It’s the same move every time. When John Erickson can’t win on the facts, he finds an institution to manufacture the story for him. This week it was the state’s largest LGBTQ+ organization. Shame on them for saying yes.
A committee called Grow California sent mailers hitting West Hollywood Councilmember John Erickson, candidate for State Senate District 24, over one thing: his travel. Trips to Italy, the Vatican, and Paris charged to the public; thousands in luxury hotels; a riff on The White Lotus; the tagline “public service meets room service.” One image shows Erickson shirtless by a pool — a photo he posted to his own social media feed.
That’s an attack about money and self-regard. You can argue it’s unfair. You can argue the trips were legitimate, as Erickson does. What you cannot honestly call it is bigotry.
Equality California called it bigotry. The organization announced that the mailers traffic in “imagery and stereotypes that evoke harmful anti-LGBTQ+ tropes,” warned that “whether intentional or inadvertent,” they “cause real harm,” and “demanded” that every candidate and committee in the race “review these materials” before sending anything else.
Anyone who has watched John Erickson operate recognizes the move. Because this is what he does.
The Method
Erickson doesn’t refute. He captures.
Confront him with a damaging fact, and his instinct isn’t to answer it; it’s to find an institution willing to relabel the story as an attack on him or on the people he claims to speak for. Sometimes the institution is a newspaper. Once it was the Sheriff’s Department. This spring it was a city commissioner. This week, it’s the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in California. The targets and tools change. The function never does: convert a problem into a grievance, and let a trusted institution carry it for him.
We have the receipts because we’ve documented each one.
2024: The Wright Arrest
In September 2024, Erickson was running for re-election, and one of his strongest challengers, Zekiah Wright — who is Black — had just won the West Hollywood Chamber’s PAC endorsement, beating out Erickson and his ally Larry Block. Within a week, Erickson activated a complaint he’d been sitting on for months: a filing irregularity involving an LLC, the kind of thing that could have been a civil matter. Instead, it became a felony referral.
The Chamber endorsed Wright on September 5. Block published a bitter op-ed on September 10. Erickson filed the complaint on September 11. Wright was arrested on September 12, and the friendly press was already in position. Beverly Press reporter Rance Collins ran the dramatic “felony arrest” framing with exquisite timing; WEHOonline amplified it. Wright’s campaign never recovered. Erickson was re-elected.
By Wright’s own account, the charges were dropped two weeks after the election, once they’d done their job. No outlet that splashed the arrest bothered to cover the dismissal. The story had already served its purpose: eliminate the threat, then let it quietly disappear.
2026: The Hallman Call
Fast forward eighteen months. This March, West Hollywood Public Safety Commissioner Tod Hallman accused Erickson of calling him directly and threatening to remove him from his commission seat for supporting Jonathan Wilson’s City Council campaign. Wilson, if elected, would be the first Black councilmember in West Hollywood’s history.
Hallman didn’t whisper it. He put it in a formal letter to the City Attorney, calling it what it was: a direct threat. The mechanism had changed from a criminal referral to a phone call, but the function was identical — use institutional power to suppress someone who threatens the structure Erickson controls. Same playbook, different target.
The Press He Already Owns
None of this works without willing institutions, and Erickson built his at home first. West Hollywood’s “access press” – Larry Block’s WEHOonline and the Beverly Press chief among them – has spent years trading scrutiny for access.
Block oscillates between running for office and covering the officials he hopes will validate him.
Collins took a City Hall commendation “for strengthening the local press” from the very councilmember whose challenger he’d helped knock out of the race. A captured press doesn’t ask why the felony charges vanished after the election. It runs the next press release.
So when a hostile ad finally lands a punch, Erickson can’t answer; the local outlets aren’t enough, they don’t carry the weight to launder a spending scandal into a civil-rights emergency. For that, he needed a bigger institution.
Now Equality California
Enter Equality California. On December 15, 2025, EQCA endorsed Erickson in Senate District 24 — the press contact on that release was Tom Temprano, the organization’s Managing Director of External Affairs, the man who runs its political and communications operation under Executive Director Tony Hoang. The same shop that had endorsed him then issued the statement that rescued him.
That statement is the captured-press move scaled up to the state level. Faced with an ad about hotel bills and a pool selfie, EQCA didn’t defend the spending. It reframed the entire attack as an assault on LGBTQ+ Californians and — the tell — “demanded” that everyone else in the race submit their future communications for review. Translate that: criticism of John Erickson must now clear a homophobia standard that Erickson’s endorser gets to define on the fly.
Does that statement write itself? An organization doesn’t casually torch its credibility, branding a rival committee’s mailers as bigotry against its own people. Someone decided it was worth it. And it strains belief that a man who has spent his career working the inside of these exact organizations — and who needed this exact narrative to survive a brutal news cycle — had nothing to do with the statement that saved him. We can’t prove the call was placed. We can read the timeline, note who gained, and ask the question EQCA won’t answer: who asked you to do this, and why did you say yes?
The Bottom Line
This is the Erickson method, start to finish. He can’t tell you why he charged you for Paris, so he tells you his critics are bigots. He couldn’t beat Zekiah Wright at the ballot box, so he beat them with a referral that evaporated after the votes were counted. He couldn’t talk Tod Hallman out of backing a Black candidate, so he threatened his seat.
The throughline isn’t ideology. It’s the reflex to capture an institution and make it carry his grievance.
Shame on Equality California for becoming the latest one to do it. Real anti-LGBTQ+ harm exists, and every time a serious organization spends its credibility crying wolf to protect an ambitious officeholder’s hotel bills, it makes that real harm easier to ignore. The victim machine only runs as long as institutions keep volunteering to be its parts. This week, Equality California volunteered — and the only question left is whether anyone there is embarrassed enough to ask who wrote the script.
Equality California should be ashamed of itself for acting as the political cleanup crew for an elected official who cannot answer criticism on the merits. Instead of engaging legitimate questions about governance, priorities, spending, and political ambition, they defaulted to the tired playbook of labeling criticism as “bigotry.” That tactic cheapens actual discrimination and insults voters’ intelligence.
John Erickson is not immune from scrutiny because he is gay, and criticism of a public official is not automatically an attack on an entire community. EQCA’s reflexive victim narrative is exactly why so many people are losing patience with performative progressive politics. Advocacy organizations should stand for principles, not function as partisan attack dogs deployed to shield favored candidates from accountability.
EQCA’s behavior in this matter is an affront to its fiduciary duties to be responsible stewards of its donor money. Enough with the incestuous bubbles!