Wednesday, January 21, 2026
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CJP Accuses LASC Judge Robert Draper of Bias
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The state’s judicial disciplinary body announced yesterday that formal proceedings have been instituted against Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert S. Draper, 83, charging him with willful misconduct, the failure to perform his duties, and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice for multiple incidents over the last four years, including making unnecessary racial remarks in a case.
In that matter, Draper uttered comments that Div. Eight of this district’s Court of Appeal described in its April 7, 2025 opinion in Odom v. Los Angeles Community College District as “extreme and bizarre.” Reversing a $10 million plaintiff’s judgment, Justice Elizabeth A. Grimes, writing for the court, said:
“[W]hile we do not know whether, as defendants contend, Judge Draper’s ‘persistent racial and gender bias’ motivated his rulings at trial, we cannot rule out that possibility….We need not decide whether bias was the reason for his arbitrary and capricious evidentiary rulings; the rulings were an abuse of discretion irrespective of his motivations. One thing we can say for sure is, the rulings were not motivated by a devotion to the law of evidence.”
Racial Remarks
Those comments included remarks made during a February 2023 hearing on a motion for a new trial in which the jurist discussed his personal views on Black people, miscegenation, the Civil Rights Act, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Discussing football seasons during his time as a student at UC Berkeley, from which he earned a B.A. and J.D., he said from the bench:
“Both of the quarterbacks, who were spectacular…, were the product of miscegenation. And the South would have had a lot better football team if the Southern senators had not—”
When pressed by a defense attorney about what his comments had to do with the matter before the court, he acknowledged that his remarks “had nothing to do with the case,” which involved allegations of sexual harassment by one Black college professor against another, but continued:
“You know, it doesn’t have meaning for this case except that we’re all a part of the world. We’re all a part of our United States. And I’m very proud of our country. I’m proud of how—75 percent of everybody were in favor of Black Lives Matter right after [George] Floyd was…done…..
“We have two plaintiffs [sic] who couldn’t say there was a racial issue in this case because they were both very Black people. Beautiful people, successful people, people I’m proud of.”
Conduct Toward Women
In a notice filed Jan. 14, the Commission on Judicial Performance (“CJP”) also accused him of referring to adults as “little girls,” referring to a woman as “quite attractive,” and having “touched, stroke, or held” the hair of a female attorney, as well as crying when discussing the Odom plaintiff’s purported testimony indicating that “she felt so alone.”
The CJP declared:
“[Draper’s] comments throughout the Odom case, when considered individually and when considered as a whole, reflected embroilment, bias, and/or prejudice, or created an appearance thereof.”
The disciplinary body also noted inappropriate interactions with court personnel, such as his allegedly having told then-Presiding Judge Samantha Jessner something like, “You look cute when you are mad,” in early 2023. When confronted about the comment, he purportedly responded by saying words to the effect of, “But you are cute when you’re angry.”
He is also accused of using his court email address to send messages to CJP staff attorney Anne Hunter, and copying multiple current and retired judges, that included, in one message, confidential records and nude photographs of minors from a juvenile dependency case and, in another, graphic images of the jurist’s alleged medical conditions, one of which showed the judge from behind without clothing.
Citing a February 2023 incident in which Draper purportedly told court employee Patricia Salcido that “I have you to protect me” after she raised safety concerns over his directions to let into his chambers a man that he identified as someone that the jurist had recently met “on the street,” the commission said:
“[Y]our conduct constitutes evidence of a disability that seriously interferes with the performance of your duties and is, or is likely to become, permanent.”
CJP also highlighted what the body described as “discourteous” communications with staff attorneys during the commission’s investigation as well as with other judicial officers during a voluntary medical leave of absence in 2022. The body said some of the 2022 emails “were incoherent, contained…grammatical errors, or…overly personal details about your mental state and psychiatric treatment” as well as “unnecessary comments regarding race.”
Draper, who was appointed to his post in 2012 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, has 20 days to file a response. He is up for re-election this year.
Copyright 2026, Metropolitan News Company