Abuse, Extortion, Racketeering: The Allegations Against SEIU Boss Dave Regan
A complete, sourced timeline of the misconduct allegations against Dave Regan, the SEIU boss behind California’s wealth tax — from a 2009 assault claim to a 2026 racketeering suit.
TL;DR
Dave Regan, the powerful SEIU healthcare-union boss who architected California’s wealth tax (Prop 40), has been accused — by his own union’s investigators — of years of bullying, threatening and, in one case, assaulting women in the labor movement, and of trying to “extort” fellow leaders into backing his ballot measures. He denies everything as a political smear, but now faces a union disciplinary hearing in December and a separate federal racketeering suit.
Who is Dave Regan?
- Regan is president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), a roughly 120,000-member California healthcare union, and a vice president of the two-million-member national SEIU. He is paid about $394,000 a year.
- How he rose: the national union installed him atop its California local in a 2009 trusteeship that ousted the local’s elected leader, Sal Rosselli — parachuting Regan in from SEIU’s District 1199 in Ohio. He was elected UHW president in 2011, a post that makes him one of the most powerful labor leaders in California.
The allegations
The most serious and recent findings come from two investigations Regan’s own union commissioned — by the firms Cohen, Weiss and Simon (for national SEIU) and Barboza & Associates (for SEIU California) — and were first reported by the Los Angeles Times:
A 2009 assault. Investigators found credible an account by Courtni Pugh, a former SEIU California executive director, that Regan kicked open her office door, pinned her against a wall and called her a “dumb ass.” A colleague said he found her afterward “shaking and clearly traumatized.” Regan calls it “a complete fabrication.”
Threats and intimidation of women. The probes substantiated that Regan threatened the council’s current director, Tia Orr — “endorse this measure by Jan. 1 or I’m coming for you” — then followed her onto a plane; that he bullied its government-relations director, Jessica Bartholow, at a March event; and that he threatened to sue a local union president, Crystal Irving, to silence her about the Pugh incident. Investigators described a “pattern” of intimidating and verbally abusing the council’s female directors. Regan claims “it is 100% false.”
The allegations are not new. A 2018 lawsuit by a UHW staffer, Mindy Sturge, alleged that Regan presided over “an alcohol-fueled party culture, where sexual misconduct thrived.” Regan was not named as a defendant. The suit and its supporting declarations leveled sexual-misconduct allegations against other senior men at the union — including a Kaiser division director who was fired after an internal investigation and a vice president who remained in his post — and earlier reporting by Payday Report described a broader pattern of the union hiring or retaining men who had faced misconduct complaints. The Sturge case settled confidentially in 2020, which is not necessarily an admission of wrongdoing. (These earlier claims are unadjudicated and predate the current scandal.)
The racketeering lawsuit
On Sept. 18, 2026, the California Primary Care Association and five community clinics sued Regan and SEIU-UHW in federal court under the RICO Act, which targets patterns of racketeering. The suit alleges that over more than a decade the union filed dozens of punitive ballot measures against health-care employers — beginning with nonprofit hospitals in 2011, dialysis providers in 2017, and community clinics from 2022 — using the threat of costly initiatives to push providers toward union organizing or bargaining, then withdrawing most of them after the industry agreed to concessions. Regan’s union has spent more than $216 million on such measures, the complaint says, and it argues that “no other singular entity or individual has engaged in such widespread corruption of California’s initiative process.”
As its central example, the suit points to Proposition 44 — a measure that would cap what nonprofit clinics can spend. It says Regan’s demands were set out in a January 2026 email from a legislative staffer acting for the union: a joint offer from UHW and two affiliates requiring the clinics to “hold elections for at least 5,000 employees in each of five years the agreement would be in effect, resulting in elections for 25,000 employees over the five-year period,” with UHW promising to drop the initiative if the clinics agreed. The email, the complaint states, “unambiguously shows that UHW and the Union Affiliates — bullied and instructed by Regan — agreed and intended to participate in an endeavor to abuse the ballot initiative process to extract valuable labor concessions from CPCA and [community health centers], in violation of federal and state law.” When negotiations collapsed on June 24, the day before the deadline to pull the measure, the suit alleges the union offered to withdraw Prop 44 if CPCA reversed its opposition to Regan’s wealth tax and redirected the money it had raised against Prop 44 to help pass the tax; “the next morning, Regan, through an intermediary, offered the same ‘deal,’” and CPCA refused. The claims have not yet been tested in court.
Where it stands now
The allegations — including the 2009 assault claim — predate Regan’s controversial wealth tax. But the measure itself fits his critics’ case: Proposition 40 would steer 90% of its revenue to health care — the industry Regan’s own union works in — which is why the California Teachers Association, the United Domestic Workers, and even his own SEIU California state council refusing to back it; before it qualified, the Los Angeles Times reported, Regan even offered to pull it in exchange for union contracts for SEIU-UHW — a bargaining chip, not a crusade, though he calls this claim “categorically false.”
That behavior is now the subject of his union’s investigations: Regan remains in his job pending a December hearing, even as the California Nurses Association, a state senator, and the California Legislative Black Caucus — which condemned Regan’s “reign of terror” — demand he resign.