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Toluca Lake Neighborhood Council’s Jo Ann Rivas Harasses the Community She Purports to Represent for Her Own Profit
The Greater Toluca Lake Neighborhood Council (GTLNC) claims to serve as a conduit between residents and government “to achieve the best result possible for our community” by “strengthening democracy in Los Angeles” and “embracing and supporting diversity.”
Perhaps they should inform their board member, Jo Ann Rivas, who has turned her personal bigotry and hate into a harassment-based business model.
Community Harassment
Rivas is an unemployed anti-Scientologist who spends her days alongside felons and ex-convicts stalking, harassing and hurling epithets at members of the community who are Scientologists, while livestreaming on her cell phone and soliciting cash for her targeted abuse of people based solely on their religion.
“I’m willing to be trespassed [arrested for trespassing] here,” Rivas says, taunting law enforcement and passersby outside the Church that serves parishioners in Toluca Lake, “but it has to be something big.”
Rivas and her cohort’s YouTube videos document their eternal quest for that “something big”—creating violence, assaults, arrests, anything anti-social will do—and her fellow harassers regularly deliver.
She, like them, considers the over 100 swatting calls they have been “coincidentally” on hand to film as “great content”—at untold taxpayer expense and danger to law enforcement, firefighters and the community.
Government Harassment
When not loitering outside churches—screaming at parishioners as they come and go from religious services—Rivas can be found disrupting public meetings and haranguing officials as they attempt to represent their citizens.
In one day alone, Rivas spent six hours roaming City Hall to seek out meetings to disrupt by screaming anti-Scientology bigotry at the top of her lungs.
Her hate came to a head at an LA City Council meeting in April. Rivas arrived after public comment had been closed, demanding access to the mic to interrupt the proceedings. When informed by an official she was disrupting the meeting, Rivas’ reply was: “Good!” When a police officer warned Rivas she would be placed on probation if she continued her disturbance, Rivas snapped back that she wanted to be ejected so she could capture the incident on video.
“I’m just going to keep interrupting until they kick me out,” she announced into the livestream on her cell phone.
But after police obliged, escorting Rivas to the exit, she immediately vowed to take to social media to complain of how the council “kicked out a disabled person.”
Rivas has even gone so far as to illegally—and repeatedly—impersonate Church officials and Church staff at government forums, signing up for public comment using their names to malign the Scientology religion while pretending to be them.
Digital Harassment
Openly admitting that her sole aim is harassment for clicks and profit, Rivas labels her YouTube videos with titles like “rants” and “shenanigans.”
Rivas is, after all, the same woman who used X to promote content advocating public executions for acts she labeled “treason,” glorifying swastikas, comparing the state governor to Hitler and equating Democrats to Nazis.
She was finally removed from the platform—already notorious for its permissiveness—for extreme and repeated content violations.
Taxpayer-Funded Harassment?
Rivas shows no sign of legitimate employment, raising the question of whether her harassment is, effectively, state-funded via public benefits.
Which naturally prompts the question: If so, is the government aware of the campaign of targeted abuse it is underwriting?
Do they know they are paying Rivas to pose as a conduit between community and government, while harassing both the community and the government?
And how can the Greater Toluca Lake Neighborhood Council claim to serve Toluca Lake while one of its own board members terrorizes its residents for profit?
STAND League is the leading global coalition exposing bigotry and championing religious freedom worldwide. Through education, advocacy and partnership, STAND promotes religious literacy, demands corporate accountability, advances honest journalism and safeguards equality, justice and human rights for all.
