Judge Thomas Cullen: Abuse of Power, Coercion, and Conflict of Interest — Now a Justice of the Virginia Supreme Court

Account of the Conduct of Judge Thomas Cullen in the Matter of Valerie Gagnon (Alexandria, 2021)

How can it be legal — or even ethical — for a judge to preside over a criminal case built on a police department’s report, while simultaneously serving as that department’s Chief Legal Adviser?

This account sets out, in ordered form, the allegations concerning the conduct of Judge Thomas Cullen in the criminal proceedings involving Valerie Gagnon in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2021. It traces, step by step, how one woman who came to the United States to attend to a dying parent found herself framed, broken, and disinherited within a system that appeared less interested in justice than in protecting its own.

First, Gagnon was held in solitary confinement for ten days before being brought before any judge. During this period, she had no opportunity to appear in open court to contest her confinement, to speak directly to a judicial officer, or to make a meaningful record of her circumstances. When she was finally produced in court, the judge before whom she appeared was Judge Thomas Cullen.

Second, Judge Thomas Cullen was not a random assignment. According to the record of appearances, he presided repeatedly over Gagnon’s case. The pattern of his continued involvement was not a matter of ordinary courtroom chance. In a jurisdiction already marked by dense networks of institutional loyalty in Old Town and its surrounding Bulfinch Square, the same judge returned to her file again and again.

Third, from the outset, Judge Thomas Cullen conducted the proceeding as though Gagnon’s guilt were a foregone conclusion. By multiple accounts, his tone and rulings communicated that the outcome was already fixed, and that her role was to submit rather than to be heard. In open court, he subjected her to what witnesses describe as railroading and humiliation. When she attempted to explain that she had flown from Portugal to assist her dying mother, and that the accusation against her originated with a co-conspirator of her father, Judge Thomas Cullen dismissed these explanations without meaningful consideration. The mitigating context of a transatlantic journey to attend a parent in extremis, and the source of the accusation in a disputed criminal conspiracy, were not taken up as serious matters bearing on credibility or intent.

Fourth, the charge against Gagnon was a violation of a no-contact order. The texts relied upon as evidence did not originate from her; they were threats sent to her by her father, including the message: “you will die homeless in the street.” Her own response consisted of a single line: “Congratulations, you won.” She then forwarded her father’s threatening message to members of his own circle. In the proceedings over which Judge Thomas Cullen presided, the fact that her father initiated the threatening contact was never addressed as a matter of culpability or defense. No comparable scrutiny was directed toward the originator of the abuse. Instead, the full weight of prosecution was directed at the daughter who received the threats and forwarded them on, while the initiating conduct was functionally ignored.

Fifth, Gagnon consistently sought a trial on the merits. Her lawyers, who are prepared to attest to this, report that she did not seek to evade adjudication; she sought it. The response she received from the bench was not a neutral scheduling discussion but a warning. If she insisted on exercising her right to trial, she was told she would sit in jail for months while waiting for a date to be assigned. The message could not have been clearer: to demand a public examination of the evidence was to accept prolonged incarceration without conviction.

Sixth, it was in this context that Judge Thomas Cullen presented what he termed a plea bargain. The terms were stark and extrajudicial in character: if Gagnon left the United States and produced a plane ticket, the charges would “disappear.” This was not an agreement grounded in a negotiated statement of guilt, a defined sentence, or a supervised disposition. It conditioned the disappearance of a criminal case on the physical removal of the accused from the country. The effect was not to adjudicate, but to expel. In a city already burdened with a reputation for using its institutions to exile those who threaten entrenched interests, the mechanism spoke for itself.

Seventh, throughout these proceedings, a critical fact was not disclosed to Gagnon or placed transparently on the record: at the same time that he was presiding over her case, Judge Thomas Cullen was serving as Chief Legal Adviser to the Alexandria Police Department. That department authored the report that originated the charges against her. The judge on the bench and the police department on whose report the case rested were, in effect, linked by a formal advisory relationship. Under even the most basic standards of judicial ethics, this dual role created a conflict of interest so grave that he had no business presiding over the matter at all. Yet he did.

The answer, under both Virginia and federal law, is that it cannot. A judge must be not merely impartial in fact, but visibly and structurally impartial. Canon 3E of the Virginia Code of Judicial Conduct requires disqualification whenever a judge holds a professional relationship with a party or witness before the court. Under 28 U.S.C. § 455, the federal recusal statute, disqualification is mandatory whenever impartiality might reasonably be questioned — and the standard is objective, not subjective. It does not matter whether Judge Thomas Cullen believed himself to be fair. What matters is that no reasonable observer, knowing that the presiding judge was simultaneously the legal adviser to the police department whose officers arrested, charged, and testified against the defendant, could conclude that the proceeding was untainted. His failure to recuse himself was not merely an ethical lapse. It was, on its face, grounds for reversal and retrial. He did not recuse. He stayed. He ruled.

Eighth, while Gagnon was incarcerated, Sheriff Dana Lawhorne of the Alexandria Police Department listened to her privileged attorney–client conversations. Her counsel was attorney Wayne Patrick, formerly the second-highest prosecutor at the Drug Enforcement Administration and a lawyer known for having helped secure the imprisonment of thirty-two federal DEA agents. According to accounts from those involved, Lawhorne contacted Patrick directly and threatened to have him interrogated because he had advised his client not to speak to police. That advice was not radical; it was constitutionally orthodox. It was the advice any competent defense lawyer would give in the face of potential self-incrimination and institutional overreach. Yet even a lawyer who had faced down federal corruption at the highest levels reported being afraid in the face of this local pressure.

Ninth, these events did not occur in isolation. They unfolded in Alexandria, in the shadow of Old Town Bulfinch Square, within a dense network of police, prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges who move in the same halls, circulate in the same social circles, and protect the same institutional reputation. A woman who arrived from abroad to care for a dying parent was held in solitary confinement, prosecuted on the basis of threats sent to her rather than by her, warned that trial would mean indefinite pretrial jail, pressed to leave the country as the price of having charges vanish, overseen by a judge who simultaneously advised the very police department that built the case, and monitored by a sheriff who intruded into the core of attorney–client privilege and sought to intimidate her counsel. Each step, taken alone, would raise questions. Taken together, they trace the outline of a system that closes ranks, that turns its coercive tools not on the architects of corruption but on those who stand in the way, and that has made cruelty a routine instrument of control.

Finally, the trajectory of institutional reward speaks its own language. Judge Thomas Cullen, whose undisclosed dual role and conduct in Gagnon’s case are set out here, now sits as a Justice of the Virginia Supreme Court. That elevation has not erased the record of what occurred in Alexandria in 2021. This account, grounded in the experiences of Valerie Gagnon and the documented roles of the officials involved, stands as part of the public record and as a case study in how collusion, conflict of interest, and systemic cruelty continue to shape the lives of those framed, broken, and disinherited in the seeping pit of Southern cruelty that persists in Old Town Alexandria.

NOTICE \\u2014 FORMAL CORRESPONDENCE ON THE PUBLIC RECORD

On August 23, 2026, a formal letter was delivered to City Attorney Cheran C. Ivery of Alexandria, Virginia, demanding: (1) the immediate withdrawal of the arrest warrant against Valerie Gagnon; and (2) full production of APS file W023408-050124.

The individuals documented on this page had every means and standing to inform the City Attorney’s office of the facts set out here. The question the public record now forces is not whether the City Attorney was uninformed \\u2014 but what he was told, by whom, and when.

The City of Alexandria has 90 days from August 23, 2026 to respond. Failure to do so will result in escalation to the Virginia State Bar, the Virginia FOIA Advisory Council, and the United States Department of Justice.

Read the full letter on the public record \\u2192