Colleges Dispute Dial-a-Porn Caller’s Claim

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 that he claimed 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,” the 23-year-old former Nestande aide said.

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.

But Judy Mandel, public affairs director at California State University, Fullerton, and a registration official at Chapman College both said Wednesday that they could find no record of Stoffel having attended 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’ right 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.