Brandon’s last con: After 17 protective orders in 3 states, he’s finally going to prison | Opinion

Brandon Johnson first wrote to me from the El Dorado County Jail in Placerville last May, and opened by describing himself as “a proud father of two young girls” cruelly separated from them because “the county sheriff beat me almost lifeless from head to toe after approaching me over mistaken identity” on July 4, 2021.

Johnson was only in jail, he said, because the injuries he’d suffered in that unprovoked attack had so altered his personality and behavior that ever since, “I have acted out in ways I never have before in my life.” Well, no. Almost nothing that he told me in that initial letter was true, including even the part about being a proud father.

But one thing Johnson, who turned 44 in August, said is accurate: Law enforcement should have taken his lawbreaking over the previous 20 years far more seriously.

“Looking back over the years,” he wrote, “I wish the legal system had stepped in to offer me more help. Seeing a pattern of off the wall behavior, the most that ever happened was fines.”

Six women in three states collectively filed at least 17 protective orders against him, but what happened as a result was this: nothing.

Nothing was ever done to stop behavior that really was off the wall. His record includes three counts of domestic violence and one of entrapment, charges to which he pleaded guilty, then got a suspended sentence. After pleading guilty to insurance fraud, he was sentenced to community service.

He still has outstanding warrants in Washington state, where he’s from, for felony theft, reckless endangerment and eluding arrest on protective order violations — speeding away from patrol cars with their lights and sirens going — while his license was suspended and with his then 12-year-old daughter in the car. But Johnson was creative in his conduct, too, according to his exes, who said that he faked cancer, lab work, advanced degrees, jobs, and at one point, his own death.

He is a tech savant, with multiple aliases, and he also filed a number of protective orders, some of which both his first wife, Athena Klingerman, and his second wife, Amber Rasmussen, got voided in September of 2021 under a new Washington State law restricting abusive litigation.

Even from jail, he filed online paperwork alleging that Klingerman owed him child support, and succeeded in getting Washington to try and take some of her wages. Also from his cell in Placerville, he’s gotten others to report Klingerman to child services.

Five women with whom he’s been involved told me in interviews that he got away with so much for so long because he is pretty much the GOAT of con men. “He’s really good,” says Rasmussen, who lives outside Portland, Oregon. She has teamed up with Klingerman, who’s in the Seattle area, on a podcast about their mutual ex that they call, “Ex-Wives Undercover.”

On multiple occasions, they said, Johnson convinced the police officers they’d called to their homes that they were the true offenders. He also won over multiple marriage counselors to his way of seeing things, and even convinced a court-appointed child monitor that the girl had been “brainwashed” by Klingerman.

The first thing that a third ex, who didn’t want to be named publicly, told me was this: “What you have to understand is that I’m terrified of Brandon” and do not feel safe even with him in custody. “He can fool anyone,” she said.

Or could for way too long, anyway.

‘He had a rape kit,’ including zip ties and duct tape

Johnson is going to prison now, on charges of assault and attempted kidnapping with intent to rape a fourth ex. In the 10-year plea deal he accepted in an El Dorado County courtroom on Friday, he waived his right to appeal and will be formally sentenced on Feb. 24.

The judge repeatedly had to ask him to speak up, but eventually, in between rolling his eyes, shaking his head in disgust and glaring at the female prosecutor, Johnson also accepted responsibility for aggravating factors, including engaging in violent conduct that poses a threat to society, targeting victims who were especially vulnerable and doing so after a level of planning considered sophisticated or professional. Admit or deny, Judge Vicki Ashworth asked him. “Admit … admit … admit.”

He’s going away because on March 12 of last year, he broke into the home of a former girlfriend in El Dorado Hills. “He showed up ready to rape, kill, kidnap, all three, or a variety of three,” Deputy District Attorney Kassie Cardullo said at his arraignment, where Johnson kept interjecting even after being admonished by the judge.

On March 2, in violation of a February protective order, Cardullo told the court, he pulled up at the woman’s job in a rented black van, grabbed her by the arm and terrified her with her zip ties. (“There were no zip ties!” Johnson yelled out.) Later that same week, Cardullo told the judge, Johnson broke into her home in the middle of the night and sexually assaulted her.

The third time, she said, he came prepared for something even darker: “He had a rape kit” — all the tools necessary to subdue and abduct her — “on his person, in his truck that he had rented.” The back seats were already down, and “there were already handcuffs ready in the seats attached to the back of the chairs,” the prosecutor told the court. Oh, and he had duct tape “already peeled off and cut into particular pieces” taped inside his jacket as a time saver.

It’s almost as if this wasn’t his first such attempt.

Death threats, assault are ‘all on video, mind you’

I won’t name the woman in El Dorado County because she’s a sexual assault victim. And even now, she can’t be completely confident that Johnson’s lies and schemes end here.

But since last March, he has been in jail in El Dorado County on charges that after removing the window bars she’d had installed to keep him out, he broke in and attacked her and a male friend of hers with a Taser and a knife.

Cardullo told the judge at Johnson’s arraignment that “he repeatedly said, ‘I’m going to blow your f—ing head off, I’m going to kill you. Don’t you reach for your phone.’ And this is all on video, mind you.”

That’s because after the woman discovered that he’d put trackers on her car, and on the cars of some of her friends and her son, she had a surveillance camera installed.

Johnson was actually trying to protect his ex from harm that night, he told me in a phone interview, because his cop-caused head injuries had him so confused that he thought her friend was there to hurt her.

He also told me he’d gone there to take back the $4,500 dog he’d bought for her.

Once there, “I heard a loud man’s voice while passing my ex’s bedroom window,” and reacted protectively.

And then? “There was a physical altercation between myself and another man. … We had a little scrape and that was it.” Both his victims and the video say otherwise.

That man told police that once he realized the weapon Johnson was holding to his head was a taser rather than a gun, he decided that “either they were going to die or he was going to fight back, so he fought back,” Cardullo said in court, eventually moving the two of them outside, where Johnson attacked him with a crowbar. When police arrived, Johnson ran, and only stopped after being tased a fifth time.

His mother, Barb Tolomei, who is paying his legal bills with her earnings as a housekeeping supervisor for an assisted living facility, told me he had gone to the woman’s house as an act of kindness, to clean up after her dog, who had been sick.

Why you’d bring a rape kit with you to either pick up or pick up after a dog is unclear.

He told me he’d been carrying those items around with him for a long time, afraid as he was for his own safety on account of his two evil ex-wives, whose podcast has made him a target.

Up until the last minute on Friday, it wasn’t clear whether Johnson would take the plea deal, or choose to take his chances with a jury. Because he was standing only a few feet in front of me in the courtroom, I heard his defense attorney, John Casey, whisper to the bailiff that he might want to call the Johnson matter ASAP, presumably before his unpredictable client could change his mind. “He’s real, real squirrely,” Casey told the bailiff, “about as squirrely as it gets.”

He’s taken the deal now, as any decent defender would have urged him to do. So there is finally reason to hope that he has run his last con.

But the question that’s a lot bigger than how this one talented fabulist and terrible boyfriend skated for years is how is it that our system regularly allows domestic abusers to keep offending until they commit a crime that we do take seriously.

As it happens, his ex-wives have some thoughts about that.

Women he’s targeted love kids and dogs

Brandon Robert Johnson was raised as an only child in the small fishing town of Aberdeen, Washington, best known as the birthplace of the grunge music scene, and of Kurt Cobain. His mom’s parents lived right next door, and he was and clearly still is adored by his mother, who when we spoke on the phone months ago described him as “real buff,” yet constantly preyed upon by women.

After Tolomei and the man Brandon thought of as his father split up when he was not yet in school, he was raised by his mom and her strict new husband. His biological father and a half-sister in Sacramento have only been in his life for the last few years, thanks to Ancestry.com.

He was a chunky, awkward and often bullied kid no girl ever took an interest in until he started working out and taking steroids in high school, his ex-wives say. But by the time he met Klingerman on Match.com in 2007, all that had changed.

At the time, she was dancing for a now-defunct minor league football team, the Everett Hawks, and only had an hour to meet him for the first time, at a restaurant near their practice gym in Seattle. Such a gentleman, she thought, walking her to her car. Instead of playing games, he had already called by the time she got home.

Right after that, she got “super sick,” and he showed up at her house with Gatorade and sympathy. She did wonder how he knew where she lived. But “I thought I had scored and had finally met a great guy. He came across as this wholesome, small-town boy who loved children and didn’t have any.”

They got serious right away, though warning signs were there from the beginning, too.

Like what? He said he had an architecture degree from a school with no architecture program. And when she surprised him one day and stopped by his work, where he’d said he had an amazing office, she instead found him in a cubicle.

He also claimed to be building them a dream house that did not exist. Yet in a way, those lies worked in his favor: When the truth came out, he said he’d just been trying to impress Klingerman because she was so wonderful that he could never measure up. “You don’t have to impress me,” she assured him. “I like you for you.”

She did get fed up and break up with him, more than once, and then he’d pressure anyone else she started seeing to leave her alone, she said. When she confronted him about that, Klingerman said, “He said he’s so head-over-heels and has never acted like this before. So I think he really loves me.’’

They married and had a child, but their time together featured burner phones and suicide threats. And if anything, things got even worse after their divorce: “He threatened to kill me,” she asserted, and he was pounding on her windows trying to get into her home to stop her from talking to the woman who became his second wife.

Klingerman called the police, but he again convinced them with fake screenshots, texts and documents that he was the one being tormented.

‘He put a ring on my finger in six weeks’

He and Rasmussen met on Tinder late in 2013, and on their second date, he told her he was falling in love with her. “I was 36 when we met, and he leads with, ‘I’m a family guy. I want more children.’ He put a ring on my finger in six weeks,” in January of 2014. Turns out, the rock wasn’t real, either.

But again, his dishonesty read to her as its opposite: On the second date, he told her he needed to share something he’d never before told anyone, and that was that he’d been drugged and raped and had unwillingly fathered a second child as a result.

Later, he produced phony but official-looking paperwork that his other daughter’s mother had been charged with raping him, had taken a plea deal and served time. None of that is true; the girl was conceived during a two-day fling while both were on vacation. He’s only acknowledged that daughter, who is 15 and lives in Oregon, “when he feels like it for a minute,” her mother told me.

But Johnson’s story about being violated did make Rasmussen feel for him: “When someone says they’ve been raped, you don’t question it.”

The women I know of who have been involved with Johnson are unusually kind-hearted, and crazy about kids and dogs, all of which he used against them. “My dogs are my life, and he’s been to my dog’s day care,” said another ex, who came to fear for not only her own safety, but that of her pets.

In part because Rasmussen was so eager to have children — “Time’s running out, and all I ever wanted was to be a mom,” — she ignored her doubts.

Johnson offered to move to Portland, where she lived, to be with her. But she didn’t think he should relocate so far away from his daughter in Seattle, so she moved there instead. Almost right away, he stopped working, and also stopped being Mr. Wonderful. But “my ego would not let me” hightail it back to Portland to hear “I told you so.” “I had school loans and no job to come back to.”

Whenever she started asking too many questions, Rasmussen said, Johnson would come up with a distraction. At one point, for instance, “he says he has a stomach tumor. Two weeks later, ‘Turns out I don’t.’”

At different times, he also faked lung cancer and leukemia, “losing weight and pretending to be throwing up violently, and would show me his fake blood work. Now he’s got two girlfriends, a wife, fake cancer, and he’s embezzling.”

He’d routinely punch walls, throw furniture, drive 100 mph with her in the car, and on two occasions, she said, he tackled her to get a phone away from her, both times after she’d discovered more evidence of infidelity.

After one of those altercations, he got up the next day and flew to Hawaii to attend a wedding with one of his girlfriends. (When that woman, an NFL cheerleader, dumped him, he posted terrible and untrue things about her on the internet equivalent of a bathroom wall and sent her a suicide video. Then, posing as his sister, he sent her a Facebook message blaming her for his imaginary death.)

Rasmussen had already filed for divorce on the day in 2019 that he grabbed a knife, held it to his own wrist, and blocked her from leaving the house. “He’s screaming, slobbering and a madman. He said if you leave, I promise you right now I’m going to that bitch Athena’s house, I’m going to kill her, then I’m going to kill” one of his other girlfriends, and then himself.

‘The law failed us’

After that incident, criminal charges were filed in King County, Washington — the three counts of domestic violence and one of entrapment. The bailiff at a hearing in that case saw but didn’t hear Johnson menacing his two ex-wives in the lobby of the courthouse, where Klingerman says he had them backed up against a wall, cursing and whispering, “You’re going to f—ing die.”

A few seconds later, two deputies “tackled him and threw him to the ground,” and put him in handcuffs for the rest of the proceedings, she said, “and still he walked away with a $400 fine.”

When he took a plea deal in August of 2019, he was ordered to pay the fine and serve a suspended sentence — 60 months on parole, the terms of which he routinely violated. So no wonder, as he suggested in that first letter to me, the lesson learned was that there was no lesson to be learned. His lies worked so well that he was free to go on lying.

What he wrote to me about being beaten by cops may or may not have happened. Police declined to talk about his allegations, which could either be yet another tale, or one time he told the truth, boy-who-cried-wolf style. He did wind up hospitalized with a head injury after what his mom calls “the honest mistake” of climbing behind the wheel of a car that wasn’t his that day, on July 4th of 2021.

According to his sister, Rebecca Crane, he didn’t know how he got hurt, either. “He didn’t even recognize me; he was that out of it. He had no idea what happened. He broke up with his girlfriend the night before, and thinks he got in a fight. He was talking gibberish and hallucinating,” imagining that his ex was in his hospital room, along with a puppy.

Though he for years suffered no real consequences for his actions, the women he was involved with all believe they did: One of them had her dogs let out of her yard, and her boyfriend had his brake lines cut. Klingerman had windows broken and her cars keyed.

By 2020, “we were defeated,” Rasmussen told me. “The no-contact order was a flop” — worthless — “and the child was not protected. The law failed us.”

Then, in May of that year, Klingerman’s sister died in a fight with her husband. The autopsy was inconclusive on whether her gun death was a homicide or a suicide, and no charges have been filed. But that’s when the two women decided to start their podcast about domestic abuse.

“We felt like we should share our story, talk about the red flags and the gaps in the system,” Rasmussen said. When women all over the country started reaching out with similar stories, they started sharing some of those, too, and are very proud to have talked one woman in Texas to safety.

But why, after decades of advocacy for women in serious danger, does our system keep failing them? And that’s not just the case on the progressive West Coast.

Domestic violence taken seriously only when it’s too late

In red-state Missouri, where I lived before moving to Sacramento, I wrote about the municipal Kansas City court that handles nine of 10 Jackson County domestic violence cases. In the previous year, that court had dealt with 867 strangulation cases that because of where they were filed couldn’t be treated as felonies, or even misdemeanors. These were city ordinance violations, right up there with jaywalking.

I also covered the murder of a woman named Tabitha Birdsong, who died with her umpteenth protective order in her back pocket, after trying for nine years to escape her abusive husband.

She moved, hid, stayed in constant touch with police, and died anyway, as her mother had always feared she would. (Her husband, Gene Birdsong, will finally go on trial for murder in her 2018 death next month, unless he gets yet another continuance.)

Yet even after her death, the Overland Park, Kansas detective Tabitha had been calling three times a week seemed to blame her for her own death. “Victims have to help themselves,” he told me.

Victim-blaming still goes on here, too, of course. Even as I was waiting for the People v. Johnson case to be called on Friday, I heard another matter on the docket that involved domestic violence allegations being joked about in open court.

A scheduled hearing on a protective order violation might not be necessary after all, defense attorney James Clark told the judge, because “Cupid has drawn back his bow and parties are back together.” Ashworth said that didn’t mean she wouldn’t override Cupid. Sure, sure, but “sometimes I giggle,” the attorney responded. Her Honor did not giggle, but this attitude is how, and why, domestic violence is usually only taken seriously when it’s too late.

Brandon Johnson’s ex-wives want to know why there’s no registry of convicted domestic violence offenders, and they’re right that there should be such a thing. “I love that idea” of a domestic violence registry, said Cardullo, the prosecutor in Johnson’s case, “but it will never happen in California.”

It wouldn’t be easy anywhere, since so many such cases are either dropped or pleaded down to almost nothing.

But unfortunately, California is marching in the opposite direction. As of last January, convicted sex offenders can petition, based on a number of factors, to be removed from what had previously been a lifetime registry.

There are cases in which that makes sense, but while we’re worrying about high school sweethearts unfairly, if oh-so-rarely found guilty of statutory rape, what about the 20% of all homicide victims who die as the result of intimate partner violence in the United States every year?

Our unwillingness to do more for victims runs counter to what we know about both sex crimes and domestic violence, which is that without intervention, they not only continue but escalate.

I understand why Johnson wrote to me that, “Looking back over the years, I wish the legal system had stepped in to offer me more help. Seeing a pattern of off the wall behavior, the most that ever happened was fines.” Only, no one did see a pattern, because no one was looking.