Enrique Pearce, the man who successfully ran Jane Kim's election campaign to the Board of Supervisors, and the Run, Ed, Run campaign, was arrested last night on charges that he was in possession of over 600 images of minors engaging in sexual acts. As San Francisco Magazine is reporting, Pearce is being held on $215,000 bail.
Pearce was at one point Kim's roommate, and also ran Matt Gonzalez's 2003 campaign for mayor.
As a principal of Left Coast Communications, Pearce ran into some trouble a couple years ago with a seeming conflict between his firm and the independent expenditure committee (like a SuperPAC) called the SF Neighbor Alliance that Pearce ran on Mayor Ed Lee’s behalf. The SF Neighbor Alliance was supposed to fund a privately published book titled The Ed Lee Story: An Unexpected Mayor that was paid for upfront by Pearce's firm, as SF Appeal reported. The firm then ended up in the red to the tune of $111,500, owed to it by the independent expenditure committee.
Reps of the same committee were also "videotaped by a rival campaign helping elderly Chinese voters fill out their ballots" to vote for Lee, as SF Weekly reported, calling Pearce a "left-leaning political consultant San Francisco progressives love to hate."
It's unclear whether Pearce has posted bail. According to The Examiner, colleagues of Pearce contacted today at his law firm said they had not heard from him or seen him today. His case will go before the DA next week.