At least twice a month, someone asks me: Where is Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the Orange County conservative activist who worked for years as a Washington, D.C. aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and is now a convicted serial child molester?
Answer: McFarland, California.
Thanks to the fondness California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has for the private prison industry (which showers his campaigns with large contributions), Nielsen is serving his three-year sentence not in a state-run hell hole but at the far less stressful, privately-run Golden State Community Correctional Facility.
The facility, located about 25 miles north of Bakersfield, is a place inmates can enjoy. According to a March 2008 Sacramento Bee article, Golden State offers a “relaxed atmosphere,” taxpayer-funded satellite television access, indoor and outdoor recreational areas, a library and “comfortable” bunk beds in a college dorm-style setting.
“Right here is love compared to [state prison],” one veteran inmate told the Bee. “Here, you get all the football games, you get movies every day. It's real easy to do your time here. You don't have to worry about nothing . . .”
Nielsen–a 38-year-old graduate of USC law school, a close pal of OC Republican Party boss Scott Baugh, a onetime intern for District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and the son of a former Republican mayor of Fountain Valley–worked his way up rabidly conservative Christian political circles while secretly boning up on his pedophilia practices. His victims included an eighth-grade middle school Virginia boy (sexually abused for three years while Nielsen worked under Rohrabacher) as well as a ninth-grade Westminster, California boy. Before he finally pleaded guilty last year, the child porn collector and his defense lawyer, Paul S. Meyer, ruthlessly attacked the victims as mentally disturbed liars and the Weekly's dogged coverage of the crimes–which went unpunished for more than a decade–as left-wing bias.
Click HERE to read “NAMBLA Fantasy,” our initial article.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.