California’s Civil Rights Department Squeezed Nine-Figure Settlements From Riot Games and Activision — Then Newsom’s Own Chief of Staff Pleaded Guilty to Lying About One of Them.
City Journal and RealClearInvestigations call it California’s “civil rights mafia” — a state agency, they argue, that turns modest discrimination complaints into nine-figure settlements, with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) as the “don” and Civil Rights Department Director Kevin Kish running the “shakedown campaigns.” Riot Games paid $100,000,000. Activision Blizzard paid $54,875,000. Tesla, in an ongoing case, is said to be facing a demand as high as $6,000,000,000.
That framing is a documented pattern, not a criminal charge — but one thread of it became exactly that. Newsom’s own chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was a Sacramento lobbyist for Activision before she took the job. In May 2026 she pleaded guilty in federal court to lying to investigators about whether she used her position to influence the very Activision case the state was suing over.
Tesla’s case remains open, contested, and unproven — the company has countersued and denies wrongdoing. Williamson’s guilty plea is not in dispute. Both belong in the same story about who runs California’s civil-rights enforcement, and who benefits when it settles.
- $100,000,000 — Riot Games settlement, finalized Dec. 2021, after CRD blocked a private $10 million deal — Civil Rights Department
- $54,875,000 — Activision Blizzard settlement, Dec. 2023 — reached while Newsom's own chief of staff was a former Activision lobbyist
- $6,000,000,000 — sum CRD Director Kevin Kish was privately said to be seeking from Tesla, per a source cited by Newsweek, in a case still unresolved
- $225,000 — diverted from a dormant Xavier Becerra campaign account — the fraud at the center of Dana Williamson's guilty plea
California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) — created in 1980 as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing — sits inside the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, a cabinet-level department under Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Its director, Kevin Kish, was appointed in February 2015 by then- Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) and reappointed by Newsom in February 2020. In a July 22, 2026 investigation, City Journal reporters Christopher F. Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp described the system Kish runs as operating “like a mafia,” with Newsom as the “don” and Kish as his “capo” running “shakedown campaigns” against private companies. RealClearInvestigations featured the reporting the same week.
Their exhibit A is Riot Games. Former employees filed a private class action in 2018 alleging pay and promotion discrimination against women; by 2019 the parties had a proposed $10,000,000 settlement. CRD and the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement objected in January 2020, arguing Riot’s exposure could run as high as $400,000,000. The larger case CRD then brought itself settled for $100,000,000in December 2021, with a court granting preliminary approval in July 2022 — ten times the deal the workers’ own lawyers had already accepted.
Activision Blizzard followed the same arc. CRD sued the video-game maker in July 2021 over alleged sexual harassment and pay and promotion discrimination against women, a case that became public the same month Microsoft announced its acquisition of the company. Activision settled with CRD in December 2023 for $54,875,000, with $45,750,000set aside to compensate women employed there between October 2015 and December 2020, admitting no wrongdoing. TechCrunch, Variety, and Bloomberg Law all covered the deal as a landmark workplace-discrimination settlement. What none of them knew yet was who had allegedly been working the case from inside the governor’s office.
Before she ran Newsom’s office, Dana Williamson was a Sacramento lobbyist whose client list included Activision, Centene, Meta, and Comcast. Newsom named her chief of staff in late 2022. According to federal prosecutors, in January 2023 — weeks into the job — Williamson told fellow lobbyist Alexis Podesta that she had told “a high level government attorney” to get the Activision case settled. CRD announced that settlement eleven months later.
Podesta was not a bystander. She had run the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency — CRD’s own parent department — under both Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) before leaving to lobby alongside Williamson. By June 2024 she was cooperating with the FBI, wearing a wire during conversations in which, prosecutors say, Williamson worried aloud about a public-records request tied to “litigation with the state.” A federal grand jury indicted Williamson that November on 23 counts, including conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and making false statements. Lobbyist Greg Campbell, who received roughly $240,000 from Activision in 2023 and 2024, and Becerra aide Sean McCluskie were charged alongside her; both later pleaded guilty, as did Campbell’s co-defendant.
The governor atop the agency — Gavin Newsom (D), whose Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency oversees CRD and who reappointed Director Kevin Kish in 2020.
The director — Kevin Kish, a career civil-rights attorney first appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) in 2015.
The chief of staff who pleaded guilty — Dana Williamson, Newsom’s top aide from late 2022 to December 2024, a former Activision lobbyist who admitted in May 2026 to lying to the FBI about her role in the Activision matter.
The wire-wearer — Alexis Podesta, who led CRD’s parent agency under two governors before cooperating with federal investigators against her own former lobbying partner.
None of this was the first sign of friction inside the Activision case. Two CRD attorneys who ran it, chief counsel Janette Wipper and assistant chief counsel Melanie Proctor, withdrew from the case in April 2022 — Wipper after being terminated, Proctor by resigning. Proctor told colleagues by email that the governor’s office had begun to interfere as the litigation proceeded.
“The Office of the Governor repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation. ... As we continued to win in state court, this interference increased, mimicking the interests of Activision's counsel.”
Melanie Proctor · then-Assistant Chief Counsel, Civil Rights Department, April 2022
Newsom’s communications director at the time, Erin Mellon, called the accusation “categorically false.” Nothing about Proctor’s 2022 email accuses Williamson by name — she wasn’t chief of staff yet — but it is the same case, the same governor’s office, and the same allegation of political interference that a federal guilty plea would substantiate three years later.
The latest round of numbers from a right-wing institute posing as a 'news organization' are pulled from thin air, relying on 'guesses,' and in some cases more than 20 years old!
Unlike Riot Games and Activision, Tesla has not settled. CRD sued Tesla in February 2022, alleging Black workers at its Fremont plant faced racial slurs, segregation into lower job tiers, and pay and promotion discrimination. Kevin Kish framed it bluntly: “Tesla claims to be built on the promise of creating a more sustainable future. But its employment practices remain rooted in some of the ugliest relics of the past.” Tesla countersued CRD over its investigative process and calls the underlying suit “unfair and counterproductive,” noting the allegations reach back years. A California appellate court cleared the case for trial in May 2026, and CRD’s systemic claims were set for trial on July 20, 2026 in Alameda County Superior Court, even as Tesla separately settled several individual workers’ claims confidentially that June.
Newsweek reported that a source familiar with the matter said Kish was seeking as much as $6,000,000,000from Tesla — a figure CRD has not confirmed in any public filing this story could locate. Tesla denies systemic discrimination occurred and disputes CRD’s process for building the case. No verdict has been reached. Everyone named in this section is entitled to a fair hearing of a case that remains open.
CRD’s only response to the City Journal investigation was boilerplate: “We take every complaint we receive seriously and evaluate them individually for further action based on the specific facts and circumstances.” Newsom’s office did not respond to Rufo and Schrupp’s requests for comment on the Activision allegations. National Review’s Jim Pettit has separately argued that Newsom’s DEI-era regulatory infrastructure — CRD included — persists in practice even as the governor rhetorically pivots toward the political center ahead of a possible 2028 run. Assemblyman David Tangipa (R-Fresno) pointed at the Williamson plea specifically, calling it “a symptom of a broken culture of power and privilege in Sacramento,” and has authored AB 1560 to bar anyone convicted of public-corruption offenses from registering as a California lobbyist.
California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that's possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Then-Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), who has since left the Republican Party to sit as an independent in the House, has separately and repeatedly called Newsom “America’s most corrupt governor” — a broader characterization, not a claim specific to CRD.
I've called Newsom America's most corrupt governor.
California’s Civil Rights Department, under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) administration, has turned discrimination cases against Riot Games and Activision into settlements worth a combined $154,875,000, and is reportedly seeking up to $6,000,000,000more from Tesla in a case still headed to trial. Critics at City Journal and RealClearInvestigations call the pattern a shakedown; that is their characterization of documented conduct, not a criminal charge. What is no longer just a characterization is Dana Williamson’s guilty plea — Newsom’s own chief of staff admitting under oath that she lied about whether she used her office to help the Activision case settle in her former lobbying client’s favor.
