Recall petition against Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus fails, judge finds no wrongdoing

All charges against Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus were dismissed with prejudice on Tuesday after she was accused of mishandling sexual assault cases and using her influence to grant special privileges.

Judge David Whedbee said he could not find any evidence of wrongdoing, stating that Backus was within her First Amendment rights to offer support and that there was no evidence her actions influenced the legal process.

Ronnie Morgan III, who ran against Backus in the 2025 mayoral race but lost in the primary, filed the recall petition just months after Backus won a fourth consecutive term, according to The Auburn Reporter.

The petition cited what Morgan called a pattern of ethical failures and included KIRO Newsradio’s investigation from last year into a letter Backus wrote supporting a former pastor convicted of child rape.

“This petition is a direct result of the lack of trust the city places in our mayor’s ability to run our city according to a code of ethics and accountability,” Morgan wrote in the filing.

What the petition alleged

Morgan’s petition covered a range of grievances, but the most prominent centered on Backus’s 2022 letter asking a judge to consider treatment rather than prison for Joshua Obadiah Headley, a former Auburn pastor who had pleaded guilty to raping a 15-year-old girl from his congregation at Northwest Family Church.

The petition referenced a KIRO Newsradio investigation published in October 2025 that found Backus wrote the letter even after an Auburn pastor had explicitly warned her about the crime. The investigation also raised questions about how Headley was celebrated by local civic organizations before he went to prison and again after his release, when he began operating under a new identity.

Beyond the Headley letter, the petition also claimed Backus used her position to grant “unwarranted privileges not available to the general public,” accepted endorsements and donations from the 47th Democratic District in 2025 while her friend served as president of that organization, and that the same friend was later placed on the city salary commission, which sets the mayor’s pay and benefits.

Morgan also alleged Backus “repeatedly mishandled sexual assault and even murder cases, favoring the perpetrators, not the victims,” including transferring all sexual assault complaints out of the Auburn Police Department’s Internal Investigations unit into a department she directly controls.

The petition also called out her public statement following former Auburn police officer Jeff Nelson’s 2024 murder conviction, arguing it contradicted her stated commitment to accountability despite what Morgan described as clear evidence of systemic problems inside the department. Nelson was convicted of second-degree murder and assault for the 2019 killing of Jesse Sarey.

Recall petition faced high bar, hearing only first step in lengthy process

Morgan’s petition faced a high bar. Recalling an elected official in Washington is a difficult process. Even if the petition cleared the Feb. 24 hearing, it would only have been the first step before signatures need to be gathered and verified for a recall election to be called.

The hearing took place in Courtroom E-201 of the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle. Lindsay Grieve, a King County senior deputy prosecuting attorney for the Civil Division, filed the petition and ballot synopsis in King County Superior Court.

Backus did not return a call from the Auburn Reporter seeking comment. At the November 2025 Auburn City Council meeting, she said her public statement on the Headley matter would be her “only public comment moving forward” and characterized earlier media coverage as “political fodder.”

Read more of Jillian Raftery’s stories here.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.