Ester Lim Lands Job with LA County District Attorney George Gascon

Esther Lim has a new job – she’s now a “special assistant” to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon.

Lim is not an attorney.

What she is a “social justice warrior” par excellence.

And why could Lim’s name be familiar? Because she has been at the center of some of the most awful “criminal justice” movements in Los Angeles and the state for the past decade.

Again, Lim is not a lawyer – she has a Masters in Social Work (MSW).  True, it was from USC and not some online “I work for the government and I got a master’s now so you have to pay me more money” diploma mill, but an MSW is hardly a degree in astrophysics…or “communications”…or even gym.

But these are the people that run county social service agencies and miss and/or ignore things like the torture and eventual murder of children like Anthony Avalos.

One of the things a person is supposed to build in college is, for lack of a better term, a bullshit detector.  You may not know exactly technically why something sounds wrong, but your education has created a filter, a pair of antennae that goes up when you hear an absurd claim.

Sadly, people like Lim not only do not have detectors but bullshit repeaters and they have created a vast well-to-do HAM radio network full of guilt-ridden narcissi neurotics.

Though she did not respond to a request for comment, we can let her speak for herself from her LinkedIn page:

For more than 20 years, Esther advocated for the reformation of the CJ system, humane & just treatment of people who are incarcerated & end of mass incarceration. 

After years of working in the non-profit sector, Esther is Special Assistant to progressive LA County District Attorney George Gascón & was the Sr. Justice Deputy & AAPI Advisor for LAC Supervisor, Hilda Solis. She is responsible for developing & advancing a “care first, jails last” agenda. 

Prior, she was the Director of Monitoring & Policy at the Correctional Association of NY, where she monitored the NY State prisons & advocated for prisoners’ rights. 

Before her move to NY, she was the long-time Director at ACLU SoCal’s Jails Project. In this role, she defended the civil rights of incarcerated individuals in LA (largest jail system in the country). She expanded the Project into Orange & Santa Barbara. She also concurrently served as Deputy Director of Advocacy Operations, responsible for administrative & management duties to ensure a more effective & efficient focus on the affiliate’s integrated advocacy approach to its multi-issue work.

In other words, she has spent her entire life trying to get people out of jail and/or keeping them from being put in jail in the first place.  By the way, she updated her employment status to note her new job on LinkedIn but still lists her “company” as the ACLU.

And that core belief – or what have you – is what has driven her career and has now landed her in Gascon’s office.

As Solis’ employee, Lim was behind her attempt to immediately let half of the inmates in LA County’s Men’s Central Jail last year.

From an earlier piece in 2023:  

(Solis’s)  motion, titled “Los Angeles County to Take Actionable Next Steps to Depopulate and Decarcerate the Los Angeles County Jails…” called for the release of inmates whose “aggregate” bail was lower than $50,000 as part of a plan to “depopulate and decarcerate” the jails as a way, in part, “to redress historical wrongs, deeply rooted in systemic racism and prejudice, and reverse status quo responses to poverty, mental health and medical needs, and substance use dependencies.”

This unexplained release threshold figure – Solis’ office did not respond to a request for comment and an explanation of how the figure was arrived at – would have sprung about 7,500 of the approximately 14,000 current “guests of the county.”

It is quite possible that the $50,000 figure was not arbitrary but arrived at by working backwards to get to that “more than half” number, thereby possibly justifying the immediate demolition of the Men’s Central Jail building, an item that has been on the county’s “to-do” for some time as part of its “care first, jails last” – also known as “Hugs AND Drugs” – policy.

Sliding in under that threshold – and therefore eligible for release – would be people charged with crimes like possession/distribution of child pornography, battery, domestic violence, residential burglary, pimping, grand theft auto, child stealing, assault with a firearm, sexual battery, false imprisonment, etc.

The effort died because of it was so absurd even the LA County Board of Supervisors shelved it.  But Lim’s stamp was all over the effort:

Exactly whether or not Solis knew the political firestorm the proposal would create – or even exactly what the actual impact it would have – is unclear.  What is abundantly clear is that Solis’ office “Justice Deputy” Esther Lim (who has a master’s in social work and is not an attorney) knew exactly what the motion meant; prior to joining Solis, Lim – again, not a lawyer – headed up the local ACLU branch’s effort to – wait for it – close the Men’s Central Jail. 

Lim has also been a strident enemy of former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.  

From an earlier piece:

While Villanueva was sheriff, Lim constantly and aggressively and obscenely blasted him and law enforcement in general, i.e. “#FuckICE.”

While the tweets were on her personal account, many of them were sent during working hours; Villanueva filed an ethics complaint in early 2021 against Lim with Solis –  (the complaint contains numerous screenshots of Lim’s tirade.)

The complaint went nowhere.

Time passes and Lim, last October, filed a complaint against now former sheriff Villaneuva sparking a full investigation involving two law firms who – shockingly – sided with Lim (weeks before the primary) and put Villanueva on a county “do not rehire” list.

Whether or not such a list is actually a real thing, Villanueva, who said “they pulled it out of the ass,” is not actually sure. But if it is a long-standing, often-used, actual real thing, Villaneuva wondered if it should contain former supervisor and convicted federal felon Mark Ridley-Thomas?

Wondering about her professionalism? Check out her social media posts:  

“This is not about a few bad apples.  The whole damn orchard needs to be torched.  #Defundpolice”

“Lots of “if they were Black” tweets going around.  Yup, we all know all what would have happened.  #WhitePrivilege”

 Other posts, along with the failed complaint by Villaneuva, can be seen here.

And now this non-lawyer is a special assistant to George Gascon.  

From a political perspective, it is a very odd situation. Lim worked – as Asian-American Pacific Islander and criminal justice advisor – for Solis for nearly two years but left the office earlier this month to work for Gascon..

Why?

Solis is a whole different kind of awful in her own right – think political and personal gain before actually believing in anything beyond woke paraphrases she spews – but she’s in office until at least the end of 2026.

Gascon – it seems according to the latest polls and fundraising reports and the repellence most of the community feels towards him – is headed for the door about two months.

So why would Lim jump onto a sinking ship?

Solis’ office did not respond to a request for comment as to whether or not she left or was pushed out.

The DA’s office did not respond to a request for comment as to why Lim was hired, and what – as a non-lawyer with significant political connections – is doing in the office so close to Election Day (note – she was elected to LA County Democratic Central Committee for Assembly district 45 in March.)

Well, maybe that’s exactly it.

But still, politicos tend not to swim toward a sinking ship, hence the oddity of the move.

Either Lim knows something no one else does or she is simply brushing up her progressive bona fides to get a different job in 2025 or she is as delusional as she seems.

Let’s hope it’s the latter.