Is Cottrell West Hollywood’s Erickson 2.0?

A damaging story about Kyle Brazeal came out of his rival Jonathan Cottrell’s bar. Councilmember John Erickson says he raised it at a Democratic club meeting, and the timing puts that meeting before the story was published. When four clubs condemned Brazeal, appointees of Erickson and Byers were cheering within minutes, and one of the clubs had given Cottrell $1,000 five weeks earlier. The newspaper that broke the story had honored Cottrell’s bar and his husband this spring. Readers were told none of it.

Eighteen days before the election, the Los Angeles Blade published a story about a West Hollywood City Council candidate, Kyle Brazeal. A trans woman, whom the paper calls “Amber,” says Brazeal used an anti-trans slur and threw her purse at her at Gym Bar on December 29, 2024. Brazeal “categorically” denies it. His campaign treasurer, who was with him that night, says there was an argument over a purse in a restroom line and no slur, no throw and no contact.

Gym Bar is owned by Jonathan Cottrell, who is running against Brazeal for one of the same three seats. The story’s lead witness is a longtime friend of Cottrell’s. And the story was not news to everyone. Councilmember John Erickson says he had already “called this out” at a meeting of the Avance Democratic Club. On the record as it stands, that meeting took place before the Blade published a word of it.

What followed came from the same small circle: Erickson’s and Byers’s appointees cheering in the comments, a club that funds Cottrell among the signers of the condemnation, and a club officer close to the Blade‘s publisher sitting on three of the four boards that signed it.

Occupied West Hollywood was provided the draft statement shown below. Everything else here is public record: the Blade‘s own reporting, the clubs’ Instagram post and its comments, City minutes and Form 700 filings, and campaign finance reports.

Before the story ran

“Not shocked one bit. I called this out during the @avancedemclub meeting and glad to see groups standing up for the trans community. Bye @kyle4weho 👋”

John Erickson, on Instagram, October 16, 3:35 p.m.

When did that meeting take place? Avance has not said publicly. But Avance posted its endorsement voter guide at 10:18 a.m. on October 16, 11 minutes after the Blade story went up at 10:07. A club announces endorsements after it votes on them, and it votes at a meeting. So Avance’s endorsement meeting came before the story was public. Unless Avance met again between 10:07 a.m. and 3:35 p.m. that same day, the meeting where Erickson says he “called this out” came before publication.

Erickson gave himself away. “Bye @kyle4weho 👋” is not the reaction of a councilmember who has just read the news. By his own account, he was working against Brazeal before there was any news to read, raising the allegation inside a Democratic club before the Blade even had a chance to publish it.

That raises a question Erickson has not answered: where did he get it? The Blade‘s own account names the people who knew before publication: Amber’s friends who were with her that night; Cottrell and his husband, Erik Braverman, whom Amber’s friend Tommy Craven told in June; and the reporter. Erickson is not among them.

Erickson won re-election in 2024 as half of the Erickson-Hang ticket. In that race, as described below, the damaging material about his rivals reached the public through Larry Block’s website.

Twenty-two minutes

At 3:13 p.m. the same day, four Democratic clubs posted a joint statement on Brazeal: the Westside Young Democrats, the Stonewall Democratic Club, the Los Angeles County Young Democrats and the Stonewall Young Democrats. All four clubs appear on the endorsement lists of both Erickson and Councilmember Chelsea Byers. Byers is one of the three candidates, along with Cottrell, backed by the outside committee described below.

Erickson’s circle was in the comments within minutes.

Within 22 minutes of the statement, one commissioner appointed by Erickson and one appointed by Byers had praised it, and one of them was recruiting a fifth club to sign on. Then Erickson said he had already raised it.

The Horvath connection

The first commissioner to praise the statement is more than Erickson’s appointee. As of July, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s own website listed Nick Wyville as her Senior Communications Deputy, and said he had worked on her 2022 campaign.

On September 19, Wyville gave $100 each to Byers and to Helen Krieger, two of the three candidates backed by the outside committee alongside Cottrell. To Krieger, he reported his employer as Los Angeles County. To Byers, the same day, he reported a different one: “Director, EJM Strategy Group.”

EJM Strategy Group is the firm of Estevan Montemayor. Horvath’s office described Montemayor as her chief of staff, who had “most recently served as President and Founder of EJM Strategy Group.”

Montemayor’s own money runs along the same lines:

• 2024: $1,000 to John Erickson’s re-election campaign and $300 to Danny Hang’s, the Erickson-Hang ticket.
• August 28, 2026: $250 each to Krieger and Byers. He told Krieger’s campaign he was “Chief of Staff, LA County,” and Byers’s campaign that he was a self-employed consultant.

So the first commissioner to praise the clubs’ statement is Erickson’s appointee, a member of Horvath’s staff as of July, and, by his own September filing, a director at the firm of a Horvath chief of staff who donated to the Erickson-Hang ticket in 2024 and to Byers and Krieger this year.

The clubs

The four clubs that condemned Brazeal are not bystanders to this race either.

Westside Young Democrats, one of the four signers, has a money trail to Cottrell and his bar:

• October 21, 2025: the club paid Gym Bar $262.50, according to its state filing.
• June 30, 2026: it gave Byers’s campaign $1,000.
• September 10, 2026: it gave Cottrell’s campaign $1,000, five weeks before it signed the statement against Cottrell’s rival.
• Its president, Alec White, is listed among Cottrell’s personal endorsers.

So one of the clubs demanding that Brazeal’s endorsers walk away is itself a Cottrell donor and endorser, and has spent money at Cottrell’s bar.

Occupied West Hollywood was provided an earlier draft of the statement. It goes further than the statement the four clubs published, and further than the Blade itself:

The Blade never reported that Brazeal physically assaulted anyone. The only physical contact it reports is Amber’s own shove. The draft accused Cottrell’s rival of “physical assault” twice. That charge was gone by the time four clubs put their names to the published version.

According to the source who provided the draft, it was not written in response to the story. It arrived already written, right as the story broke. The source says one of the clubs was asked to sign the original, refused, and insisted on edits because of the legal liability in the first draft. The published statement went up five hours after the Blade story.

The endorsements overlap the same way. Cottrell’s campaign displays the logos of two of the four signers, the Westside and Stonewall Young Democrats. Krieger’s displays three: those two and the Stonewall Democratic Club. Erickson and Byers list all four.

One officer sits at the center of three of them. Joshua Marin-Mora is political director of the Westside Young Democrats, political vice president of the Stonewall Young Democrats and vice president of operations of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats. That is three of the four clubs that signed.

Marin-Mora is also close to the Blade‘s own publisher, Alexander Rodriguez. In February, Rodriguez posted that he had accepted “the Impact Award at the @stonewallydems Hero Awards on behalf of the @losangelesblade,” with “Kudos to @joshua_marinmora for putting together an amazing event.” The two tag each other in social posts, and in November 2025 the Blade ran a profile of Marin-Mora.

The maneuver

West Hollywood has seen this before. This site laid it out in Beware the Block-Erickson Alliance.

In 2024, Larry Block, who co-owns WEHOonline, was running for City Council. The Chamber of Commerce’s PAC passed over the pairing Block wanted, himself and John Erickson, and endorsed George Nickle and Zekiah Wright. Block’s site then went after both of them:

• Nickle: It told readers his conduct was “illegal.”
• Wright: It reported Wright “arrested on felony charges” and said it had known of “the impending arrest earlier in the week.” According to Wright’s attorney, Wright had not yet been told of the case. Block’s own story said the complaint behind it came from Erickson.
• After the election: In 2025, Block attacked Nickle again, using emails that Erickson handed him.

Erickson and his running mate, Danny Hang, won both seats.

On October 7, 2026, three days after that piece ran, WEHOonline added editor’s notes to both of its stories about Nickle. Each says the story “has been substantially revised to correct factual errors and unsupported or overstated assertions involving George Nickle.” The 2024 story now adds that WEHOonline “has not established that Nickle violated campaign-finance law.” Both notes, on that story and on the 2025 op-ed, end the same way: “WEHOonline regrets the errors and has corrected the record.”

That is the maneuver. The candidate who benefits is never on the byline and keeps clean hands in public. The damaging material comes from his side and lands in an outlet with an undisclosed stake, and the rival absorbs the hit.

Whose bar

Gym Bar, on Santa Monica Boulevard, is owned by Cottrell and his husband, Erik Braverman, a senior vice president of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Blade story’s lead witness is Tommy Craven, a friend of Amber’s who was with her at Gym Bar that night. The story itself says that Craven “had known Cottrell and Braverman for years and considered them friends.” According to the Blade, on the night of the incident Craven “quickly called the owners.” The next morning, he texted a group chat “that included Jonathan Cottrell,” naming “Kyle (seen in video).”

The rest of the timeline comes from the same article:

• Brazeal announced his candidacy in April 2026.
• In June 2026, Craven “reached out to Braverman and Cottrell, who had recently announced his own campaign,” to tell them the man from that night was Brazeal.
• Amber herself did not know Brazeal was running until days before the story ran. According to the Blade, she learned of it only when friends told her “a reporter for the Los Angeles Blade was investigating.”

So Amber did not bring the story to the paper. By the time she heard about it, it was already being reported. The Blade does not say who brought it in.

“Never our story to tell”

Cottrell’s public position is that he has kept out of it. “This was never our story to tell,” he told the Blade, and the paper reports that he “has not mentioned anything on the campaign trail.”

The story’s documents, however, come from his side of the bar:

• The text naming Brazeal was sent to a group chat that included Cottrell.
• The strongest corroboration is a message from Cottrell’s own Instagram account. It promised Amber that the “individuals” involved would “don’t ever come back.”

In fact, Brazeal did come back. Both of Amber’s friends, Craven and Rick Turpin, told the Blade that they saw him at Gym Bar “multiple times after the incident.” Cottrell now calls it “a temporary ban.” He “would not discuss why or when the ban was lifted,” because Gym Bar does not “share internal incident matters.”

That leaves the bar’s own record of the night, which its owner holds and declines to release. Meanwhile, a promise he made on December 30, 2024, is doing the work of corroboration in his rival’s worst news story of the campaign.

A third witness

Nine minutes after Erickson’s comment, at 3:44 p.m., another commenter wrote under the clubs’ statement: “Eye witness here. The story is accurate.” The account belongs to Jake Mason, founder of a West Hollywood dodgeball league. The Blade does not name or quote him. Its only named witnesses are Craven and Turpin, both friends of Amber.

Mason’s comment is a public claim to have seen the incident, and readers should weigh it. He gave no details of what he saw. Years ago, before Cottrell owned it, Gym Bar was a sponsor of Mason’s league; whether that continues is not in the record. Mason also served on the City’s Public Facilities, Recreation and Infrastructure Commission, appointed by then-Mayor Sepi Shyne, until February 2025. On March 3, 2025, days later, Councilmember Danny Hang appointed Cottrell to the same commission. The issue is the same one raised throughout: who saw what, who told whom, and when.

What the paper didn’t say

On March 26, 2026, the Los Angeles Blade held its 9th Annual Best of LA Award Show at The Abbey. The winners were “voted on by readers of the Blade.” Best LGBTQ Bar: Gym Bar. LGBTQ Professional of the Year: Erik Braverman.

Four months later, the Blade ran a warm profile of Cottrell’s campaign, which opens with him “running the popular GYM Bar WEHO sports bar.” The profile embeds a post from the bar’s own Instagram account.

The Brazeal story does tell readers that Cottrell “is also currently running for West Hollywood City Council.” It does not tell them that in the same year, the Blade put Cottrell’s bar and his husband on its own awards stage.

The race

Three seats are open, and the top three finishers win. Every voter who leaves Brazeal is a voter available to someone else, Cottrell included.

• Money: As of the September filings, Brazeal was second in the field in money raised and loaned, and Cottrell was third. Since then, Cottrell has lent his campaign another $75,000 through the Braverman Cottrell Trust, bringing his total loans to $78,500.
• The outside committee: A committee named “Friends of Chelsea Byers, Helen Krieger, and Jonathan Cottrell” has raised about $98,900, most of it from Sunset Strip billboard and real estate companies. It reported its first ad buys on October 8, digital ads split evenly among the three. The Brazeal story ran eight days later.
• Cottrell’s patron: Cottrell sits on the City’s Public Facilities, Recreation and Infrastructure Commission, appointed on March 3, 2025, by Councilmember Danny Hang, the other half of the 2024 Erickson-Hang ticket. About six months before that appointment, Cottrell gave $500 to Hang’s 2024 campaign. In April 2025, Hang reported from the dais that he had attended Gym Bar’s “re-grand opening.”

That is the setting in which a story about Cottrell’s rival came out of Cottrell’s bar.

What we don’t know

We do not know who brought this story to the Los Angeles Blade. We do not know whether Jonathan Cottrell knew the Blade was reporting it before Amber did.

Block’s readers in 2024 were not told who stood behind the stories they were reading either.

1. To Jonathan Cottrell: When did you first learn the Blade was reporting on Brazeal, and from whom? Did you or anyone at Gym Bar give the reporter the group-chat text or your Instagram message?
2. To the Los Angeles Blade: Who first brought the allegation to the paper? Why did the story not disclose that the Blade honored Gym Bar and Erik Braverman at its own awards show this year?
3. To John Erickson: On what date was the Avance meeting where you “called this out,” and how did you learn of the allegation before it was published?
4. To the Avance Democratic Club: When did the club hold its West Hollywood endorsement meeting, and was a Brazeal endorsement before it?
5. To the four clubs: Who wrote the original draft, and when was it first circulated? What was changed before the four clubs published, and why?

Cottrell says it was never his story to tell. The questions are only about whether he helped tell it.