Abuse survivor sues county attorney, calls her soft on sex criminals

Kayleigh Kozak really hates Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell.

For the second time in the past six months, the prominent victims’ rights advocate has used a lawsuit to get off some shots at Mitchell, who gave a plea deal to the soccer coach who sexually abused Kozak when she was 12. This time, Kozak’s broadside against the county prosecutor’s tough-on-crime reputation includes references to the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Saturday Night Live.

Known for spearheading the passage of Kayleigh’s Law, which allows victims to obtain lifetime injunctions against their abusers, Kozak first used the courts to air her grievances against Mitchell in November. In a lawsuit against Liberty Elementary School District in Buckeye for allegedly covering for her abuser, Kozak accused Mitchell of giving the man who molested her a sweetheart plea deal. Mitchell was not named as a defendant in that suit.

Now, though, Kozak is taking the battle directly to the county attorney’s office, albeit in the form of a public records lawsuit. The suit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on March 3, asks Mitchell’s office to comply with public records law and fork over its file from the 2006 prosecution of Joshua Jacobsen, the soccer coach who abused Kozak. Mitchell handled that case as a subordinate of then-county attorney Andrew Thomas.

Kozak’s attorney, William Fischbach, declined an interview request on behalf of himself and his client. Mitchell’s office did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Kozak would seem to have a case. She first requested the file from the county attorney’s office back in May 2024, and Arizona’s public records law says that a custodian of records is supposed to produce those records “promptly” upon request. Kozak’s request is now 10 months old.

Kozak’s complaint does far more than just gesture at the calendar, however. She uses it to repeat accusations against Mitchell leveled in the first lawsuit. According to Kozak, Mitchell supposedly told Kozak’s parents that the case against Jacobsen was weak, and the prosecutor “never provided Kozak with a police report” on the Buckeye Police Department’s investigation into Jacobsen. Mitchell allowed him to plead to sexual abuse of a minor and luring a minor, for which he received just nine months in jail and lifetime probation.

When Kozak finally obtained the report last year, it showed that the case was potentially stronger than Mitchell had let on. Several parents and children had reported Jacobsen’s “pedophilic tendencies” to Liberty Elementary’s principal. Some of these reports confirmed Kozak’s account of her abuse by Jacobsen.

As in the first lawsuit, the new complaint insinuates that the plea deal was unusual because Jacobsen’s attorney was a former county prosecutor who had been censured by the bar in 2003 for improperly soliciting a prospective client. The new complaint names the attorney involved: renowned Phoenix defense attorney Jason Lamm.

Kozak’s complaint quotes the State Bar of Arizona’s website, which describes how Lamm, while still with the county attorney’s office, “misled a detention officer in order to talk” to a potential client for his future work as a defense counsel. Lamm was “remorseful” and was “censured by consent,” according to the state bar. The bar placed him on probation for a year.

Contacted by Phoenix New Times, Lamm scoffed at the notion that there may have been anything improper about the plea deal for Jacobsen. “This is akin to the wholesale hurling of ancient excrement at a wall and praying there will be some degree of adhesion,” Lamm said. As for his legal hiccup, which was unrelated to the Jacobsen case, Lamm was not impressed with its inclusion in Kozak’s suit.

“I also talked during a math test in third grade,” he cracked.

Kavanaugh and SNL

Kozak’s new complaint revisits the origin of her ongoing feud with Mitchell, which predates Kozak’s various lawsuits.

Mitchell was once Kozak’s ally and referred to her as “truly inspiring” in a 2022 social media post. Mitchell and Kozak later fell out over a different law Kozak was backing. When Kozak endorsed Gina Godbehere over Mitchell in the 2024 Republican primary, the county attorney’s head practically exploded. Mitchell denounced Kozak in a fiery X post, calling Kozak a “grifter supporter” of Godbehere who “wrote some terrible legislation and got mad when it failed.”

The complaint also quotes a portion of the county attorney’s website trumpeting Mitchell’s “career protecting families by prosecuting crimes against children,” during which she “pushed for changes in the courtroom to comfort victims testifying in abuse cases.” The site also touts how in 2018, Mitchell “rose to national prominence” when she was hired by the U.S. Senate to question Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused him of sexual assault.

Skittish at the prospect of a bunch of old white guys interrogating Ford during her testimony before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that they had “hired a female assistant” to ask questions of the two parties “in a respectful and professional way.” That “female assistant” was Mitchell, then a veteran sex crimes prosecutor under Bill Montgomery.

Though the senators allowed Mitchell to fully question Ford from a tiny desk set before the committee’s dais, they took over her questioning of Kavanaugh in midstream and proceeded to loudly berate Democrats for supposedly smearing Kavanaugh’s name. Despite not being able to fully question Kavanaugh, she later penned a memo to Senate Republicans titled “Analysis of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Allegations,” which poked holes in Ford’s story and assailed her for having a faulty memory.

Kozak’s new complaint references that memo and quotes Mitchell’s conclusion that “I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the committee.” Though Mitchell claimed in her memo that she was “not a political or partisan person” – she’d run for office as a Republican four years later – the report was largely seen as the product of a partisan hack.

The Brennan Center for Justice called the memo “incomplete and deeply flawed.” The website Mother Jones quoted Matthew Long, “a former sex crimes prosecutor who was trained by Mitchell.” Long called the report “disingenuous” and said he was “very disappointed in my former boss and mentor,” especially when Mitchell questioned Ford’s memory on the date the alleged attack occurred. Long said victims often have trouble nailing down the precise date of an attack and that Mitchell’s office had brought prosecutions despite this issue.

“I was trained explicitly by her to not consider this time thing as an inconsistency,” Long said.

As Kozak’s complaint notes, Mitchell’s star turn earned her a spot in a 2018 Saturday Night Live cold open. The sketch lampooned the hearing as a clown show, in which one “senator” referred to Mitchell, as played by Phoenix native Aidy Bryant, as “the female prosecutor we hired as a human shield.”

Kozak’s complaint includes a YouTube link to the sketch and even quotes Bryant’s opening line:

“Hello, my name is Rachel Mitchell, I’m here mostly for Twitter…”