A Los Gatos teen stood trembling at the courtroom microphone, barely maintaining her composure as she tearfully begged a judge not to allow bail for the woman accused of hosting drunken high school parties and sexual hookups for her freshman son’s friends.
That woman, charged by her maiden name as Shannon O’Connor to avoid further traumatizing a son now living with his father in Texas, “robbed me of my innocence” and left her with searing “memories I’ll have to live with the rest of my life,” the girl, identified in court only as Jane Doe 4, said Tuesday.
Her comments came in a remarkable bail hearing that featured the first testimony from some of the more than a dozen teens O’Connor is accused of victimizing. No decision was made on whether O’Connor can walk free while awaiting trial, but the children and their parents made palpable the threat they feel from the enigmatic woman at the center of a nationally notorious scandal.
“I fear she will not face the law,” the girl continued tearfully as O’Connor, 47, sat next to her lawyer with her back to the teen at a table just a few feet away. “She hurt so many young people, including her young sons.”
O’Connor has been jailed in the Bay Area since her October arrest in Idaho, where she’d recently moved, on 39 charges including felony endangering or injuring children and misdemeanor furnishing liquor to minors, child molestation and sexual battery. According to prosecutors, she arranged for the teens to sneak out of their homes at night without telling their parents and forbade them to talk with anyone about the parties. She was making her second request for a chance to post bail.
The case made national headlines and roiled the stylish town nestled at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Silicon Valley, known for its Victorian architecture, mountain biking and Michelin-star dining and where O’Connor’s oldest son had been a popular football quarterback.
Prosecutors have argued that O’Connor remains a threat to the teen victims, their families and the broader community as well as a risk to flee justice. Her lawyer, Brian Madden, countered in a motion last week that there’s no evidence of that and said his client isn’t charged with capital or violent offenses that would warrant keeping her locked up.
Judge Johnny Gogo set a Feb. 3 date to decide on O’Connor’s bail request after her lawyer asked permission to file a rebuttal to prosecutors’ argument against allowing her release.
The teen parties were alleged to have been held during the 2020-2021 school year, initially with her freshman son, his friends and their girlfriends in Los Gatos and later in Idaho, where she had moved with the boys in the spring. She and her technology executive husband, with whom she has a younger son, sold their $4.6 million home in the Los Gatos hills last month.
According to prosecutors’ court filings, “after the children were drunk on the alcohol she provided, she encouraged them to engage in sexual activity with each other” and “even facilitated the sexual encounters, some consensual and some nonconsensual.” They said there are 15 teen victims.
O’Connor, according to prosecution filings, once gave a teen boy a condom and sent him into a room in her house where Jane Doe 4 was lying drunk on a bed. The girl, fearing what would happen, locked herself in a bathroom. In other encounters, O’Connor allegedly told the girl to give another boy oral sex and told a boy to touch the girl sexually while they were drunk in O’Connor’s hot tub.
Later that night, when the girl was almost passed out from alcohol in a bedroom, O’Connor allegedly let a boy sexually molest her and laughed at the girl afterward when she complained. Months later, after the girl had a falling out with O’Connor, the woman saw her walking along the street, pulled alongside in her car and stared at her to intimidate her.
“She has no regard for the law and is a master manipulator,” the girl’s mother told the judge Tuesday. “Please keep her behind bars so our children can heal.”
A girl identified as Jane Doe 8 from Idaho had met O’Connor’s son after she and her boys moved there last spring. Prosecution court filings say O’Connor invited the girl and her sister to their Los Gatos home last April, where she plied the girls with alcohol, encouraged Jane Doe 8 and her older son to have sex and told her how to keep it a secret from her parents.
Jane Doe 8 and her mother told the judge Tuesday that they feared O’Connor will return to Idaho if released and come after them. They begged him if he does allow her release, not to let her have access to a cell phone, because they feared she’d try to contact them.
“We want to feel free of fear,” Jane Doe 8 told the judge. Her mother added, “she will further torment our children.”
The mother of Jane Doe 2, a girl prosecutors allege O’Connor invited to a drinking party with her son and his friends at Lake Tahoe where she was subjected to an unwanted sexual encounter, told the judge O’Connor “has the means to disappear.”
Jane Doe 4’s mother also read a statement from Jane Doe 3, whom O’Connor allegedly allowed to drink to the point of vomiting and almost drowning in her hot tub and who was subjected to an unwanted sexual encounter. Prosecutors said O’Connor laughed when the crying girl complained to her that “he made me bleed.”
“She taught us how to lie to our parents,” the girl wrote in the letter, and when they threatened to tell their parents what had happened, “she threatened us.”
“I am scared” of O’Connor, she wrote.
