Concord Board of Ethics dismisses claims against at-large councilor as meritless

An ethics complaint against At-large City Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton was rooted in conjecture, failed to outline a specific violation of the city’s ethics rules, misapplied state law, probed events too far in the past and relied on false framing about how city government works, the Concord ethics board determined Friday.

The board unanimously dismissed the complaint, filed in January by Claire Best, a California resident who owns property in Moultonborough.

Best claimed that the councilor and her employer, the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, have conjured fake victims of assault, manipulated witnesses and other evidence in the 2015 trial of former St. Paul’s student Owen Labrie, enriched themselves financially from victim settlements and stalked Best online. The complaint also alleges the involvement of the Concord Police Department in these crimes and takes issue with Grady Sexton chairing the city’s public safety board, which gives advice to the council about safety issues in the city.

Those accusations were speculative and unproven, the board determined.

The Board of Ethics, Steve Shurtleff said, “deals simply with facts, not prepositions, not ideas, not thoughts, not conjecture.”

When an ethics complaint is filed, the board determines first whether it merits a public hearing. In recent years, the board has dismissed other complaints that it found too vague or referenced events too far in the past to be weighed fairly – members have emphasized that they are not investigators.

To Grady Sexton, the point of the complaint was to draw attention and false legitimacy to conspiracy theories against her and the coalition.

“I think that this was a pretty reckless publicity stunt. I think it was an abuse of the ethics process,” Grady Sexton said after the hearing. “Harassment is a crime in the state of New Hampshire, and so is falsely accusing people of crimes. I hope that Claire Best is held accountable.”

More than a dozen people, including a handful of city councilors, attended the hearing, most of whom offered support to Grady Sexton after the brief meeting.

Best was not among the audience, nor was Ward 5 Councilor Stacey Brown, who repated some of Best’s allegations. Brown is married to an officer in the Concord Police Department.

“No court, litigant, or regulated entity in the Labrie matter or any of the legal matters referenced in the complaint remotely suggested, let alone found, that I engaged in any of the allegedly unethical or illegal activities referenced in the complaint,” Grady Sexton wrote in a filing responding to the complaint. “Further, there is no evidence to support the accusations.”

Grady Sexton has spoken out about what she describes as a defamatory campaign by Best against her and her employer, which has spanned more than six years.

Best has levied similar claims over the last several years, including in numerous posts on social media and blogs as well as outreach to state investigators. Best endorsed a bill in the New Hampshire State House this winter to cut the organization’s funding pending an investigation of its finances, as did Brown.

At the ethics board, preliminary discussions of complaints don’t delve into their substance, but consider whether the complaint, as framed, falls within the board’s purview, lays out a potential violation of the ethics rules and is generally of merit.

Not only did board members find the complaint largely unsubstantiated, but they noted that it pointed to no specific action, like a vote, that Grady Sexton may have taken in violation of the ethics rules.

Shurtleff also raised concerns that the time period at the heart of the allegations – surrounding the Labrie trial – was a decade ago, and reiterated that the public safety board has no control over police pay and spending. The meeting concluded in roughly ten minutes.

Afterwards, Grady Sexton said the Board of Ethics’ swift dismissal of the complaint as meritless shows that “our local processes cannot be hijacked to advance conspiracy narratives.”

“These claims are demonstrably untrue. They have been repeated online without any evidence and pushed through official channels, including this ethics filing, in an effort to manufacture legitimacy for baseless and conspiratorial allegations,” Grady Sexton said in a statement.

She concluded with an assertion that the state legislation would be similarly set aside. The bill, she said, is “built on the very same false claims that were rejected here today. It is an attempt to use the legislative process to legitimize internet fiction and to target an organization that advocates for victims of crime.”

In an interview, Grady Sexton framed the ethics complaint and its elevation by Brown as far more than a political dispute.

“A city councilor is promoting a woman who is making accusations about another city councilor, that she is engaging in human trafficking and has manipulated a trial through DNA tampering,” Grady Sexton said. “That is very different than ‘Amanda and Stacey aren’t getting along.’”

Being able to refocus on her work, both advocacy in the State House and service to the people of Concord, “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

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