When accusations from four women were about to end Dominic Foppoli's career in 2021, the Windsor mayor turned to a friend who had made millions lobbying for dictators. The strategy that friend prescribed, now surfacing in a Sonoma County courtroom, was not to survive the storm but to start a bigger one.

Across six weeks of civil trial, attorneys for seven women have laid out how Foppoli's response to sexual-assault allegations was engineered by Robert Stryk, a Trump-era influence peddler who represented pariah governments. New court filings detailed this week by the San Francisco Chronicle sharpen the picture. The Dissent has covered the tape-and-intimidation tactics in this trial before; what the Stryk thread adds is the architecture behind them — a crisis playbook built for autocrats, pointed at accusers in a Wine Country town of 27,000.

Dominic Foppoli spent a decade as a fixture of Sonoma County life: co-owner of Christopher Creek Winery, a networker in the Active 20-30 civic club, eventually mayor of Windsor with ambitions beyond it. That trajectory cratered in the spring of 2021, when the San Francisco Chronicle prepared to publish accounts from four women who said he had assaulted them. Seven women sued him in April 2022 (external source, opens in a new tab), alleging assaults between 2001 and 2020. He has always denied wrongdoing, and the California Attorney General's Office found insufficient evidence for criminal charges.

The man Foppoli leaned on was no local flack. Robert Stryk had vaulted from a mid-tier lobbyist into one of the Trump era's more improbable influence brokers, cashing in to represent governments other firms wouldn't touch — Somalia, Bahrain and other clients that made him rich. Turning that machinery on a small-town scandal produced what the plaintiffs' lead attorney, Traci Carrillo, described in her opening statement as a "scorched earth" campaign waged by Foppoli and Stryk against the seven women.

The tactics were personal and specific. According to Patch's account of opening statements (external source, opens in a new tab), Carrillo told jurors Stryk boasted in a WhatsApp message that he had tried to "get under the skin" of one accuser, Jane Doe 7, to intimidate her and deter others from coming forward. The women's complaint alleges Stryk threatened to leak humiliating material, including explicit recordings of two of them, to keep them quiet. Foppoli's attorney, Andrew Watters, has urged jurors to weigh each of the "seven unrelated encounters between consenting adults" on its own and to set aside the publicity around the case.

The most concrete version of that threat surfaced this month in testimony from Santa Rosa Vice Mayor Jeff Okrepkie, who told jurors Foppoli showed him footage of a Town Council colleague and signaled it could keep her from running for office. Recalled by the defense last week, Okrepkie likened the maneuver to "House of Cards" (external source, opens in a new tab) — the kind of thing, he said, you would expect from a streaming political drama, not a Sonoma County town hall.

Foppoli's attorney, Andrew Watters, has urged jurors to weigh each of the "seven unrelated encounters between consenting adults" on its own and to set aside the publicity around the case.

None of this appeared from nowhere. In 2021, the Chronicle reported (external source, opens in a new tab) that Foppoli had recruited Stryk for a "nuclear option" response, and that lawyers for council member Esther Lemus accused a Foppoli operative of trying to leak an incriminating video of her. The new filings reported by the Chronicle this week add the paper trail — the text exchanges in which Stryk coached Foppoli to go on the attack rather than retreat — now entered into the court record.

Foppoli has taken the stand himself, answering plaintiffs' attorneys' questions about the messages and statements they say reveal his character, including a text suggesting that enough wine could do the work of a date-rape drug. He has framed the ugliest of them as jokes lacking context, and has kept his distance from Stryk's conduct.

The plaintiffs rested Aug. 19; defense witnesses are now testifying in Judge Dana Simonds' courtroom, with a verdict still weeks away. Whatever the jury decides, the trial has already put on the record something rarely seen so plainly: the crisis machinery of international power, retooled to protect one man and discredit the women accusing him.