Rachel Mitchell’s fiance used burner accounts to attack her critics

Earlier this year, journalists and politicians who have criticized Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell were the target of social media grousing and insults from a pair of anonymous accounts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Now, thanks to testimony given in Maricopa County Superior Court last month, those accounts have been unmasked as belonging to Paul Stout, who confirmed under oath that he ran the burner accounts and is Mitchell’s fiance.

The revelation surfaced in September as Stout took the stand to defend an Aug. 22 injunction he obtained against suspended attorney Vladimir Gagic after a social media tiff between the two over Mitchell got too personal. The court sided with Stout and upheld the injunction. In the process, though, the 63-year-old former employee of the Arizona Department of Child Safety outed himself as a keyboard warrior who has angrily inserted himself into the mentions of reporters and politicos in Maricopa County.

The two accounts in question, @AZJayPaul and @AZ1Patriot, are now defunct. But in the course of his online feud with Stout, Gagic compiled files of posts from both accounts, many of which targeted critics and rivals of Mitchell.

The @AZ1Patriot account took aim at Gina Godbehere, Mitchell’s opponent in this year’s Republican primary, calling Godbehere a “pandering liar” and a “scared chicken,” among other things. After Godbehere posted a Mother’s Day message on X, the account accused her of “exploiting Mother’s Day” and of wearing an “overly too tight shirt,” a comment Godbehere later referred to as a “creepy response” from her rival’s romantic partner.

The @AZ1Patriot account went after figures who endorsed Godbehere over Mitchell, including GOP congressional candidate Abraham Hamadeh and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. @AZ1Patriot called Hamadeh “dishonest Abe” and an “election denying crybaby” whose “political career is like a backed up toilet.” @AZ1Patriot also mocked Arpaio as “Grumpy Joe” and pointed out that the former sheriff had “cost taxpayers in excess of $250 million,” a reference to the Melendres v. Arpaio lawsuit that has landed the sheriff’s office under the scrutiny of a federal court for a decade.

Ironically, Mitchell has criticized the outcome of the Melendres case.

Using both accounts, Stout also took swipes at local journalists. Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts and Republic criminal justice reporter Jimmy Jenkins drew his ire. So has Phoenix New Times, which @AZ1Patriot labeled “junk reporting” in response to a post by the paper's news editor, Zach Buchanan. (@AZ1Patriot also mentioned this reporter briefly in one post.) The @AZJayPaul account derided ABC 15 reporter Nicole Grigg as a “fiction writer,” and it blasted erstwhile Democratic county attorney candidate Julie Gunnigle for her “flaming radical liberal views,” insisting that Gunnigle “isn't qualified to be the lowest level supervisor at the MCAO. FACT!”

New Times reached out to Stout directly via a phone number believed to be his, but Stout has not replied.

A feud begins

Stout’s online sniping might have remained undiscovered until he trolled Gagic, who posts frequently and sometimes manically on X.

At the Sept. 16 hearing on the injunction he filed against the 50-year-old Gagic, Stout admitted using the @AZJayPaul account to start the feud with Gagic. “It probably started at the end of 2023, and I had seen some very negative posts directed at Rachel Mitchell, my fiancee, and so I responded,” Stout told the court. He claimed Mitchell never asked him to post on social media and that he deleted the @AZJayPaul account in late February 2024.

Mitchell previously has refused to confirm or deny if Stout is her fiance, but she acknowledged him by name after he held the Bibles when she took her oath of office in 2022. She giddily thanked him for being “a bedrock of security and support” through the campaign, even attending fundraisers on her behalf. Stout also has contributed to Mitchell’s reelection campaign, donating $350 so far.

When Gagic criticized Mitchell for her office’s controversial prosecution of Phoenix resident Jamaal Pennington on accusations of sex trafficking and sexual contact with a minor, @AZJayPaul lit into the attorney. Gagic had defended Pennington until the State Bar of Arizona went after Gagic for criticizing judges assigned to the case, suspending his law license for one year and fining him $6,000.

As @AZJayPaul, Stout posted a link to Gagic’s disciplinary history and called Gagic “disgraced” and “delusional.” In another post, @AZJayPaul posted a YouTube video of Gagic being assaulted in court by Lamont Payne, whom Gagic was assigned to represent on behalf of Maricopa County Public Defense Services. Accused of biting a county corrections officer on the ankle, Payne had been ordered out of court by a judge for being disruptive when he unexpectedly sucker punched Gagic in the head. The assault made national news.

“Can you explain why your client cold-cocked you in the courtroom?” @AZJayPaul asked Gagic in a back-and-forth on X.

The @AZ1Patriot account remained active at least until a July 5 post, when the account denied being Stout and claimed to be a “married female.” Stout testified that he closed both accounts because he wanted to “disengage” from Gagic and that he misrepresented his identity in that July 5 post for the same reason.

“I didn’t want to have any communication with you,” Stout told Gagic under cross-examination, adding, “If I had to do it over again, I would not have had any communication whatsoever with you.”

Trolling the wrong guy

Stout soon learned he’d trolled the wrong person.

Gagic told Maricopa County Commissioner Richard Albrecht, who presided over the hearings, that someone dropped a dime to him that @AZJayPaul was Stout. Gagic said he was “floored” and began investigating Stout and posting what he found out — or at least what he thought he’d found out.

Gagic said he began posting about Stout because he believed Mitchell was “retaliating against me by proxy, by using him to come after me, first as @AZJayPaul” and then as @AZ1Patriot. Gagic said he believed Stout had been using other anonymous accounts, which Stout denied under oath.

When an account he believed to be Stout addressed him directly, Gagic fired back, writing, “Fine Paul name the place Saturday … ”

Stout testified that Gagic’s challenge alarmed him and made him feel harassed, and it was one of several incidents mentioned in Stout’s petition for an injunction against harassment. Gagic posted Stout’s signature and court paperwork regarding Stout’s child support. Gagic also dug up and posted a request for an injunction against harassment filed against Stout by a neighbor in 2007. On YouTube, Gagic also posted audio from the hearing in which Stout successfully challenged the injunction, with the title “Rachel Mitchell, Maricopa County Attorney fiance Paul Stout and his History of violence.”

Gagic also posted court paperwork from Texas concerning a “Paul M. Stout” who was convicted of a sex crime — either ignoring or unaware at the time that Stout’s middle initial is H — and wondered in a post if Mitchell's fiance had been convicted of a similar crime and if Mitchell was hiding this from the public. “Even if not true,” Gagic wrote, “if RM can’t control her creepy psycho fiance, how can she run MCAO?”

Gagic told New Times that he didn’t know the Texas Stout was a different person, but he was trying to find out if it was. “I didn’t say it was Rachel Mitchell's fiance. I just said, ‘Is this the guy?’” he explained, adding, “If I knew he was Paul H. Stout, I wouldn’t have done it.” Albrecht ruled against Gagic’s argument that “adding a question mark to some of the accusations” absolved them of being accusations, finding that Gagic’s posts on the subject were not “entitled to the protection of the First Amendment.”

Stout filed the petition for an injunction in August, saying that he feared for his safety and reputation and became withdrawn. Though the two men had never met in person before the hearings on the injunction, Stout nonetheless checked a box on the injunction form that instructed Gagic to stay away from Stout's residence and to not possess any firearms while the injunction is in effect. Stout said he checked the box because he knew Gagic was a former Marine and assumed he might have firearms.

Stout also testified that Mitchell helped him draft the complaint against Gagic. A pre-hearing filing made by Stout’s counsel listed Mitchell as a possible witness for Stout, but the county attorney was a no-show.

Through county attorney spokesperson Jeanine L’Ecuyer, Mitchell declined to speak to New Times. However, L’Ecuyer said, “No County dollars have been expended on this matter.”

Injunction granted

The injunction was granted on Aug. 22 and ordered Gagic to have no contact with Stout “in person, electronic, digital or … through third parties.” The injunction also instructed Gagic to “cease posting or remove” all social media posts consisting of “lewd, obscene or profane remarks” or personal attacks that “do not convey a message that is of public interest.” Gagic still “may comment on ideas posted by Mr. Stout.”

Gagic challenged the injunction and represented himself at the hearing. Stout was represented by Christopher Rapp, Lesli Sorenson and Andrew Pacheco of the Phoenix firm Ryan Rapp Pacheco and Sorenson. Notably, Pacheco is a former bureau chief with the county attorney's office and was once the chief of the criminal division of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

The law firm is also listed as an approved vendor with Maricopa County, with a contract allowing the firm to charge anywhere from $150 to $340 per hour for legal fees. Rapp and Pacheco have donated to Mitchell’s re-election campaign, each giving $500 a piece. Both men gave more to Mitchell during the 2022 cycle, when she was running in a special election to replace former county attorney Allister Adel. Pacheco donated $1,500 to Mitchell that year, while Rapp donated $1,000.

The firm declined a request for comment.

Albrecht ultimately ruled against Gagic’s effort to quash the injunction, claiming that it was content-neutral and did not implicate his First Amendment rights. Albrecht’s ruling makes no mention of Stout’s claim to be Mitchell’s fiance.

Gagic is appealing the decision. Meanwhile, he has seen some vindication in the case that caused the state bar to penalize him and for which Stout attacked him online. Though a judge in February sentenced former Gagic client Jamaal Pennington to 30 years for sexual conduct with a minor, the Arizona Republic previously reported that the now-adult female victim in the case says Pennington never touched her.

Pennington’s conviction is now before the Arizona Court of Appeals. In its response to Pennington’s appeal, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office conceded in a brief to the court that “prosecutorial error” occurred when the county attorney “presented arguments that were factually incorrect.” As a result, the Mayes’ office concluded that “Pennington should receive a new trial for his sexual-conduct-with-a-minor-charge.”

The appeals court has yet to rule, but Gagic is unconvinced that it will do the right thing in Pennington’s case. Before that case, Gagic had been an attorney for 20 years with no prior history of discipline from the bar. He now believes the bar did Mitchell’s bidding in sanctioning him and that the injunction from Stout is another effort to shut him up. Gagic’s suspension has ended, though he has not applied for reinstatement.

He’s fighting Stout’s injunction for the same reason he popped off about the judges in Pennington’s case — he wanted a fair day in court.

“I'm not saying he’s innocent,” Gagic said of Pennington. “I’m just saying give him a chance to prove he’s not guilty. Know what I mean?”