‘You don’t need roofies if you give them enough wine’: Trial opens against ex-Windsor mayor with his own words 39%
By Julie Johnson53% Cynthia Dizikes53%
7/15/2026, 7:39:45 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.2% saturation with 369 hits. Analysis detected 2,554 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,523 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.5% and a BS Rank of 39% (9,884 of 16,187 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 61.10% of the article peer group.
For two decades, a once rising political star used his influence, connections and wine-soaked lifestyle to grope, grab, assault and rape women, a plaintiff’s attorney said Wednesday during the opening of a civil trial in Santa Rosa.
Dominic Foppoli’s targets, she claimed, were a matter of convenience: girlfriends, a professional colleague and new acquaintances whom he plied with alcohol and, they suspect, date rape drugs even as he was elected to public office and became mayor of the town of Windsor.
‘You don’t need roofies if you give them enough wine.’
Those are Dominic Foppoli’s words,” attorney Traci Carrillo told the Sonoma County jury as she described the evidence, including text messages and testimony, that she plans to present in coming days.
Along the way, she said, Foppoli was enabled by the “upper echelons” of the North Bay, including friends who belonged to the social club and children’s charity, Active 20-30.
‘Bring some pussy’ — those are not my words, those were the words of Dominic Foppoli,” she said.
About an hour later, attorney Andrew Watters rose from his seat next to Foppoli at the defendant’s table and asked the jury to set any biases aside as they would, in the weeks ahead, hear difficult and emotional testimony.
The sexual encounters, he said, were consensual interactions between adults.
Watters rebuffed Carrillo’s claims that his client had intentionally tried to get women drunk, saying Foppoli was a wine industry professional who knew how to avoid over-serving people.
The women, he said, had come forward as part of a coordinated “group effort” against Foppoli, and “not an organic effort at truth seeking."
Mr.
Foppoli has yet to be charged with any crime five years later and counting,” Watters said.
The opening statements marked the start of the first trial against Foppoli, who resigned as mayor soon after a 2021 Chronicle investigation exposed numerous sexual assault allegations against him, including forcible groping and kissing, nonconsensual oral copulation and rape.
In all, 13 women would come forward to accuse Foppoli of sexual assault and misconduct.
Foppoli, 44, who still owns Christopher Creek Winery in Healdsburg and lives part-time in Italy, has maintained his innocence.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office launched a criminal inquiry, which was handed to the Attorney General’s office but then suspended in 2024 when investigators concluded they lacked “enough evidence to warrant filing charges on the cases not barred by the statute of limitations.”
By that time, seven of the women had banded together to take their claims to Sonoma County Superior Court in a civil lawsuit against Foppoli, seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
On Wednesday, Foppoli sat, scribbling notes on a notepad, next to Watters and lawyers representing Active 20-30, which the women have accused of failing to investigate reports of Foppoli’s assaults when he was a member.
The jury of 12 Wine Country residents will be asked to decide whether the women proved that Foppoli’s actions amounted to sexual assault or abuse, and whether his conduct violated civil rights or domestic violence laws.
Unlike a criminal trial, which requires unanimous agreement, only 9 of the 12 are required to reach a verdict for him to be held liable.
“We’re going to ask for a lot of money,” Carrillo told the jury.
“But it’s appropriate.”
In the coming weeks, Carrillo told jurors, they will learn about a pattern of sexual abuse that began when Foppoli was around 21 and continued throughout his adulthood as he launched careers in the wine industry and in politics.
Carrillo told the jury they may see videos and photographs that Foppoli took surreptitiously of women in vulnerable states — inebriated, unconscious and unaware of the filming.
In one video, she said, Foppoli approaches his sleeping girlfriend and lifts up her nightgown, exposing her body.
“She didn’t even know he was in her house,” Carrillo said.
Carrillo said Foppoli’s nonconsensual recordings “created this fear: Could he have photographed me?”.
Four of the women were in their late teens or early 20s at the time of the assaults, and Foppoli took advantage of their youth and inexperience, Carrillo said.
Two of the women met Foppoli through Active 20-30, a national charity with an all-male chapter in Santa Rosa that they claimed created a “culture of drinking” that put the women at risk.
Club leaders learned that Foppoli may have assaulted fellow members and, in at least one case, promised to investigate, Carrillo said, but nothing came of it.
They kicked Foppoli out of the group only after the Chronicle published its investigation in 2021.
Carrillo said that, over the years, her clients confided in numerous friends, therapists and loved ones about the assaults, and contemporaneously documented the encounters with Foppoli in journals.
But they initially felt too horrified and ashamed to come forward publicly until a reporter started digging into the allegations.
Others, who had dated Foppoli in young adulthood, didn’t realize until years later that a romantic partner’s actions could constitute assault or rape, she said.
Carrillo said that at least two women described feeling unusually disoriented after Foppoli filled their glasses from unmarked wine bottles, including one woman who said she blacked out and woke up naked with Foppoli raping her.
“It still haunts her even today,” Carrillo said.
The abuse didn’t stop there, Carrillo said, telling jurors that they would learn about aggressive tactics that Foppoli employed to attack the women’s credibility after they came forward and his political career was at stake.
“If we are using the trump playbook let’s do it all of the way,” Foppoli wrote to an old friend and lobbyist, Robert Stryk, in an April 8, 2021 text message that Carrillo presented to the jury.
“Time for scorched earth,” Stryck wrote in a text message sent the next day.
Carrillo said Stryk went onto a live radio broadcast and spewed insults and accusations toward one of the women, claiming she was an “alcoholic” and unfit to be near children.
“It’s not about the truth, it’s about controlling the narrative and dirtying the victims,” Carrillo said.
By noon, trial testimony began with the first plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe 1, taking the stand.
She said she dated Foppoli around 2001 when she was 18.
She described Foppoli as macho and handsy with women when they were in groups, but “funny, goofy and dorky” when they were alone.
“I thought, ‘This is the real Dominic, and everything else is a facade to seem cool,’” she said.
But she was soon unsettled by some of his behavior.
She had developed film from a camera and saw that Foppoli had taken pictures of them kissing when she was unaware.
In her opening, Carrillo said that Jane Doe 1 had tried to ask for help from Foppoli’s mother after he wouldn’t stop groping and kissing her while she was working at his family’s daycare.
Foppoli’s mother dismissed her concerns, telling her in an email that “the Foppoli men are passionate,” according to Carrillo and court filings.
That response, Carrillo said, shaped Jane Doe 1’s “view and perspective” of Foppoli’s behavior.
Carrillo said that was the mindset she’d been given when the “single most haunting event” occurred on Valentines Day in 2002.
Foppoli blindfolded and handcuffed her and inserted grapes into her vagina, even as “she was crying and saying no,” Carrillo said.
“She internalized it,” Carrillo said.
“Until a reporter reached out to her, and she thought, ‘I’m not alone.’”
Before the questioning continued, an attorney for the plaintiffs requested that the judge close the courtroom.
The parties had agreed that certain testimony involving sensitive details could be presented to the jury without members of the public present.
The lawsuit originally named Active 20-30 and Christopher Creek Winery as defendants, accusing both organizations of failing to investigate reports of sexual assault against Foppoli and for profiting financially from the ways he “lured” women to events.
Christopher Creek Winery and Active 20-30’s national organization reached a confidential settlement with the plaintiffs, Carrillo said.
The Santa Rosa chapter of Active 20-30, where Foppoli was a member, remains a defendant.
The civil trial, which is the broadest lawsuit that has been filed against Foppoli, is expected to continue through August.
A civil case filed by Farrah Abraham, a social media influencer and former reality television star, who said Foppoli raped her at a March 2021 house party in Florida, is still pending.
Last year, Foppoli’s wine company settled another lawsuit filed by a Montana woman who said Foppoli raped her multiple times in 2020 when she was 18.
In the hallway outside the courtroom Wednesday, Windsor residents Bob and Sharron Walters waited for the trial to reopen to the public.
Foppoli represented them on the Windsor Town Council for more than six years, and they said they were disturbed that their elected official may have committed such acts.
They wanted to hear testimony first hand and bear witness on behalf of their community.
“It’s personal — he represented the town we live in,” Sharron Walters said.
“He was our mayor.”
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