On July 12, 2020, Washington D.C., comedian Elizabeth Croydon tagged renowned Black philosopher Cornel West in a cryptic tweet that read, “I’d like you to know that Shaid [sic] Buttar sexually harassed me and is friends w/the ‘ex’ ‘gang banger’ who threw me into a wall disabling me for years. …” In what seems like the oldest movie plot of all time, staffers who had parted ways with Buttar’s campaign reached out to Croydon, and on July 21 Croydon published an account called “Shahid Buttar Repeatedly Sexually Harassed Me” in which she claimed the harassment took place over 20 years ago when they lived in a communal home in D.C. for freelancers in activism and the arts.
Based on the tweet and Croydon’s account, DSASF circulated a draft resolution moving to rescind their endorsement and calling on Buttar to participate in a “restorative justice process” with the club, of which he and several of his current and former staffers were members. The resolution accused Buttar of “a pattern of abuse including but not limited to sexually inappropriate behavior with his staff and volunteers.” Local media outlets including the San Francisco Chronicle and Mission Local covered the effort without confirming the accusations.
During this same time, on July 25, 2020, blogger Jaqueline Anne Thompson published the first in a six-part series about “Elizabeth Croydon’s ever-growing list of victims.” Thompson says after her initial post, more victims came forward. In each subsequent chapter, she helps another person tell their story about Croydon’s bizarre behavior. Each account is frightening, but the most terrifying of all is the account of a woman named Stacey Haines, a fellow comedian who let Croydon stay with her in Los Angeles and then could not get her out. In the beginning, Haines says things were fine. She even felt comfortable enough to tell Croydon the reason she had chosen to be celibate was that she was a sexual assault survivor. What was supposed to be a short stay, however, dragged on, with Croydon gradually taking over the apartment. When Haines was at her waitressing job, Croydon went through her personal belongings, including her journal. Finally, the landlord, who had run-ins with an erratic Croydon as well, changed the lock and told Haines to put Croydon’s things in the hallway, which she did — but that wasn’t the end of it.
Not only did Croydon stalk Haines at her job, but at the comedy club where they both performed. Haines says on several occasions Croydon mocked her for remaining celibate and yelled out, “We need to get Stacey fucked! Who will fuck Stacey? Anyone?” Haines says Croydon also started a rumor that she wasn’t a woman. “Elizabeth claimed I had a penis and that I cornered her and rubbed my breasts and penis up against her on a regular basis.” Haines was shocked to see Croydon describe her encounter with Buttar in the same way, as well as use her story about celibacy, writing, “she stole my experience as her own.”
“The only thing more alarming to me than being the target of racist accusations was watching the fragility of ‘progressives’ and ‘socialists’ in San Francisco lead them to double down and shoot the messenger even after the lies were exposed.”
— Shahid Buttar
After the story ran, Croydon herself confirmed it in a tweet — and went even further: “Stacey Haines is accusing me of sexual harassment /career sabotage in defense of Shahid Buttar. … She also tried to make me touch her balls.”
Thompson said by the time she was done with her series, over two dozen people had contacted her to say they, too, had been victims of Croydon’s lies and harassment.
Patricia Brooks, founder of earned media firm MatchMap Media and a Buttar campaign volunteer, told me in a 2022 interview that she and Buttar did overlapping work on the East Coast. “I lived in the D.C. area for 17 years and was pretty well-known in those circles, and people from those circles came to me and said Liz has done this before. It was 20 years ago. Usually there are others who come forward — these things rarely happen in a vacuum. But no one did. Instead, people came to me with concerns about Liz and not Shahid.”
‘A pretty bad boss’
Apparently, members of the DSASF, the Milk Club, and SFBerniecrats (which dissolved in 2025) couldn’t be bothered to do a simple Google search, but even without the damning accounts of other victims and Croydon’s own off-the-rail tweets, the story quickly fell apart. Shockingly, no one from those groups — which share many common members — apologized for pushing the resolution.
“The only thing more alarming to me than being the target of racist accusations was watching the fragility of ‘progressives’ and ‘socialists’ in San Francisco lead them to double down and shoot the messenger even after the lies were exposed,” Buttar told me in a March 2022 interview.
Brooks, who is herself a survivor of sexual assault, was deeply concerned about members of the SFBerniecrats using the #MeToo movement to attack a Brown Muslim man. “I was a Bernie Sanders supporter way before he got in the race. Their group is part of our revolution, which is national. I decided to testify at their hearing about Shahid with my Bernie perspective,” Brooks said. “I told them if it was about treatment of staff, they should unendorse Bernie because way worse things were said about him being sexist.” SFBerniecrats then-Chairman Brandon Harami told Brooks she was “speaking nonsense” and told her to “get a life.” He also called her a “harasser” and deleted her post from a public forum. “I was trying to tell the truth,” Brooks said. “They don’t care about survivors. They don’t care about anything. It’s just a political game for them.”
In 2022, when I was working on my investigation into Buttar case for the Marina Times, Harami refused my invite to tell his side, instead taking to Medium in a post titled, “Seriously: The Left Doesn’t Need to Die on this Hill,” which confirmed his role in the Buttar rumormongering. “I heard it from multiple staffers that Shahid was a pretty bad boss for some time but bit my tongue because I had worked on campaigns before and know how stressful it is and because the staffers asked me not to say anything,” he wrote. After agreeing “the sexual assault accusations were questionable,” Harami said the club “voted by a slim majority to recommend rescinding Shahid’s endorsement on the basis he operated a toxic work environment.” Still, a toxic work environment is a long way from sexual assault. “This is someone’s life. You can’t just call them a sexual predator and then say, ‘oh it’s false’ but we must move on for the sake of the movement,” Brooks said. “I have worked with Shahid very directly as a woman on the team for a year and a half. I like working with him. He is not a bad boss nor a sexist one, in my experience.”
On Aug. 4, 2020, during a virtual meeting, DSASF passed a resolution removing the accusations of staff mistreatment and sexual misconduct, simply stating they had “lost confidence in the management” of Buttar’s campaign “and in Shahid Buttar as a candidate that represents our values.” More than 40 DSA members, including current District 9 supervisor Jackie Fielder and former District 5 supervisor Dean Preston, signed it.
