For more than a year, Marissa Roy has vowed to turn the Los Angeles city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm.”
Now, she has a sweeping mandate to put that plan into action.
As of Wednesday morning, Roy had nearly double the vote tally of her opponent, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, all but assuring the 34-year-old progressive will walk into City Hall in one of her jewel-toned blazers next year as Los Angeles’ chief lawyer. While the contest has not officially been called, McKinney effectively conceded the race in an interview with The Times on Wednesday.
For decades, the L.A. city attorney’s office has focused almost exclusively on prosecuting minor crimes and defending the city from increasingly expensive litigation. In an interview in May, outgoing City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto scowled when a reporter mentioned Roy’s campaign line about running the office as a “public interest law firm.”
“That’s insane,” Feldstein Soto said, days before her historic primary defeat.
But in Roy, an enthusiastic and tenacious California deputy attorney general, the city will have a proactive top litigator who’s ready to play offense. Roy has promised to take her experience from a years-long legal battle with Meta to aggressively pursue litigation against corporations and landlords for alleged misconduct that harms the average Angeleno.
Long before she announced her candidacy, Roy had begun courting public servants inside the sprawling city attorney’s office to ensure her plan passed muster.
What began as a series of informal coffees at Pitchoun! Bakery downtown quickly evolved into a network of trusted advisors, who helped shape her campaign promises and fine-tune policy proposals so they could be executed on Day One.
“There’s not a single word on my website that they haven’t reviewed first to make sure that we can implement it,” Roy said in an October interview. “It’s why sometimes I won’t take a hard line on something, because I talk to the deputies involved and they say they need discretion.”
Despite attack ads saying otherwise, Roy hasn’t vowed to block prosecution of certain misdemeanor crimes — even though she prefers diversion programs as a way to aid homeless defendants.
She’s been more direct about her plans to protect the city’s immigrant communities from potential future raids and aggressively fight the Trump administration in court when it targets Los Angeles. Given her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, Roy’s stances on litigation involving the Los Angeles Police Department could also depart from her predecessors’.
The union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers spent millions against Roy. Feldstein Soto also steadfastly defended the LAPD’s widely criticized uses of force on protesters and journalists during immigration raids last year.
Roy also benefits from a deep bench of elected allies across the state, including her current boss, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, and fellow progressive city attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland. Many local supporters showed up to toast her presumptive win Tuesday night, already riding high on the blue wave that crashed across the U.S. when the first Los Angeles returns dropped around 8:20 p.m.
The event at Audio Graph Brewery in downtown L.A. had all the energy of a wedding reception, with DSA acolytes munching cookies emblazoned with Roy’s face in icing and union organizers bopping up and down to the viral Slayyyter track “Dance…” as results rolled in.
Roy is an evangelist for affirmative litigation, proactive suits of the type that forced President Trump to cede control of the California National Guard late last year after he deployed thousands of soldiers to quell protests and aid immigration enforcement across the state.
“We need someone who knows how to sue the Trump administration, who also has the relationships and can pick up the phone and call the San Francisco and San Diego city attorney,” Roy said. “We’re all part of this very tiny niche of municipalities suing the federal government. We all became experts [in those methods] together.”
Despite at times amplifying inaccurate claims that McKinney was a conservative, Roy and her opponent shared some policy planks. Both were highly critical of ballooning legal costs under Feldstein Soto, as well as her penchant for hiring outside law firms to fight the city’s battles. Both also said they wanted to revive internal programs the outgoing city attorney had scuttled, such as neighborhood prosecutors and specialized units for handing child abuse and domestic violence.
“This election is gonna go her way, and I’m just really truly grateful for the opportunity to be part of this over the last nine months,” McKinney said Wednesday morning. “I met a remarkable group of people. I learned a lot about the city, the City Attorney’s office, about city politics and I’m a better person for it. I congratulate Marissa on her victory, I wish her well.”
McKinney said he hopes Roy can “uplift that office to be the finest municipal law office in the country,” but also suggested she spend her energy on more than legal combat with business leaders or the White House.
“She’s gonna have to broaden her focus to issues related to public safety, homelessness. Obviously, we both agree that city liabilities need aggressive proactive risk management,” he said.
Meanwhile, Roy could scarcely contain her excitement as she laid out her plan to supporters chanting her name.
“I’m much more comfortable when people chant things like ‘Let’s sue it’, because that’s the work that we’re going to do,” she said.
“Let’s sue it!” the crowd cheered.