Fact check: Did Adam Hill send vulgar emails to Dave Congalton? Or is this a political hit?
Just 30 days before Election Day, vulgar and harassing emails sent more than three years ago from what appeared to be Supervisor Adam Hill’s computer have surfaced, injecting the race with a salacious allegation and cries of dirty tricks.
Hill, who is running for a fourth term on the San Luis Obispo County board in the March 3 election, denied then and now that he sent the emails to KVEC radio host Dave Congalton after investigators traced the emails to his home address.
The San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office closed a criminal investigation that named Hill as a potential suspect in 2016 without filing charges because there is “reasonable doubt as to the actual perpetrator,” according to a DA’s investigative report that Congalton provided to The Tribune.
Now, Hill’s opponent, Stacy Korsgaden, has launched campaign ads accusing Hill of the emails, including in a paid Facebook post saying that “Supervisor Adam Hill was CAUGHT threatening a local radio host.”
That comes after critics of Hill tied him to the emails in several public forums in the last two weeks, most prominently on Cal Coast News — whose writer has sued Hill multiple times — and Mike Brown from the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business of San Luis Obispo County (COLAB), who raised the issue at a San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors meeting on Feb. 4.
In response, county Supervisor John Peschong publicly requested that the Board of Supervisors address the topic in a future closed session. The emails first came up after Congalton talked about them on his show on Jan. 29.
Hill and his private attorney, Don Ernst, told The Tribune that the unproven allegations and the timing of this publicity are part of a political hit from a group of Hill’s political adversaries.
“For this information to be released now and Adam to be accused in the public of this when there is really no objective proof at all — you have to really look at the timing of this,” Ernst told The Tribune.
When questioned directly about the emails by The Tribune, Hill became agitated and ridiculed the reporter.
Hill also said this is part of “a coordinated attack on me” by those associated with Cal Coast News, which he called “a completely discredited blog” that has “run some people out of jobs.”
The controversy comes two years after Hill’s communication style was raised as an issue at a county board meeting. After a constituent complained that Hill told him to “f--- off,” Hill apologized for his behavior and said he was working to change. The board then developed a code of conduct to encourage civility.
Confirmation as to the emails’ source and why they were released now remain unclear, but here’s what The Tribune has learned about them:
Did SLO County supervisor send harassing emails?
The numerous emails sent to Congalton in July 2016 were crude, aggressive and personal. They referenced Congalton’s divorce and the suicide of a close friend, brought up bestiality and accused him of performing sex acts with local personalities. The emails came from the address salkrill12@gmail.com with a sender identified as “Sal Krill.”
Congalton told The Tribune he reported the emails to the District Attorney’s Office in 2016 because he wanted to know who was behind them. After talking with Congalton, the District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation into a potential misdemeanor crime for annoying or harassing communications.
Through search warrants served at that time to Google and Charter Communications, investigators traced the email address back to an IP address — a unique number associated with any device that accesses the internet — for an account owned by Dee Torres-Hill at the home she shared with her three children and then-husband, Adam Hill, the investigative report says.
Investigators questioned Hill about the emails in October 2016, and Hill denied sending them while adding that it was unlikely his wife would have either.
When asked if there was anyone he would want to send harassing emails to, Hill told investigators “no” and that he gets accused of being “too rough,” but any messages he sends are not harassing and are always under his own name. Hill said he had been targeted with fake accounts in the past, including a fake campaign website and a fake Facebook account, according to the report.
At the request of Hill’s attorney and in response to the investigation at that time, Cal Poly professor Zachary Peterson, an expert in cybersecurity, signed a declaration saying it’s possible that a skilled attacker can forge network traffic or emails to look like it came from a specific IP address or emails account, from anywhere on the Internet.
“Indeed, this is an exercise I gave the Cal Poly freshmen that take my Introduction to Security course to demonstrate the insecurity of the Internet,” Peterson said in the declaration.
But District Attorney Dan Dow told The Tribune on Wednesday that the expert report wasn’t the reason the office chose not to file charges against Hill.
Rather, he said, “it was a lack of evidence to prove who was sitting at the computer and sent the message.”
“It is highly unlikely that the messages were the result of hacking and spoofing. There were multiple adults and teenagers living in the residence at the time,” Dow said.
Adam Hill questions DA’s release of report
In November 2019, the District Attorney’s Office gave Congalton the full investigative report that named Hill as a potential suspect, and he went public with the story on his Jan. 29 radio show.
Congalton told The Tribune he has no doubt that Hill sent the emails, and he said he doesn’t think Hill’s behavior should be excused, saying it’s often embarrassing. He added that he thinks Hill is going to win the election, by a landslide.
Hill and his attorney criticized Dow for releasing the report in its entirety, saying proper procedures weren’t followed. Hill also said Dow was being too political and partisan in his office.
“I do not believe this information should have been released, and I believe that releasing it has turned into a manufactured hit piece,” Ernst told The Tribune.
Dow defended his decision to release it, pointing to a section of the California Public Records Act as the legal reason for why “we routinely provide investigative reports and files when requested by a victim, while redacting certain private identifying information.”
The report was released three years after the case was closed, in response to an Oct. 2019 request from Congalton.
Congalton said he had asked the DA for the report before. He could not recall when he made the request but said it had been declined.
Dow said the report was released in response to the victim’s request for the records, and that Congalton had requested information about what had been discovered around the time of the investigation’s conclusion in 2016.
“Other than that, I do not believe the victim ever asked about the case again until Oct. 3, 2019,” Dow wrote in an email. “It took my office several weeks to respond to his request and ultimately we arranged to meet with the victim on Nov. 7, and provide the documents he was legally entitled to as a victim of a crime and like we routinely do when asked by a victim.”
The supervisor race will be decided in the primary election, March 3, because there only two candidates. Three of five supervisor seats are up for election and the victors will join the board in January 2021.
This story was originally published February 12, 2020 at 3:25 PM.
