The former Windsor mayor who went down in a cloud of sexual assault allegations from nine different women may be hiding at an Italian castle, but his Sonoma County home was relieved of a few items today by sheriff's detectives investigating those allegations.

The wealthy wine country bro seen above is Dominic Foppoli (pronounced fa-POLE-y), the former mayor of Windsor, California and inheritor of a winery, doing a food and beverage webcast with Guy Fieri back in April 2020. Foppoli has suffered a stunning fall from grace since the Chronicle’s April 2021 exposé on four women accusing him of sexual assault. That pool of alleged victims grew to nine women accusing him by the time Foppoli eventually resigned a month later.

There are criminal charges involved in some of those accusations, and as such, KPIX reports that Sonoma County sheriff's detectives raided Foppoli's home Wednesday morning (the same place seen in the sweet Zoom background above). Per images posted to social media, at least four deputies could be seen hauling items out of the home in brown paper bags, and the front door still has a sign on it reading “No!!!! Comment, Go Away.”

Among the more shocking assault accusations against Foppoli is from sitting City Council member Esther Lemus, whom Foppoli threatened to release a sex tape of. Lemus, for her part, says she was drugged and raped the night the footage was taken, she suspects by Foppoli himself.

Also among Foppoli's accusers is reality TV star Farrah Abraham, of Teen Mom fame.

The bizarre footnotes don’t end there. According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, renters are currently staying in Foppoli’s house, as he has run off to Italy. The Press Democrat spoke with one of the current tenants, who “briefly spoke to a reporter on the phone, [and] said that Foppoli was in Italy.” The paper adds that “Foppoli’s family owns a thousand-year-old castle 75 miles northeast of Milan in the town of Mazzo de Valtellini. He bought the property, named Castello Foppoli, after it went up for sale about five years ago.”

People say San Francisco’s City Hall and Board of Supervisors are dysfunctional. That may be. But we do not have mayors racking up nine sexual assault charges, we do not have elected officials threatening each other with sex tapes, and we do not have officials hiding in Italian castles to avoid all their felony counts. One has to sympathize with Windsor, where these are not movie plot lines, these are things happening in a tragic reality of local governance.

Related: Disgraced Windsor Ex-Mayor’s Latest Sexual Battery Charge Comes from ‘Teen Mom’ Farrah Abraham [SFist]

Image: @RussianRiverBC via Twitter