Attorney for fired Vallejo cop seeks to restrain Vallejo Sun from reporting client’s disciplinary record

VALLEJO — An attorney representing fired Vallejo police officer Ryan McMahon has asked a federal judge to prevent the Vallejo Sun from reporting on newly disclosed details of his disciplinary record. 

The records were released as part of a motion in a $500,000 lawsuit McMahon has brought against the city and his former supervisor, Capt. John Whitney, who was also fired from the Vallejo Police Department. McMahon alleges Whitney and others disclosed confidential information from his personnel file to the media. 

Last month, McMahon’s attorney in the case, Lenore Albert, filed a motion to disqualify Whitney’s attorney, Alison Berry-Wilkinson, because she had previously represented McMahon in other matters.

In response, Berry-Wilkinson filed a motion publicly available on PACER — the federal government’s online court filing system — that included details on McMahon’s disciplinary records with the Sausalito Police Department and the Central Marin Police Authority before he joined Vallejo police in 2017. 

A Sun reporter reached out to Albert on Wednesday for comment regarding those records, as this online news source was in the process of publishing a story about them. 

“Do not do a story on it,” Albert emailed the Sun, requesting an immediate reply with assurances the Sun wouldn’t use the information “or else I will see you in court with an ex parte application to prohibit you from using it.”

The Sun did not respond.

Soon after, Albert filed a motion that requests that U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller “temporarily restrain the Vallejo Sun from using the confidential information contained in those documents until the Court can hear this matter.”

Albert’s motion said the documents contain “allegations regarding internal investigations” where McMahon was exonerated and are therefore not qualified to be disclosed under state law. It said McMahon’s “reputation will be further damaged and misunderstood by having this information in the public docket wherein the Vallejo Sun can use it in their stories.”

Duffy Carolan, a San Francisco-based First Amendment attorney, said that the attempt to prevent the Vallejo Sun from publishing was obviously an attempt at unconstitutional prior restraint.

"Even if it was a mistake to put them on a public docket, you can't put the genie back in the bottle," Carolan said. "Her efforts are quite shocking in that it's a clear violation of your First Amendment rights to publish what you got from the record."

The Sun published the story on Thursday.

In his lawsuit, McMahon alleges that Whitney — a whistleblower who recently settled a wrongful termination suit against the city for $900,000 — wrongfully accused him of participating in the department’s badge bending scandal. Some of McMahon’s personnel records that showed McMahon had a long history of poor work performance, including seven incidents in 2018 alone, were also obtained by the Sun last year, and McMahon’s attorney alleges that the city did not properly secure or dispose of them. 

McMahon’s attorney said further details of his disciplinary record “is not of public interest.”

Albert sent an email to attorneys on the case and the Vallejo Sun late Wednesday which said  she “hereby demand you and your clients preserve all text messages, burner phones, emails, even encrypted messages, phone calls, smoke signals…” She claimed the Sun only showed interest in the information once she petitioned the court to have it sealed. 

McMahon’s history of complaints

In 2012, while working at the Sausalito Police Department, he joined Vallejo Police Officer Sean Kenney on a ride-along. McMahon would announce a suspect had a weapon, and Kenney killed that man and two others in a five-month span that year. 

McMahon shot Ronell Foster in February 2018. He chased Foster for not having a bike on his light, shooting him in the back and the back of the head. Vallejo paid his family $5.7 million in 2020.

In February 2019, McMahon shot from behind another officer into a Mercedes stopped in a Taco Bell drive-thru. It remains unclear if McMahon’s single shot was one of the 38 that hit McCoy, who had been unresponsive behind the wheel just seconds before police opened fire. Vallejo recently settled with McCoy’s family for $5 million. 

While investigating that shooting, Vallejo police found McMahon added a plate to his firearm that said “Veritas” and “Aequitas,” a reference to the movie Boondock Saints where two Catholic brothers believe they were asked by God to enact fatal justice on evil men. McMahon, however, argued the plate had religious intentions. 

During the investigation into the McCoy police killing, McMahon’s misshapen star-shaped metal badge was brought to Whitney’s attention. Whitney alleges McMahon told department superiors that the tips on two badges represented the two people he killed while on duty, a continuation of a department tradition of commemorating on-duty shootings that dates back to 2003. McMahon has denied he participated in the badge bending practice.

As a Solano County judge would later describe, McMahon was “off the rails” by the time his supervisors noticed he had participated in a tradition of some Vallejo police officers bending the tips of their badges following a shooting. Then-Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams terminated McMahon in October 2020 for putting another officer at risk in the McCoy police killing.

McMahon left his most recent employer — the Broadmoor Police Department — after the Sun reported on McMahon’s disciplinary history with Vallejo, including allegedly interviewing suspects without first issuing their Miranda Rights and failing to complete several investigations and collect physical evidence from several crimes. 

McMahon recently completed arbitration proceedings to get his job back with Vallejo police and is awaiting a final decision by the arbitrator.

A hearing on Albert’s motion to seal McMahon’s personnel records and bar the Sun from reporting on them has been set for Friday.

Scott Morris contributed to this report.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that McMahon did not tell Whitney directly why his badge was bent and to clarify that Whitney did not complete arbitration proceedings as an at-will employee.