The Rev. Crystal Cox and her Universal Church of Light has cast her ethics complaint net wide over recent days, with additional filings alleging ethics breaches against city council members Amy Howard and Libby Wennstrom, and against Public Records Officer Haylie Truesdel.

Those followed complaints filed against City Manager John Mauro and Mayor David Faber on March 2 and Feb. 28, respectively.

The city’s planned rewriting of its ethics complaint policy prompted the three most recent complaints.

“These five together are only because they are changing the rules or I would have paced them out to allow the city to respond to each over time,” Cox said. “They have forced it to be now or not at all.”

Cox was one of four items on the agenda for the three council members tasked with reviewing the policy in place since 2017, which then proposed changes. The Port Townsend City Council voted to approve numerous revisions at its Monday, March 17, meeting, while adding at least one more.

The final version will make it harder for Cox, and others, to file complaints. The new policy requires the complainant to either reside in or own a business in the city. Cox is not a city resident and her Universal Church of Light had a city business license which expired in September 2022. She said she would renew her business license if need be. Meanwhile, the rule council added was that people who filed a complaint needed to have done business or been previous residents of the city to have standing.

Advocate or adversary

While Cox sees herself as a champion of the people, city staff and elected officials see her as a bully, a serial harasser and an abuser of the state’s Sunshine laws.

The principal arguments in the complaints have been generated by Cox’s prolific public records campaign, which dates back several years. 

The cost of processing those requests adds up, based on staff salaries and the sheer number of requests. As of March 17, the city had received a total of 125 public record requests, 14 of which were from Cox. The office is still processing earlier requests, with a total of 47 outstanding for Reverend Crystal Cox, Universal Church of Light, according to Truesdel.

In 2024, Cox filed 83 of the 464 requests received, or 17.8%. In 2023, Cox filed 117 of 535 total requests filed, or 21.87%. 

All five ethics complaints, according to the filings, share similar traits — allegations of violations of the open public meetings and open records acts, special privilege, breaches of fiduciary duties, conflicts of interest, bullying and discrimination, among others. 

The recent complaints, all told, span nearly 200 pages and include text messages, Facebook posts, emails, video evidence and links to law enforcement body cam footage. 

Cox pushed to get the complaints in before March 17 so they could be reviewed under the old rules. 

Many of the allegations date back to 2022 and events surrounding the Julie Jaman incident at the YMCA-run municipal pool and subsequent protests. Other allegations are linked to events as recent as 2024 and 2025.

Cox said the filings point to myriad wrong doings on the part of city staff and elected officials and form an interconnected web of deceit, mismanagement, bad government and corruption. 

In terms of Cox’s current focus on city government, she points to certain members of city council and the city manager’s handling of events surrounding the Jaman case, which involved Jaman being banned from the YMCA after confronting a trans person. 

From Cox’s perspective, Mauro and members of the council’s involvement in the protests and counter-protests, Jaman’s ban from the YMCA, Faber’s handling of a city council meeting, memos and emails all point to a “hive mind” mentality and a conspiracy to crush any opposition to the supposed group-think. Jaman could not be reached for comment by press time.

“It was all ideology and emotion,” Cox said. “It was stunning, this hive mind. I have used the legal process in place to expose the truth of what public officials are doing in private to hurt the public at large.” 

Cox said she filed one ethics complaint in 2023 and one in 2024, “hardly an abuse. What they’ve done is something downright dirty,” adding she wasn’t afraid to play dirty too.

“What’s the benefit of getting dirty? Hurting the people that hurt,” said Cox. “I go every single way I can to remove these people in power any way I can.”  

Jodi Adams, the city’s finance director, said it’s difficult to fully quantify the cost of processing Cox’s ethics complaints.

Earlier complaint

When asked specifically to quantify Cox’s summer 2024 ethics complaint against Faber, Adams estimated the tally for the previous Faber complaint at 75 staff hours and about $6,000. Adams said the city pays Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts $165 an hour for his services.

Cox makes no apologies. “As for abusing the ethics process, I have exposed that it is worthless. I reported on real city code violations and all were thrown under the rug,” Cox said. 

Cox also filed an ethics complaint against Wennstrom in 2023, but later withdrew the filing. She filed a second ethics complaint against Faber in 2024 alleging Faber’s wrongdoing in land use decisions. Olbrechts found two of the five allegations worthy of review but ultimately dismissed those.

That complaint, however, triggered Faber’s vitriol and led to Faber and his associates posting on social media that Cox is a mentally ill online serial harasser. 

In a recent interview, Cox countered that she has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following events surrounding the Julie Jaman protests.

“I have never been institutionalized nor deemed any mental health issue that is a harm to the public in any way,” wrote Cox.  “Been called Crazy my whole life, just as most women who speak their mind, talk about their lived experience, expose their abuses and the system that protects them. My brilliance scares and shocks them, so they, not medical professionals, deem me mentally ill for their own narrative.”

Being labeled mentally ill is a common occurrence from public officials who “don’t like” what is being said, Cox said. “Look at history, many diagnosed in this world, by public opinion or who are being exposed, as mentally ill are the savants, the great inventors, the front leaders on issues the public does not yet understand.”

Cox added that “either what I post is true or not — the facts speak for themselves.”

In addition to the ethics complaints, Cox said she sees a civil suit against the city on the horizon. She described the city’s ethics complaint process as a sham and added that a civil rights lawsuit is the only way to achieve satisfaction.

“I don’t have an attachment to the outcome,” Cox said. “My passion is to give people a voice. It’s an absolute spiritual calling. It’s all spiritual, there’s nothing I gain from it other than knowing I’m doing the right thing. This isn’t about me. I’ve never needed to be a hero. This is my grand finale and it’s going to be glorious.”

Agitator

Cox is no stranger to going after powerful people and facing consequences. In 2011 Obsidian Financial Group sued Cox for defamation and Cox was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages. Cox appealed the decision, and after hearing the case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case back to the lower court for retrial. Cox tallies the remand as a victory.

The suit came after Cox — a real estate broker who termed herself both whistleblower and investigative journalist at the time — launched numerous websites full of allegations regarding what Cox said were Obsidian’s unethical financial practices. She used domain names like “obsidianfinancialsucks.com,” primarily directing her ire at one of the firm’s principals, Kevin Padrick. Padrick died in a plane crash in June 2019. 

According to those close to the case, Cox would post negative information about her targets on the internet. Then she would buy domain names about the individuals, their business and their families, and use those domains to push her negative posts to the top of Google searches. After feeling the impact of the negative press, Cox would then reach out to offer “reputation management services” to clean it all up. 

Cox said she no longer owns the domain names, but, “I still have the blogs.” Cox was never charged with extortion. Her suit with Obsidian focused on free speech issues.

In the Obsidian case, the judge found that most of what Cox had written about Obsidian was purely opinion, protected by the First Amendment — and “so grossly hyberbolic that no reasonable person would believe it” — but did let the case go to trial based on one blog post with very specific allegations about Padrick and Obsidian committing fraud. Cox claimed to have a source for that information, but a trial by jury found that her claims were false, and found her guilty of defamation. Obsidian’s lawyers had asked for $1 million. The jury awarded Obsidian and Padrick $2.5 million.

When asked about her tactics, Cox said she felt compelled to expose Padrick and his colleagues at Obsidian, because of the financial harm she alleged they had caused. Cox also denied attempting to extort Padrick. 

“The truth is the truth,” Cox said. “If it bankrupts your business, oh well.”