.
San Francisco elections have seen similar scandals before: Amid the controversy of the 2022 recall of San Francisco school board members, a man stole forms carrying petition signatures; he was charged with a misdemeanor. Mark Dietrich, a Richmond resident who posted the image of Pitta to social media, said “The photo and video doesn’t lie. There’s a way to do political discourse and there’s a way not to.”
In an interview, Pitta blamed the incident on frustration with past, “really unfortunate” interactions with Philhour surrogates.
“I really shouldn’t have done it,” said Pitta, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent and Forbes editor. “We’re only human.”
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She said at a meeting last year where a Philhour supporter accosted her and Chan and asked her how many babies she had killed. Chan filed a police report regarding the incident.
Philhour said the alleged incident happened before she launched her campaign and added that she wasn’t aware of anyone on her campaign team being involved in any crime.
“I would trust that any suspected crime including threats would be promptly and properly reported to the police and the police would investigate,” she said.
Philhour, a political moderate candidate challenging Chan, previously ran in 2016 and 2020, and has focused on public safety issues affecting the neighborhood. She said Monday that Pitta’s actions follow past skirmishes with the columnist, particularly one after a Richmond shopkeeper, Yohannes “John” Tewolde, was beaten to death last year.
Philhour’s daughter visited the shop frequently and spoke at a vigil in his honor, Philhour said, prompting Pitta to accuse Philhour in several tweets of politicizing the event and commenting that her daughter looked “mortified.”
“This toxicity has really reached a fever pitch,” Philhour said Monday. “I understand that as a candidate for local office, I am open to attack.”
“This really needs to be taken down a notch,” she added.
After the photo and videos of her removing the sign made their way online, Pitta posted an apology on social media in which she said she believed she had permission to remove it.
In an interview, Royal Ground Coffee owner Jim Kim said Pitta did not have permission. Kim said he allows supporters of political campaigns to put signs up in his shop.
“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he said, “I just let them do it.”
On Monday, he found himself fielding calls from reporters about the incident, while Philhour supporters came by his shop and removed other signs because they were afraid of affecting his business.
“I just want things to calm down,” he said.
Still, the situation irked Terry Whelan, the Philhour supporter who’d first asked to place the sign in the cafe.
Whelan lives around the corner, and like Pitta, frequently stops by the shop.
“On one hand, it’s the most insignificant thing in the universe,” he said. “But on the other hand, it’s lame. Julie Pitta is undermining democracy by doing this, in a very small way, and undermining a fellow civically active female, which is Marjan. It’s just lame.”
Pitta’s publisher at the Richmond Review, Michael Durand, published a note Monday announcing he’d terminated the column. The Review avoids endorsements, he said, and seeks a wide variety of opinions from columnists such as Pitta and former supervisor Quentin Kopp.
“I know people’s emotions get high in political discussions,” he said. “But what feels like might be the right thing to do isn’t always the right thing to do … it was absolutely wrong and there’s no excuse for it.”
Reach St. John Barned-Smith: stjohn.smith@sfchronicle.com
Feb 5, 2024
St. John “Sinjin” Barned-Smith joined The San Francisco Chronicle in 2022 and covers City Hall. He previously worked at The Houston Chronicle, where he covered law enforcement.
Barned-Smith started his career at the Philadelphia Daily News, served in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay, and worked at the Montgomery Gazette, in Maryland, before joining Hearst Newspapers in 2014. His coverage of floods, mass shootings and police misconduct and other topics has been honored with several state and national awards.
Barned-Smith lives in San Francisco, with his newshound, Scoop.
He can be reached at stjohn.smith@sfchronicle.com.
