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As Kylie Jenner is hit with another lawsuit by a former housekeeper who claims she was traumatized after working for the beauty mogul, attorneys for Jenner are asking an L.A. court to drop anonymity for the former chef who claimed working conditions led to her miscarriage.

In a lawsuit filed Nov. 5, Dinora Carolina Cabria Amaya alleges that Jenner, her company and staff members Laura Dooley and Itzel Sibrian skimped on paying her the overtime she was due and increased her workload after she was injured on the job, among other workplace violations, which culminated in Amaya being wrongfully terminated.

In court documents reviewed by The Times, Amaya claims that while cleaning and organizing a drawer in Jenner’s laundry room, an unsecured can of pepper spray discharged directly into her eyes and face. She says she experienced severe burning and vision problems and reported the injury. In response, she claims she was asked to complete incident report paperwork and give it to security.

The suit reads that Amaya “continued suffering from blurry vision, burning, itching, dryness, irritation, and a constant sand-like sensation in her eyes and repeatedly reported these symptoms” and claimed that the more she complained that she was hurt, the harder her supervisors made her job by increasing her workload, assigning more physically demanding tasks and demanding she finish before leaving for the day.

On another occasion, Dooley allegedly instructed Amaya to enter Jenner’s closet and provided the passcode. Amaya claims she became locked inside for more than an hour, and that when she called Dooley and told her she was trapped and having a panic attack, “Dooley laughed and mocked her stating, ‘No one is at the house that can let you out and I cannot give the password to anyone else, you just have to wait.’”

Around October 2025, Amaya further claims she was assigned to clean Jenner’s doghouse, where she was bitten by the dog.

“Again, no meaningful assistance was provided,” the suit reads, adding that Amaya “purchased over-the-counter medication and treated the injury herself. She continued reporting that her eyes hurt, her arm and wrist hurt from the dog bite, and her back hurt from the increasingly physical work.”

Supervisors allegedly knew that Amaya had “suffered multiple workplace injuries, sought medical treatment, continued experiencing physical symptoms, and repeatedly asked for help and reported numerous violations,” and instead of helping her, they removed assistance, increased her workload, assigned heavier tasks, and abruptly changed her schedule and work locations,” in what the suit claims was an effort to make her life so miserable that she would quit.

On Feb. 6, 2026, Amaya claims she was wrongfully terminated.

Jenner’s attorney did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

In an Oct. 23 filing, attorneys for Jenner petitioned the court, arguing that the former chef who sued Jenner in June, alleging that a grueling workload led to her miscarriage, should not be permitted to sue Jenner using the pseudonym Jane Doe.

Attorneys argued that “pregnancy related allegations” do not support the former chef from proceeding with the suit anonymously and that she could have “avoided the ‘press attention’ and ‘public association’ of her name with the lawsuit in the first place by adhering to the confidential arbitration agreement she entered into.”

According to the filing, the former chef “opted to use the ‘press attention’ she purportedly seeks to avoid as a sword while attempting to use a pseudonym as a shield.”

The private chef’s lawsuit against Jenner followed two lawsuits brought by former housekeepers of the embattled reality TV star. Less than two weeks after one woman on Jenner’s cleaning staff sued her, claiming her co-workers harassed and discriminated against her, another housekeeper came forward with allegations claiming the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star didn’t intervene while she suffered abuse from fellow staff, despite the housekeeper slipping the reality star a letter pleading for help.

“Our client Dinora courageously chose to stand up for her rights. Her courage deserves to be heard, not silenced,” Della Shaker, the attorney who reps the former employees in all four suits brought this year, told The Times in a statement. “But let me be unequivocally clear: no amount of wealth, fame, power, or influence places anyone above the law. No one has the right to intimidate, threaten, or silence employees for standing up for their rights. Over the last several months, our firm has spoken with dozens of employees who fear retaliation, losing their livelihoods, and being blacklisted in the entertainment industry for speaking out against employment violations.”

Nearly a year after Christina Downer disappeared, her actor boyfriend was among two people arrested on suspicion of murdering her, Los Angeles police said Friday.

Downer’s brother is “Saturday Night Live” writer Jimmy Fowlie. Los Angeles Police Department officers arrested Delorean Bijon Brandon, 41, and Kaylee Nicole Markowski, 34, on Thursday after a lengthy investigation that kicked off after Downer was reported missing just before Christmas last year.

Both Brandon and Markowski were booked at the Metropolitan Detention Center with bail set at $2 million each. It is not clear if they are being represented by attorneys.

At first, the disappearance appeared to be a missing person’s case. Downer’s ex-husband requested a welfare check on Dec. 18, 2025 when he hadn’t heard from her. At the time, Downer’s boyfriend, Brandon, claimed that she had moved out several months earlier, leaving behind everything she owned including her car and dog, according to LAPD.

A few days later on Dec. 22, Fowlie shared a missing persons flier on his Instagram, writing that Downer had been missing and the family was concerned for her safety. In a separate post, he shared a photo of Downer and her dog, Rex, and wrote in the caption that his sister was very attached to the dog and had last been seen in Koreatown.

“I heard from her on Nov 26th. She was active on social media up to Dec 15th,” he wrote, noting that the last time anyone had spoke to her on the phone was Oct. 5. Fowlie said in the post that the family had “reason to believe” that in the weeks before she went missing, her phone and social media had been compromised and that whoever had Downer’s phone used it to hide “the fact that she was gone,” by requesting money and create an illusion that she’d skipped town and gone off the grid.

But when Downer’s phone washed ashore on the beach in Santa Monica, LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division took over the investigation.

Early this month, investigators searched an Airbnb in Joshua Tree in connection with Downer’s disappearance, according to NBC. It is not clear what, if anything, investigators found at the location.

When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote, they invited friendly media outlets to document the early morning arrest of one suspect.

At a news conference in Los Angeles this week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli intoned that the defendants’ alleged crimes proved President Trump’s long-held conspiracy theory that voter fraud threatens democracy and that noncitizens are voting by the boatload. Mug shots of the accused — lawful permanent residents, some of whom said they didn’t recall registering to vote — were displayed as if they were part of a Mafia-like conspiracy.

It all felt staged for maximum humiliation.

So what happened to a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and attempted to cast ballots for it in two elections?

There was no perp walk for Laura Lee Yourex, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. No melodramatic news conference from Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer.

Nah, Spitzer dismissed Yourex’s case after she paid $1,500 for four electronic billboards along the 22 and 55 freeways. They feature a photo of her late boxer Maya Jean sporting an “I Voted” sticker alongside a warning — “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime” — and the district attorney’s election fraud hotline number.

Yourex’s attorney has said she was trying to expose flaws in the state’s voter registration system by showing that even a dog could cast a ballot, a gimmick for which Spitzer had little sympathy.

He’s usually the modern-day equivalent of a hanging judge, the type of hard ass who wants his prosecutors to not only throw the book at defendants but also to bury them with a library. In an email, he told me that his office has successfully prosecuted two other voter fraud cases during his eight years in office and is pursuing three current ones. But as serious as voter fraud is, Spitzer has never preened in these cases the way Essayli has.

The Republican stalwart declined to comment on Essayli’s approach, saying he’s “not privy to any of the evidence in those cases.” When I asked why he chose a chuckle-inducing billboard as Yourex’s punishment, he argued that it successfully “address[ed] the harm that is done when engaging in this type of criminal behavior.”

Leave it to the Trump administration to make Spitzer — whose campaign slogan for his 2022 reelection was “#NoLAinOC” — come off as a big ol’ liberal softy. But when it comes to voter fraud, at least he’s meting out penalties that fit the crime, while Essayli is once again making Trump his North Star, not the Constitution.

The defendants charged with voter fraud deserve punishment, if they are indeed guilty. But as my colleagues Brittny Mejia and Kevin Rector reported, citing election experts, cases of noncitizens registering to vote are often a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of immigrants, for example, if they accidentally check a box at the DMV.

Essayli’s record as Trump’s top lawman in Southern California — he can’t even call himself the region’s U.S. attorney, since he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate — is so laughable that I wouldn’t believe him if he claimed that water is wet.

His prosecutors have gone after activists involved in protests against Trump’s masked deportation goons with shoddy charges that were dropped, rejected by grand juries, ridiculed as “amateur hour” by a federal judge or resulted in not guilty verdicts. He’s a lackey who silently stood and watched last year as FBI agents tackled Alex Padilla during a news conference in Los Angeles just because the U.S. senator dared to challenge then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ludicrous defense of mass immigration raids. He’s a coward who regularly declines to talk to press outlets — including The Times — that don’t think Trump is the greatest president in history.

Unsurprisingly, my request to interview Essayli — or at least receive emailed answers to questions including whether every felony defendant gets arrested with a phalanx of armed officers surrounding their home, whether that’s occurred in other voter fraud cases and whether his office regularly releases mug shots of felony defendants — went unanswered.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said his office is pursuing three voter fraud cases.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Mejia and Rector spoke to some of the accused immigrants and their families swept up by “Operation Protect the Vote,” who were bewildered as to what they had done wrong and why the U.S. Justice Department was swinging such a heavy hammer against them. They shouldn’t be.

What Essayli is doing in the name of rooting out voter fraud isn’t about upholding the law. It’s about validating Trump’s xenophobia. The show trials the defendants will probably face are not about getting rid the worst of the worst, as Trump long claimed. It’s about casting suspicion on all immigrants, legal and not.

What’s especially ironic — no, disgusting — about Essayli’s claims that immigrants who wrongly register to vote are disenfranchising American citizens is that the portrait of this country’s biggest election scofflaw hangs in every federal courthouse. It was Trump who wanted Congress to stop the electoral college from formalizing his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, claiming that Democrats stole the White House from him, and provoked a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.

But facts have never stopped Essayli from making a pendejo out of himself. His pathetic, dangerous charade reminds me of an infamous voter fraud case from 30 years ago. I wrote about it this summer when Trump first announced he was going to sic the Justice Department on noncitizens who were supposedly voting en masse.

Back then, Loretta Sanchez forever changed O.C. politics when she beat Republican Rep. Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Like Trump, Dornan claimed he lost because of immigrants who illegally voted. Like today’s GOP, sympathetic prosecutors and lawmakers at the local and federal levels spent way too much time and taxpayer money looking into the baseless allegations.

Just as Operation Protect the Vote has already shown this year, with only 28 charged out of about 23 million registered voters in California, Sanchez’s 1996 victory was not achieved through a vast immigrant voting conspiracy.

At least in the Dornan fiasco, Republicans finally dropped their investigation and moved on. The few immigrants who did vote improperly had their ballots tossed but otherwise faced no legal problems.

I doubt Trump and Essayli will give up so easily. That would require humility, mercy and the ability to admit they’re wrong.

But hey, if a dog can cast a vote in California, I guess anything’s possible.

Rock band Pavlov’s Dog is mourning the loss of singer-songwriter and lead vocalist David Surkamp, who died Monday at age 74.

Violinist and Pavlov’s Dog member Abbie Steiling announced Surkamp’s death Wednesday on Facebook. Additional information about Surkamp’s passing, including a cause of death, was not revealed.

“David leaves behind a legacy of endless creativity, unmistakable artistry, and a body of music that has touched lives across generations and around the world,” Steiling said on the band’s behalf.

Pavlov’s Dog also remembered its vocalist for his “profoundly poetic spirit and a romantic heart that found its way into every note, every lyric and every performance.”

Surkamp was born May 23, 1952, and led Pavlov’s Dog, known for songs “Julia” and “Late November,” since its founding in 1973 in St. Louis. He founded the band alongside bassist Rick Stockton, violinist Siegfried Carver and drummer Mike Safron, according to the band’s website. The group, which first signed to ABC Records under a six-figure deal, released its debut album “Pampered Menial” in 1975. The release featured the band’s most popular songs and showcased Surkamp’s high-pitched and trembling, yet powerful, vocals.

Pavlov’s Dog’s second release “At the Sound of the Bell” followed in 1976 and its third, “Lost in America,” came more than a decade later in 1990. Surkamp departed Pavlov’s Dog while recording its junior album and traveled to Seattle to further develop his musical talents. This led to a collaboration with British musician Iain Matthews and their power pop duo Hi-Fi.

Surkamp and his Pavlov’s Dog collaborators reunited in the early 2000s and Surkamp’s wife, Sara, joined as a vocalist and guitarist. The group went on to tour Europe, including playing the Netherlands’ Arrow Rock Festival in 2006. Over the years, Pavlov’s Dog saw members come and go: Some musicians departed the group because of conflicting commitments and others — including founding members Carver and Rayburn — died in the late aughts and early 2010s.

The group, with Surkamp still at the helm, later released albums “Echo & Boo” in 2011, “Wonderlust” in 2025 alongside some live albums, remasters and unreleased demos.

“He always allowed the musicians around him to shine in their strengths, generous with the spotlight and appreciative of what each brought to the music,” Steiling continued in the band’s Facebook post. “No matter what life held for him, he came alive onstage. Even on his hardest days, when the lights came up and the count-off began, he was a consummate performer. If he was playing music, it was a great day.”

Surkamp was preceded in death by his wife Sara, who died in 2025 at age 72. He is survived by children Saylor and Evan.