“Moderate” Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger (D.) appointed a leader of a left-wing nonprofit founded by ousted George Soros-backed prosecutors Chesa Boudin and George Gascón to serve on the state’s Criminal Justice Services Board. The new Spanberger appointee, Robyn Sordelett, has said that she’s “self-conscious” about her “whiteness” and that she feels “guilt about being born white.”
Sordelett’s addition to the 32-member board, which approves Department of Criminal Justice Services grants to police departments and school resource officers, was included in a May 22 announcement in which Spanberger said her picks “reflect the depth of talent and dedication that exists across our Commonwealth.” Sordelett’s employer—the Prosecutors Alliance, where Sordelett serves as director of the group’s Survivor Center—also celebrated the move, calling Sordelett “a thoughtful voice for accountability, public safety.”
Former constituents of the left-wing prosecutors who founded the alliance may disagree. They include Boudin, who served as district attorney of San Francisco, and Gascón, who served as district attorney of San Francisco and then of Los Angeles County. The pair created the alliance in 2020 as a liberal alternative to the California District Attorneys Association and in opposition to “law enforcement unions” and their “tough-on-crime policies,” as Boudin said at the time. Both Boudin and Gascón eliminated cash bail as district attorneys—and both went on to face recall efforts as crime spiked on their watches. San Francisco voters successfully recalled Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists, in 2022, while Gascón lost his 2024 reelection bid to tough-on-crime former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman by 20 points. Liberal billionaire George Soros contributed millions of dollars to Gascón’s 2020 campaign and funded a network of liberal organizations that opposed Boudin’s recall. The Prosecutors Alliance is affiliated with Tides Center, another Soros-funded entity.
Sordelett, for her part, has said she often feels guilty for being white. In 2018, she told Facing Whiteness, a Columbia University project, that there are “no cons to being white” beside being “self-conscious.”
“I think something that’s tough is when you want to engage as an ally and you feel self-conscious about your whiteness … and I feel that a lot,” she said. “Sometimes I think that there’s nothing worse than a well-intentioned white person who maybe is wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and donates to all the organizations, but like, still doesn’t get it.”
“You need to be able to grasp that you’ll never understand, and you’ll never get it, and it’s messy, and complicated, and you just have to listen more than you talk,” she continued. “For me, that’s the only drawback.” Sordelett, who was born in South Africa to an “anti-apartheid” activist father, also told Columbia that she “definitely [has] this guilt about being born white in a country where being born white meant sometimes that you got to live.”
Sordelett’s appointment to Virginia’s Criminal Justice Services Board is the latest indication that Spanberger is ditching the moderate image she presented to voters while running for governor. Shortly after taking office, she backed a failed effort to gerrymander Virginia’s congressional map after saying on the campaign trail that she had no plans to do so. She later signed legislation banning so-called assault weapons.
The appointment also comes as progressive prosecutors in Northern Virginia—Arlington County’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax County’s Steve Descano—release illegal immigrants accused of violent crimes back into the community. In one instance, an illegal immigrant Descano had repeatedly released despite more than 30 prior arrests was later accused of killing a woman at a Fairfax County bus stop. Spanberger, who ordered state law enforcement agencies to sever their partnerships with ICE, said federal agents should obtain a judicial warrant to detain the suspect, prompting the Department of Homeland Security to accuse her of “fighting to protect a MURDERER over American citizens.” Dehghani-Tafti and Descano, like Boudin and Gascón, have received significant funding from Soros-affiliated groups.
Sordelett declined to comment. Spanberger and the Prosecutors Alliance did not return requests for comment.
The alliance is run by Cristine Soto DeBerry, who has served as a top aide to Boudin and Gascón. It has an extensive history of pushing for progressive policies, focusing on “restorative justice” and steering prosecutors toward alternatives to incarceration.
Since Boudin and Gascón’s ousters, the Prosecutors Alliance has expanded to over 5,000 members, providing training to prosecutors across the country and coordinating prison visits to “build bridges” with the incarcerated. Sordelett’s Survivor Center, meanwhile, works to “integrate a justice-oriented lens into victim support, understanding how systems can both compound and repair harm, and how advocates can work toward responses that honor dignity.”
The group is a fiscally sponsored project of the Soros-funded Tides Center, making its financial information, including its donors, secret. An affiliated political advocacy group, Prosecutors Alliance Action, is a project of another Soros-backed group, Beyond Impact, formerly known as Tides Advocacy.
In 2023, the Prosecutors Alliance submitted a brief to the California supreme court arguing that Tony Hardin, a black man sentenced to life without parole for strangling a 66-year-old woman to death, should be eligible for parole. The group alleged that blocking Hardin from parole eligibility exemplifies how “bias plagues the criminal justice system” and that charging decisions have produced “racial disparities pertaining to Black people.” The court ruled that the original sentence would remain.
Prosecutors Alliance Action, meanwhile, touts its efforts to “defend prosecutors facing bad-faith partisan attacks.” In 2024, after voters ousted Alameda County, Calif., district attorney Pamela Price—another Soros-funded progressive prosecutor—amid rising crime, DeBerry called the recall “deeply poisonous to our political system” and accused billionaires and police unions of “misleading the public, overthrowing the will of the people, and ousting a prosecutor committed to reform.”
Sordelett, who has derided “the audacity of mediocre white men,” has also worked with the anti-gun groups Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, where she advocated for red flag laws in Virginia. She has argued that there’s “no real end to gun violence without the end of white supremacy” and claimed that the “right to protect your home belongs only to white gun owners.”