CLEVELAND, Ohio – A judge Friday dismissed felony charges against Lorain County Prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson that stemmed from an office romance.
Judge Patrick Carroll, hearing the case on assignment in Elyria Municipal Court, threw out allegations of tampering with evidence, attempted bribery and intimidation against Tomlinson after the key witness in the case, Jennifer Battistelli, failed to show up for the hearing.
Charges against Tomlinson’s chief of staff, James Burge, were also dropped. The cases were filed Oct. 1.
The decision by Carroll, a retired Lakewood Municipal Court jurist, came 10 days after Anthony Cillo, a Republican, defeated Tomlinson, a Democrat, for the prosecutor’s job on Election Day. Tomlinson said he was the victim of politics, and he cited the charges as a way for his opponents to grab the office.
“I was never worried,” he said Friday night. “We had so much exculpatory evidence that I was never concerned. This was bittersweet. We wanted her to show up. We wanted to have a hearing.”
Friday’s hearing was to determine whether enough evidence existed for the case to be bound over to a grand jury, and Carroll said the case could be reintroduced.
Cillo, who will be sworn in as the new prosecutor in January, can bring in a special prosecutor to take the matter to a grand jury.
The charges involved Tomlinson’s relationship with Battistelli, whom he dated and hired as an outreach coordinator when he took office in January 2021.
She told investigators that Tomlinson pushed her onto a couch in his office and shook her on Aug. 15, 2023, according to an affidavit by Capt. Robert Vansant, a Lorain County sheriff’s deputy.
She received a $100,000 payment from the prosecutor’s office in October 2023 as part of a separation agreement with the office. Since then, Battistelli said that Burge and Tomlinson have attempted to make her change her story, according to the affidavit.
In the document, Vansant denied that investigators with his office, the state auditor’s office and the FBI were politically motivated.