Dial-a-Porn Figure Wasn’t a Student, Two Schools Say

A former intern who admitted making more than 100 dial-a-porn calls from Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande’s office was never a student at two colleges he claimed that he had attended, spokeswomen at both schools said Wednesday.

John Stoffel, the former intern, refused Wednesday to answer a Times reporter’s questions about his background. “This is all behind me now and I’m not going to say anything more about it,” said the 23-year-old former Nestande aide.

A GOP activist hired in December, 1984, as a county management intern, Stoffel had told Nestande and members of the supervisor’s staff that he had “transferred to Cal State Fullerton after losing a scholarship at Chapman College,” Tom Eichorn, a Nestande aide, said Wednesday.

Privacy Rights Cited

But Judy Mandel, public affairs director at Cal State Fullerton, and a registration official at Chapman College both said Wednesday that they could find no record of Stoffel attending classes at their institutions. Mandel said Stoffel had been accepted for admission to Cal State Fullerton but never registered for classes.

County Personnel Director Russ Patton said Tuesday that he could not release Stoffel’s job application forms, citing laws protecting applicants’ rights to privacy. But Patton said Stoffel would have had to list upper division college experience in order to qualify for the county internship.

Stoffel took a leave of absence from Nestande’s staff in July to work at Republican Party headquarters in Marin County. On Tuesday, in a report from County Administrative Officer Larry Parrish to the Board of Supervisors, Stoffel was identified as the person who made the dial-a-porn calls. The district attorney’s office said Tuesday that it had declined to prosecute Stoffel because he had resigned, paid restitution of $236.49 for the calls and has no prior criminal record.

Stoffel served as Nestande’s unpaid representative on the county’s five-member Fair Campaign Practices Commission through last June’s primary election. The panel rules on the truthfulness of election claims made by candidates for county offices, including the Board of Supervisors.

Nestande Applauded

At Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Roger R. Stanton applauded Nestande for waiting so long before identifying the former intern as the caller to the dial-a-porn phone messages.

“I don’t know how he had the patience, having had this knowledge or suspicion who it might have been” soon after the calls were reported, to have waited for investigations to conclude and not have identified the caller, Stanton said.

Stanton said that Nestande was subjected to “vicious, demeaning, unfair commentary in the public press after August newspaper reports of the calls. Stanton did not specify what he was referring to but stressed that he was talking about commentary and not news articles.

Stanton went out of his way at the end of the supervisors’ regularly scheduled meeting to make his public comments, which he said were “impromptu” and spoken “because they needed to be said.”

Times staff writer John Needham contributed to this story.