SANTA ANA – While his mother cried in the courtroom gallery, a former aide to an Orange County congressman stood between his two lawyers Wednesday and admitted molesting two boys.
Jeffrey Ray Nielsen’s admission came nine months after he insisted in testimony during his first trial that he never had ***, exposed himself, kissed, or touched one of the boys. That case ended with a hung jury.
Since then, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office filed a second case against Nielsen, charging him with molesting a Virginia teenager he met in 1994 when he was an aide in Washington, D.C., to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach.
Nielsen decided to plead guilty to molesting both boys – and accept a three-year prison sentence – rather than risk convictions during a second trial. He would have faced a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison had he been convicted on all counts.
Now he must serve at least 80 percent of the three-year term, and register as a *** offender for the rest of his life.
Nielsen, who is also a lawyer, declined to comment after the court hearing. He quickly walked into the courthouse elevator with his mother and father and a friend.
Defense attorney Paul S. Meyer would only say, “We felt it was time to resolve this case.”
Nielsen will remain free on $10,000 bail until Jan. 14, when he will check into the Del Amo Hospital, a Los Angeles County facility that specializes in treatment of *** offenders. It is the same facility that housed former Superior Court Judge Ronald Kline after he was charged with possession of child ***********. Kline is now serving time in a federal prison.
Superior Court Judge David A. Thompson scheduled Nielsen’s sentencing for April 18. But that hearing will likely be moved up if Nielsen completes the in-house treatment program earlier.
Besides a stint as a legislative aide for Rohrabacher, Nielsen also worked on an Assembly campaign of Scott Baugh, now the Republican Party chairman in Orange County, and he was given recommendations to University of Southern California law school by Orange County Republican activists Tom Fuentes and Michael Schroeder.
His father, Ben, is a former Fountain Valley mayor, and Jeffrey Nielsen also worked for a brief time as an intern in the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
Nielsen was arrested in 2003 in his office at his Irvine law firm after a Westminster High School student allegedly bragged to a classmate about being sexually involved with a wealthy lawyer. Nielsen was accused of seducing the 14-year-old boy after first making contact in a gay Internet chat room.
In testimony at his first trial, although Nielsen denied any ****** activity, he acknowledged he counseled the teenager after the boy told him that he was troubled about whether he should come out as gay.
Before a retrial could be started, Deputy District Attorney Colleen Crommett filed a new case against Nielsen, accusing him of molesting the Virginia boy. Crommett said Nielsen began molesting that victim when the boy was 12 or 13 years old and Nielsen was living with the boy’s family in Virginia.
Orange County had jurisdiction to prosecute in that case, Crommett said, because Nielsen also molested the teenager when he brought him for a visit to his parents’ home in Fountain Valley in 1995.
Crommett said Wednesday she agreed to the plea bargain in part because it spared the two victims the ordeal of having to testify.
She said both victims, who are now adults, were not anxious to take the witness stand in a second Nielsen trial. “These are very personal and private matters,” she said. “They are difficult to talk about.
“Mr. Nielsen is going to prison. This case warrants prison,” Crommett added. “That is what the District Attorney’s Office wanted all along.”
