Jon Jacobo, a rising political star in San Francisco and an influential affordable housing advocate, resigned from his building inspection commission seat late Friday and took a leave of absence from his nonprofit work after a woman accused him of raping her in a tweet and an extensive online post.
Sasha Perigo, a 26-year-old tenant rights advocate, said she had visited Jacobo at his apartment in the Mission one evening in early April when he forcibly groped and kissed her that night and raped her the following morning. Perigo said she told Jacobo “no” dozens of times during both encounters, and tried to push him off her and block his advances, but that he repeatedly ignored her pleas and persisted.
In a series of tweets on Friday night, Jacobo, 32, said, “My memory of these events is different than her memory. I believed then, as I do now, that our relationship was completely consensual.” He wrote that “every woman needs to be heard” and that he was “deeply saddened by the deep pain being experienced by Sasha Perigo, which she says I caused.”
Jacobo did not respond to requests seeking comment other than to refer reporters to his tweets.
In the hours and days following the incident, Perigo said she began telling her friends and family that Jacobo had sexually assaulted her and went to San Francisco General Hospital to have a rape kit conducted. Perigo said she didn’t file a police report because of her fundamental opposition to law enforcement and her prior friendship with Jacobo.
But she said that when a friend told her in June about an unsettling experience with Jacobo, she felt compelled to detail her account publicly.
A hospital spokesperson declined to comment on the case, citing patient privacy laws. A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department also would not comment beyond acknowledging that the special victims unit “is aware of the social media posting and is looking into the matter. Due to the sensitive nature of the allegation, we cannot comment further.”
“I chose to come forward to protect other women from being victimized,” Perigo said. “And to lift the weight of bearing this secret off of my shoulders.”
Jacobo’s response on Twitter included an announcement that he was resigning his position on the Building Inspection Commission and that he was taking a leave of absence from “work.” A Mission District native, Jacobo is a policy director with the South of Market nonprofit Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, known as TODCO.
Last year, he worked as a press secretary in the Latino community for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and rose to greater prominence as the chair of the health committee on the San Francisco Latino Task Force, helping to lead coronavirus testing efforts in the Mission and drawing attention to racial disparities in infections and aid.
He said he was stepping away from his work “for the sake of the community, which I owe so much, and to avoid distraction from the important work of addressing and preventing the spread of COVID-19 which has been my mission this past year.”
His response came as the allegations spread quickly through the tight-knit affordable housing advocacy community and City Hall, where Jacobo had been widely expected to run for a Board of Supervisor seat in 2024, when District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen termed out.
“My thoughts go out to the victim for her courage and bravery for speaking out on this awful situation that no one should ever experience,” tweeted District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton prior to Jacobo’s resignation. “These are very serious allegations against a City Commissioner. My office is conferring with the City Attorney on legal options.”
The Chronicle interviewed Perigo Friday and spoke to two friends who Perigo told about the alleged assault in the ensuing hours and days. Reporters also reviewed contemporaneous journal entries in which Perigo described the alleged assault and her efforts to work through the emotional trauma it had caused, as well as text messages between Perigo and Jacobo and Perigo and her friends and other documentation that was consistent with her account.
Perigo publicly posted portions of these documents, including a part of her discharge paperwork from the hospital following the rape kit and a letter from the Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, in a Google Doc she shared online Friday titled “A Prominent San Francisco Politico Raped Me. He Can’t Have Any More Victims.”
Perigo told The Chronicle she met Jacobo in November 2019 when she was writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner focused on the housing crisis and interviewed TODCO head John Elberling.
Perigo, who does communications and organizing for Tenants Together, a statewide tenants rights organization in San Francisco, said she had admired Jacobo’s reputation in the housing advocacy world. That day, Perigo said, she and Jacobo struck up a conversation about Marin County and how affordable housing could be built on parking lots. Perigo, who grew up in Marin County, was passionate about trying to improve the enormous housing disparities in that area. She said she instantly felt a connection to Jacobo.
“It was really cool to meet Jon, who I had admired a lot, and to hear him talking about the issues I cared about so much,” Perigo said. “I looked up to him.”
Perigo said their initial connection turned into a friendship. The pair had sex in November 2020 once, and “sexted off and on for a while afterwards,” Perigo wrote in her online post. But Perigo said she broke it off in February, telling Jacobo that she preferred to be platonic friends.
Jon Jacobo at the Latino Task Force Resource Hub in San Francisco in November.
Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle 2020Perigo said she had remained friends with Jacobo when, on April 3, he invited her to hang out. Perigo agreed, but she emphasized that she did not want to engage in anything sexual. They decided to meet at Jacobo’s apartment that night to talk and have some drinks, according to a text thread shared with The Chronicle.
“(Also I don’t think this was your expectation but just to be sure, I started seeing someone so I’m not looking to hook up!)” Perigo texted Jacobo around 10 p.m. Jacobo hit a heart button in response and texted back, “Thanks for the heads up! That’s important and sad news.” He followed up with a laughing emoji.
An Uber receipt provided to The Chronicle indicates Perigo arrived at Jacobo’s Van Ness apartment at 11:51 p.m. She also texted her friend Rebecca Peacock that night before she left, saying she was going to meet up with Jacobo but had established that their relationship was platonic.
Perigo said that after she arrived at Jacobo’s apartment they talked for hours, sharing personal stories, while having a few drinks. At around 4 a.m., Perigo said, she told Jacobo she was going to get an Uber home, but he offered to have her sleep over.
Perigo said she agreed to sleep in a bed with Jacobo and told him they could cuddle. But she said she reinforced that she did not want anything sexual to occur.
Almost immediately upon laying down, however, Perigo said Jacobo forcibly kissed her and put his hands inside her shirt and pants, forcibly groping her breasts and buttocks while she told him “no,” and that she was uncomfortable. She said she tried to push his hands away from her but that Jacobo persisted for around 45 minutes, ignoring her demands that he stop. She said she was so stunned by what was happening that she remained in the bed.
“I said ‘no’ dozens of times,” Perigo told The Chronicle. “I knew he was assaulting me, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t want to rock the boat … and I didn’t want to think that about him.”
Perigo said she then brought up her boyfriend, and that she didn’t want to cheat on him. She said Jacobo finally stopped, but asked if he could masturbate. Perigo said she told Jacobo “no,” and that he would have to go into the bathroom, or she would leave. She said he didn’t and they both fell asleep.
In the morning, Perigo said, they woke up around 8:30 a.m. She said Jacobo again started forcibly kissing her and groping her breasts and buttocks as she told him “no” and tried to push him off her.
Perigo said she continued to tell Jacobo “no” while he pulled her pants off, forced oral sex on her and then raped her. Perigo said she froze in shock.
“A few minutes in, my emotions caught up with me, and I could no longer deny what was happening,” Perigo wrote in her online post. “I told him I was uncomfortable and that I wanted to stop. He ignored my request, and proceeded to finish inside of me. At no point had he asked if I wanted to use a condom.”
Perigo said she went to the bathroom and then came back and laid next to him. “I think I was looking for some warmth in that moment because I didn’t want it to be this moment where my friend was so vicious to me,” Perigo told The Chronicle. But she said Jacobo exclaimed, “That was fun!” and asked her if she wanted to go on vacation with him to Cabo San Lucas.
Perigo took an Uber back to her apartment at about 10 a.m. that morning, according to a receipt she provided The Chronicle. Once at home, she said she fell asleep for several hours. When she woke up, Perigo said she began telling her friends and family about what had happened, as well as writing about the incident in a journal.
“Jon Jacobo raped me this morning,” she wrote in a handwritten diary entry dated April 4 that she shared with The Chronicle. “I feel completely empty and very, very alone.”
At around 5 p.m. on April 4, Perigo texted a friend: “So I took my friend Jon up on an offer to hang out last night to get my mind off things and slept over, making very clear that I was just crashing there and was 0% interested in hooking up because I was seeing someone.”
“He raped me this morning,” Perigo wrote in the text thread she shared with The Chronicle, which she partially redacted.
“That’s disgusting,” the friend wrote back. “What the f***.”
As of early Saturday, The Chronicle had not been able to speak to the friend.
Peacock told The Chronicle that Perigo confided on April 4 that Jacobo had sexually assaulted her after she went to his apartment to hang out.
“She described this relentless experience of saying, ‘No, no, no. The things you’re trying to do with me, I’m not interested in it,’” Peacock said. “She got so overwhelmed with it all.”
On April 5 at around 3 p.m., Perigo texted Jacobo, confronting him about the alleged sexual assault, according to a text thread Perigo posted online and a more extensive version that she shared with The Chronicle.
“You ignored dozens of nos — you literally made eye contact with me and took my pants off AS I WAS TELLING YOU NO … I’m not sure what you think rape looks like, but it looks like this,” she wrote.
“Reading this hurt deeply, that you even feel this way is heartbreaking,” Jacobo texted back, adding that he had tried to call her.
Later that day, after consulting with Peacock and other friends, Perigo went to San Francisco General Hospital for a sexual assault examination, allowing medical personnel to take samples to analyze for DNA evidence, according to Perigo, Peacock and discharge paperwork that Perigo provided The Chronicle.
Perigo, who said she is a part-time student at Stanford finishing a degree in computer science, said she did not file an accompanying police report because her work in advocacy and tenants rights has given her a deep distrust of law enforcement as a path toward justice. She also said she had no interest in enduring a retraumatizing reporting process and a potential legal case.
“A lot of the work I met Jon through was also anti-police brutality work,” Perigo said. “I consider myself an abolitionist and support defunding the police.”
In the following weeks, Perigo experienced worsening depression and had trouble getting out of bed and going to work or any events where she might encounter Jacobo, according to Perigo, Peacock and Perigo’s journal entries.
Peacock said the change in her friend was noticeable. “It really debilitated her,” Peacock said. “She’s had a difficult time getting out of bed most mornings. It’s been really, really hard. I wish I could just snap her out of it.”
On April 15, Perigo agreed to meet Jacobo in person in Golden Gate Park the following day to discuss the incident, according to text messages she shared with The Chronicle and friends she later told about the meeting. Perigo said another friend accompanied her to the meeting, but Perigo declined to provide the friend’s identity, saying the friend had requested anonymity.
“The conversation seemed to go well,” Perigo wrote in her online post. “He cried his way through it, admitted wrongdoing, and told me he’d started therapy. We said our goodbyes and have not talked since.”
In his tweet on Friday, Jacobo wrote, “In April, we attempted a restorative process and I will continue to work to understand why and how she feels I caused her harm.”
On April 22, a San Francisco police sergeant with the Special Victims Unit wrote a letter to Perigo saying they had “developed a DNA Profile” from the swabs that were collected during her medical examination. “The DNA was entered into a national DNA Data Bank and may identify the involved suspect,” the sergeant wrote.
The sergeant said that as of that date, Perigo had not followed up with an investigator about the incident, but referred her to the Special Victims Unit address if she wanted to proceed.
At the time, Perigo said, she was still grappling with the emotional trauma from the incident. She said she was regularly going to therapy and unable to go to work. “In some ways it feels like Jon ripped apart and dismantled me as a person,” Perigo wrote in a journal entry dated April 23. “Who am I? How do I relate to the world? I’m floating.”
Then, shortly before her birthday in early June, Perigo said she told a younger friend that Jacobo had raped her. Perigo said the friend relayed that she, too, had a concerning experience with Jacobo. Perigo said she did not ask the woman for more details. Perigo referenced the conversation with the younger friend in her online post.
Perigo said she resolved to pull together her allegations about Jacobo and post them online to warn other women. Perigo said she wrote a draft of the public post in June, but was unable to fill out the details of the sexual assault because it was too traumatizing to relive.
In early August, Perigo completed the post, and she tweeted it out on Friday at 8:59 a.m.
“One of the reasons I kept this story to myself for so long is that I didn’t want to hurt Jon by coming forward. I cared about him deeply, and I’ll forever be heartbroken that someone I once admired could violate me in this way,” Perigo wrote. “But moving on means accepting that Jon isn’t the person I thought he was. I need to free myself from the burden of shielding him from consequences.”
Cynthia Dizikes and Matthias Gafni are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: cdizikes@sfchronicle.com, matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @cdizikes @mgafni
