Starting in 2015, five women accused their former acting teacher, Jason McLean, of sexually abusing them as teenagers. Faced with lawsuits, the restaurateur sold off $4.75 million in real estate and went to ground—resurfacing in a Mexican beach resort.
But the women’s allegations—a forerunner to the #MeToo movement—uncovered more than painful memories.There were allegations of other girls and a cache of secret letters hidden under floorboards.
How does McLean explain his actions—and his disappearing act? And, by ignoring the allegations against McLean, did the local theater scene—and throngs of restaurant patrons—help pay for McLean’s ticket to Cabo?
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Jason McLean at his Dinkytown restaurant, Loring Pasta Bar, in 2014
Jason Mclean
Melissa Beneke felt no surprise when Jason McLean left acting to open the Loring Café and Bar. She’d known about his passion for food and fine dining since she was 14 years old, which is when he started inviting her to his home, she said, following the afternoon theater program where Beneke was a student and McLean was a teacher and performer.
McLean was 27 years old—almost twice Beneke’s age—and he had been paying attention to her for a year already: flirting backstage, making sexual innuendos. Eventually, she said, he told her he “wanted to do something for her.”
That something was cooking. Beneke remembers McLean creating recipes that appeared brand-new to a kid growing up in the bland Minneapolis of the 1980s. She also remembers him treating her like the adult that she wasn’t. There were artichokes dipped in sauce and candles and jazz. And there was wine. There was always wine.
Beneke, now a yoga instructor living in Anchorage, Alaska, remembers one meal when McLean confessed he didn’t want to be an actor. He dreamed instead of becoming a restaurateur. He wanted to have a bohemian haven—“a place where artists would hang out all day and all night,” she said.
McLean told her these dreams during a four-year period when, she alleges, he sexually abused her. On January 6, 2016, she filed a lawsuit in Hennepin County against McLean, claiming that the abuse started during the spring of 1981, when she was a ninth grader and a student in the performing arts school at the Children’s Theatre Company (CTC). According to Beneke, the abuse lasted throughout high school. Her complaint states that “in multiple instances McLean inflicted harmful, offensive, and unpermitted sexual contact” upon her. Beneke also sued the theater for negligent hiring, supervision, and retention of McLean.
Beneke, it turns out, wasn’t the only girl who would allege that McLean plied her with alcohol and fancy meals. Gifts of food—from candy bars and snack-shop sandwiches to dinners with steamed mussels—represented one way he charmed and manipulated girls before, Beneke contends, he coerced them into having sex.
“He had been using this wonderful talent of his to seduce 13-, 14-, 15-, 16-year-old girls,” Beneke alleges. According to allegations in numerous civil lawsuits filed against McLean, he employed that talent prolifically with girls in the theater.
McLean was a skilled and playful actor who scored lead roles in many of the theater’s productions, including the Creature in Frankenstein and Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, a role that landed him on a 1982 cover of Smithsonian magazine. A former student remembers him bragging about how, on the day of the shoot, he applied makeup so that his nose would look like a penis in the photograph.
Several students from that time say that McLean’s blond boyishness and flirtatiousness carried a certain charm. Some, including Beneke, developed crushes on him.
Melissa Beneke
Melissa Beneke, now a yoga instructor, at age 15 or 16
“That’s very typical and very natural,” said Beneke. “What’s not natural and normal is that teacher responding.”
“At that age, you’re excited that somebody’s actually paying that kind of attention to you,” she said, alleging that McLean would get girls so drunk that they “couldn’t really remember.”
She added, “You don’t realize you are in deep water,” until “it’s too late.”
If you follow the news, you know four women in addition to Beneke have filed separate lawsuits in civil court, alleging that McLean sexually abused them while they were students at the theater in the 1980s. Four of the five plaintiffs also filed lawsuits against CTC. Twelve additional former students have filed their own lawsuits against the theater and other adults who worked there.
In a statement sent to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, the Children’s Theatre Company responded, “Our guiding principles are to have the truth be known and to see justice done for anyone who may have been the victim of sexual abuse. In this, we stand with all those who believe that any abuse of a child is an unconscionable act. As part of our efforts in this area, we welcome any information that may come forward as a result of this process.”
Representing the women in their suits is Jeff Anderson, trial attorney for Jeff Anderson & Associates, whose St. Paul law firm has represented thousands of survivors who were abused as children by Catholic clergy. McLean, according to civil court documents filed by Anderson, stands accused of sexual battery, sexual abuse, aiding and abetting criminal sexual conduct and sexual exploitation, and sexually molesting children when he was between the ages of 27 and 31. One of the civil complaints also alleges additional instances of sexual abuse by McLean, beyond the five women in the suits.
These are damning charges, especially in a time when far milder allegations have caused powerful men, including Senator Al Franken, to lose their jobs. But instead of parrying the civil litigation, McLean did something shocking. He disappeared, cashing out of almost $4.75 million dollars in real estate and taking the proceeds with him to Mexico. The money came in the form of real estate sales of three properties. Two of these were sold locally, one to a group of associates who knew McLean well and knew about the suits against him.
It’s a story that, ironically, would seem to be made for a dramatist—complete with an almost preposterous cat-and-mouse legal chase, evidence in the form of secret letters hidden under floorboards and locked up for years, bystanders who can’t or won’t speak up, and women who came forward after decades of silence. Much of the story is being told here for the first time.
In an emailed response to an interview request for this story, McLean stated that he is innocent: “I have done no intentional harm to anyone at any time in my life. The current furor is a cynical ploy to transfer my wealth to others, with whom I happened to have encounters one-third of a century ago.” (To read McLean’s full response, click here.)
The first lawsuits against McLean were filed almost two years before the #MeToo movement started seeking accountability from men who may have acted improperly and abusively against women and girls. But the case of McLean raises questions about the potential of that campaign and the community’s commitment. While McLean has so far succeeded in cashing out of Minnesota and going on the lam, it would also appear that the Twin Cities gave him a 35-year head start.
This account is based on interviews I conducted with 39 former theater students, lawyers, sexual abuse experts, people in the Twin Cities theater and restaurant communities, and an email exchange with McLean himself—the first time he’s been heard from publicly in roughly eight months. Almost as important are the 21 people, including many of McLean’s former peers in the theater world, who declined to participate and who perpetuate what one woman who filed suit against McLean calls an “epic” silence that has long enveloped people who were once connected to the theater school.
Were the allegations against McLean a secret in the Twin Cities theater and food worlds? How many of the restaurant patrons who drank bottles of the house red and listened to Parisian accordion jazz knew about them? How did McLean transform himself into a successful dining impresario?
Before we can understand how and why McLean left, we probably need to know what he did.
A piece of the answer can be teased out from a one-year Star Tribune investigative project by reporter Kay Miller about the 1980s sexual abuse scandal at the theater. In the story, which ran in 1991, Miller detailed a school culture where “normal boundaries between adults and kids” were “nonexistent.” In the years that followed, she suggested, a community-wide denial dropped a stage curtain over what happened. McLean makes only a casual cameo in the story. Beyond John Clark Donahue, five other theater administrators and staff were investigated for “sexually abusing students or failing to report that abuse. They were acquitted or the charges against them were dismissed,” the article noted.
In his emailed statement to Mpls.St.Paul, McLean recounted that in 1982, he was investigated but not charged—and therefore never publicly named—by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. “The investigation resulted in felony indictments that resulted in long prison sentences for some,” McLean wrote. “The BCA also investigated me, but did not allege any criminal misconduct on my part. Dealing with allegations of this sort is humiliating and painful, but I deny any wrongdoing.”
McLean did get a shout-out in the investigative series for his contribution to the Twin Cities cultural scene. Years after his conversation with Beneke, he achieved his restaurant ambition, having molded the Loring Cafe and Bar “into one of Minneapolis’ most avant-garde nightspots.”
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Jason McLean didn’t found the Loring Café and Bar. In fact, back in 1986, the person who originally planned to take over the vacant restaurant space in the historic but tattered Fawkes Building was Doug Clow. He was a house painter—he’d learned about the opportunity at a job site—and lived across the street from McLean on East 22nd. Clow invited McLean and one of McLean’s friends to join him, and he put up all the money himself—$12,500, he said.
Clow recalled that McLean’s girlfriend at the time was a teenager (McLean was 32 years old when the Loring opened). He confronted McLean, demanding to know if there were other complications that could jeopardize their business. McLean said no and told Clow his current relationship wouldn’t have happened if the girlfriend hadn’t initiated it.
That tension got swept under the Loring’s Oriental rugs when the restaurant opened later in 1986. A mashup of the Moulin Rouge, Vienna’s Café Central, and CBGB, the Loring thrummed with an off-kilter craziness. It quickly became a hamlet for self-described weirdos, along with the more corporate types who enjoyed slumming for the evening with the demimonde. McLean’s recipes, from artichoke ramekin to lemon caper chicken, proved to be crowd pleasers.
The relationship between the three partners soured in less than a year. One day, Clow arrived at the restaurant to discover the locks had been changed. He recalled that McLean’s girlfriend visited his house with three bottles of wine: a peace offering. “I sent them back and never talked to him again,” Clow said.
McLean was running the Loring on his own now, and former staffers remember that he didn’t care much for restaurant-industry conventions. The way they saw it, McLean seemed to think his identity as an artist put him above those norms. When Bob Parker, now the co-owner of the restaurant Ward 6, arrived to manage the Loring Bar in 1999, he was surprised to find an antiquated operation. They still used 10-key cash registers (the industry was going digital) and eschewed inventory controls. One cook and cocktail server, who asked to go by her social media handle, Dawn Sauvignon, remembers that a line cook lit the (hand-written) guest checks on fire.
McLean presided over the chaos, but in the background. Colleagues remember him as a shy version of Peter Pan, dressed in rolled-up jeans and sleeveless T-shirts. Some servers, apparently proud of their incompetence, drank group shots during their shifts. McLean didn’t charge staff for alcohol, although years later, embroiled in a labor dispute, he would accuse them of stealing and embezzling from him. “It was the Island of Misfit Toys,” said Sauvignon.
Several staffers agree that McLean showed a soft spot for society’s castoffs. He gave homeless people soup and bread, and let them spend the night on the restaurant’s well-worn sofas. Sauvignon remembers McLean checking another employee into treatment for alcoholism and fretting over how she was faring.
One employee whose presence raised uncomfortable questions was pastry chef John Clark Donahue. CTC’s former artistic director had been arrested in 1984 and charged with six felony counts of sexually abusing three boys; he did 10 months in the Hennepin County Workhouse.
If customers knew or cared about that hiring choice, the queues outside didn’t show it. “Anyone who frequents the ‘Loring,’ as it’s known, can testify to problems with parking in the neighborhood and with getting a good table without a two-day advance reservation,” the Pioneer Press wrote in 1999.
I knew about this following because I went there myself, having worked for five years at Utne Reader, which occupied the same building as the Loring. I recognized Donahue from having taken classes at the theater, in 1980, through a morning program offered by my high school. One day, on the bus ride back to school, a boy I knew announced that he’d been “invited to sleep at John’s.”
Maybe Donahue’s employment should have given me insights into the Loring Cafe, but it’s pretty clear I chose not to see them. Because I never stopped going to the Loring. I can’t remember exactly how I came to that choice. But I probably told myself that Donahue had served out his sentence and now McLean had granted him a second chance.
In 1991 McLean became a patron and producer when he and Donahue opened the Loring Playhouse, upstairs in the Fawkes Building. The boho-funky theater became a favorite venue for independent and experimental theater companies, such as Theater Latté Da, Frank Theatre, and Ballet of the Dolls, to direct plays and present their work. (McLean produced shows there, too.) In 1998, Eye of the Storm Theater booked the Loring Playhouse for the first Twin Cities production of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive—one of the most acclaimed shows in contemporary American theater about sexual abuse.
What the theater community thought of McLean during this interval is difficult to say, as very few people from that scene agreed to answer questions for this story. But the Loring staff—several of whom graduated from the youth theater—swapped gossip about him. “The rumors weren’t something that someone mentioned once or twice,” said James Flemming, who worked as a server at the restaurant for six years. “It was in the water.”
Barbara Meyer, a server at the Loring, told me that she never experienced any uncomfortable sexual overtures from McLean. At 31, she recalled, she was clearly too old for him. But his penchant for dating young women fueled gossip. As did his behavior.
“He’d chase me around the bar” and “try to sleep with you,” said Sauvignon, who started at the Loring when she was 22 and worked there until she was 28. “But I didn’t feel threatened. It was part of the culture.”
*****
For all the people who flocked blithely to the Loring, there were others who observed McLean’s rise through a darker lens.
“McLean’s successes were devastating to see,” said Laura Adams, who was 15 years old and a student at the theater’s Conservatory School when she was cast opposite McLean for a lead role in a 1982 production of Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas. Adams is one of the women now suing McLean for harmful, offensive, and unpermitted sexual contact.
Today, Adams serves as the wigmaster at the Guthrie Theater and often acts as a spokeswoman—not only for herself and her schoolmates, but also for the facts about sexual abuse. That role includes explaining why it’s so difficult for survivors to come forward.
“The amount of fear and shame you need to wade through in order to speak the truth about it keeps most people silent, and perpetrators know this,” she said. “They count on it.”
In a press conference on December 1, 2015, the day she filed her lawsuit against McLean, Adams held up a yearbook photograph of herself at 15 and described the girl in the photo. She was tall and looked like a grownup—Adams played adult roles at the theater—and she didn’t get asked out by boys her age. “I was flattered,” Adams said of her feelings when McLean began paying attention to her. “I welcomed it.”
“Jason took advantage of the fact,” she said. According to her complaint, he sexually abused her in either May or June of 1983. That document also states that in 1984—the time of Donahue’s arrest—McLean took a leave from the theater and convinced “a female student he had sexually abused to assist him by speaking to a list of several female Children’s Theatre students. McLean had [her] talk with the girls to try and convince them that the abuse was consensual. The youngest student on the list was 13 years old.”
In an email to Mpls.St.Paul, McLean employed different terms to describe what led to him being “drummed out of the corps of CTC.” After “the Donahue scandal,” McLean said, “it was no longer a job I’d fight to keep. The art of theater had been lost.”
Recalling his 1986 resignation letter, McLean added, “It was absolutely not worth it—the heat of libidos-in-training; close encounters of the third kind, INITIATED by those now claiming harms and damage, was too much and so I decided to leave that swelter, and I did.”
In this version of events, the girls were not victims of sexual abuse by a 30-year-old acting teacher, so much as maturing sexual pursuers whom McLean failed to escape.
McLean’s name started appearing on the theater’s playbills sometime around 1979, which is the year Woody Allen’s Manhattan arrived in movie theaters. In the film, Allen’s character, who was 42, conducts a “romantic” relationship with a 17-year-old girl, played by Mariel Hemingway.
“At that time, people didn’t believe that sexual abuse happened,” said Cordelia Anderson, a national leader in the field of sexual-abuse prevention. In 1977, she created one of the first prevention programs through her work as a child advocate in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. She has also facilitated discussion circles with adults who were abused when they were CTC students.
In the proudly countercultural scene around the theater, sexual activity involving teenagers and adults didn’t set off alarms the way it should have. “I think it’s very easy for people to delude themselves and think this is not wrong—to think that those statutory sex laws are a holdover from Victorian times,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
In fact, Finkelhor said, society criminalizes sex between adults and minors for important reasons. “We want adults to be acting as mentors to children and thinking about what their needs are,” he said. “And when you allow adults to act on their sexual feelings with young people, that’s going to bias their judgment.” Finkelhor added that sexual encounters between adults and children “are more likely to involve pregnancy and emotional and psychological damage to the child” than with an age-appropriate peer. The psychological and emotional damage from the abuse and the subsequent lack of support can be crushing.
According to a civil complaint, from approximately September 1984 to May 1985, McLean “inflicted harmful, offensive, and unpermitted sexual contact” upon Lisa*, starting when she was 15 years old and in 10th grade.
She describes a lifelong impact from the alleged abuse. Before 9/11 tightened screening procedures, Lisa would compulsively go to airports: Being on the other side of the security cordon made her feel safe. At many periods in her life, she has slept in a closet for a sense of protection. (Beneke said she’s “slept with a knife near my bed since I can remember.”)
“Holding a steady job is impossible,” said Lisa. “I would go to quit because I know they’re going to find out any second I’m horrible at it.”
Like Adams, Lisa would never patronize the Loring and remembers arguing with friends from the theater who did. “How could you go there?” she’d ask. The answer? That was where everyone hung out.
Rob Shapiro, a voice actor in Los Angeles who attended the Conservatory School from 1984–85, would later go on to meet friends at the Loring. “It felt like a family reunion,” he said of his return visits. This scene “was our home and where we felt safest,” he said.
Plenty of friends from his old crowd had seen their real families explode in the divorce boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (“By the end of the decade our parents were doing quaaludes and EST,” he said.)
The children from those situations then entered the theater’s adult beatnik culture, which encouraged kids to act like adults and adults to act like kids. In this mix, boundaries dissolved. “I know people my age were having relationships” with adults, Shapiro said. “But I didn’t know it was intentionally destructive and how it wasn’t a relationship.”
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In the spring of 2001, McLean expanded the Loring brand into Dinkytown, where he opened the Loring Pasta Bar. This was the former home of Gray’s Campus Drug, a local landmark where Bob Dylan once rented an upstairs apartment as a student at the University of Minnesota. Property records show McLean bought the building in 1999 for $815,000. He also designed the concept for the Kitty Cat Klub next door.
It’s unclear if the financial obligations of the Pasta Bar caused McLean to fall behind on his rent at the original Loring. “Jason was very creative, but he wasn’t a great businessman,” said Joe Whitney, the owner of the Fawkes Building. “He was a serial late payer.”
When McLean refused to agree to an extended lease, Whitney signed a new tenant. Whitney said McLean appeared incredulous. He fulminated about how his patrons and employees would rise to his defense and strike a blow against what McLean described in a letter as “the WAL-MARTization of America.”
“I felt like I was a parent with a child,” Whitney recalled.
After that protest failed to overturn the rules of commercial real estate, McLean threw a farewell block party and hung Whitney in effigy. A few days later, Whitney arrived at the building to see McLean taking down the blond brick arches that had come to symbolize the Loring style. “I ran down to the courthouse and got a restraining order to prevent them from dismantling this place,” Whitney remembers.
Moving on to his new projects, in 2004 McLean took out a lease on the Varsity Theater, another historic Dinkytown property. An LLP associated with McLean purchased the building for $1.1 million in 2009. The venue hosted concerts—from Mumford and Sons to the late Amy Winehouse—alongside private eventsand weddings.
McLean continued to expand his business interests—and his horizons. In the summer 2013 issue of Artful Living, McLean recounted that his girlfriend of five years, Abby Keul, moved to the Bay Area in 2011 after a “parting of the ways.” (McLean was married to singer Nancy Seward from 2000–2003; they have a son who is now a teenager. He also has a grown daughter from a previous relationship.) McLean followed Keul out West, where they reconciled, married, and opened Loring Cafe in the Uptown neighborhood of Oakland, California.
The restaurant appeared to be a recreation of both the original Loring and the Loring Pasta Bar, down to the curvy brickwork, vintage furnishings, and menu items such as artichoke ramekin and Minnesota pork loin. In July 2012, McLean described the menu to the regional lifestyle magazine Diablo as a “new culinary state of the union, where fusion is left far behind” and “themes are out.”
The Loring lexicon, however, didn’t appear to translate to the Bay Area. In an April 2013 review, the East Bay Express described “an assorted cast of characters who work in the restaurant (as large a collection of bow ties, suspenders, and newsboy caps as you’ll find in this town), and you end up with a cross between a speakeasy, an old-timey carnival, and a scene from Alice in Wonderland.” The review went on to pan McLean’s recipes. Everything was “a little bit weird and overpriced, and not much of it any good.”
After closing in 2015, the restaurant reopened in 2016 as Small Wonder, which remains in operation. Small Wonder maintains no website or phone number and it’s unclear if it enjoys a steady clientele. Judging from the decor, McLean is either nostalgic for his Minneapolis success or remains confident that his decades-old formula will be a winner. One item on the current menu is “The Artichoke Ramekin!”
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At the same time McLean and Keul were making a public show of their new life in Oakland, Governor Mark Dayton signed the Child Victims Act. The law opened up a legal three-year window—starting May 25, 2013—for adults (over the age of 24) who alleged abuse as children to sue for damages in civil court. (The status change came in response to the Catholic clergy abuse scandals. Previously, victims had only until age 24 to take legal action.)
On December 1, 2015, Laura Adams became the first woman to file a lawsuit against McLean and the theater.
Lisa filed nine days later.
Beneke learned about the lawsuits after Adams contacted her over Facebook. At first, Beneke had no interest in filing a lawsuit of her own. Then she read a news story that quoted McLean asserting he was innocent and that the BCA investigation had cleared him of any charges.
Beneke felt upset. But the fact that he used the BCA investigation to buttress his innocence was too galling for her to ignore. As part of that investigation, Beneke had been one of the students called to testify in front of the grand jury. Beneke alleged in her complaint that over dinner in a restaurant McLean had convinced her to lie.
“I sat back the last time, when I had the excuse of being a child and being afraid,” she said
Commenting on the people in Minneapolis who have remained silent, she added, “These people really need to think about what they’re protecting.”
Eventually, two more women—both identified as Jane Does—would file suit against McLean. (Neither participated in this story.) In one of these cases the court granted the plaintiff a summary judgment; the other four that involve McLean are ongoing. All the suits that name the CTC remain in mediation.
To show solidarity with the women who were suing McLean, fellow alumni from the theater took to the press and social media and called for boycotts of his businesses. On September 10, 2016, the Minnesota Daily described a demonstration of roughly 40 protesters and quoted a Pasta Bar employee who had quit in a show of support for the accusers.
One former student contacted Jake Rudh, a popular DJ who had held his Transmission parties at the Varsity on the last Wednesday of every month. This individual asked him to switch a planned David Bowie tribute to a different venue. But when Bowie died unexpectedly that January, fans asked Rudh to move up the showcase.
Caught in a bind between his desire to support the women and answer to the audience, Rudh did the Bowie show.
“The staff of the Varsity and I were all caught in the middle of a terrible situation,” said Rudh. “We relied on the income from these events to support ourselves and our families.” After that show, he stopped performing at the theater (he’s back there now that the Varsity has a new owner).
“I wish I had looked deeper into the allegations brought up at the time and severed ties earlier,” Rudh said.
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Anderson and his associate Molly Burke first tried to depose McLean in November of 2015. He was served with papers at the Loring Pasta Bar. After more than two years, several subpoenas and a court order, four missed depositions, countless unanswered emails and phone calls, claims of penury, loss of legal representation, and a decision to become his own lawyer, McLean has yet to sit down and answer formal questions about the allegations against him.
“He has played shenanigans, quite frankly,” said Burke, the plaintiffs’ attorney. While few people relish the prospect of being interviewed by hostile lawyers, dodging depositions is an unusual recourse. Bradford Colbert, a resident adjunct professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, described this type of avoidance as a risky strategy that often results in sanctions. In extreme cases, it can lead to jail time or a default judgment: a binding court outcome that occurs when one party does not fulfill its obligation in litigation.
For months, Burke and Anderson and their legal team worked on securing McLean’s deposition through his lawyers, the prominent defense attorneys Jon Hopeman and Marnie Fearon, then at Felhaber Larson. Then, in 2016, Burke and Anderson got a break so dramatic that it would feel clichéd even in a movie script.
Burke was sitting in her office at Anderson & Associates when she received a phone call from a confidential source who had seen news coverage about the McLean lawsuits. The caller had known McLean when he was an actor at the theater. And he told Burke that he had taken a sheaf of papers hidden under the floorboards of a duplex McLean partly owned.
The caller told Burke he’d then placed the file in a safe-deposit box. But he’d long since stopped paying the storage fees, and he wasn’t sure if the file had been destroyed. (This person agreed to be interviewed for the story but requested anonymity.) After engaging Anderson & Associates to retrieve the file, which had been transferred as unclaimed property to the state, the caller gave it to Burke.
The file contained letters addressed to McLean, with girls’ signatures. One letter, written in rounded teenage-girl cursive, appears on stationery decorated with lace and a cherub sticker. There are cards, a yearbook photo, pages from journals, dream entries, even a student self-evaluation for a class where the instructor listed on the form is Jason McLean. An Actors’ Equity Association card, under the name Jason McLean, is in there, too. In all, the letters represented 230 pages of material that someone had apparently decided to file for safekeeping, under the floor.
“It was horrifying,” Burke said.
As part of the pretrial discovery process, Anderson and Burke shared the contents of the file with McLean’s attorneys on August 16, 2016. Hopeman and Fearon withdrew as McLean’s attorneys on October 21, 2016, a fact they confirmed without providing any further explanation about the cause. In an email to Mpls.St.Paul, McLean offered his own explanation for the separation:
I explained the situation and counsel explained that the fees would be billed at $550/hr. Counsel also offered the services of the in-firm real-estate veteran attorney to ‘help’ me assess my wealth, who also billed at the same or similar astonishing wage. Fifty-thousand dollars or so into their debt, and not a thing to show for it, I decided to fire ’em.
What McLean may have known about the recovered letters from the girls is anyone’s guess: He did not return an email requesting comment on the subject.
In the midst of these developments, it appears that McLean continued to run Small Wonder. A photo posted February 17, 2017, on Yelp shows him standing in the dining room of Small Wonder amid broken dishes and a flipped table. Dressed in black jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt, McLean stands with his arms crossed as he glowers at the camera. (McLean did not reply to an email asking about the photo.)
Having no legal counsel, McLean started sending his own correspondence to Anderson and Burke, composed in a sort of layman’s legalese. For instance, on April 13, 2017, he wrote in a letter, “I heard from family that you made the news recently and broadcast that you had scheduled a deposition and I was absent. If that hearsay is true, I am unaware of any appointments scheduled regarding your litigation exercises; no legal service has been delivered to me directly since December of 2015.”
Then, McLean added, “I’d certainly like to get this adventure figured out at some point.”
A week later, on April 20, 2017, McLean asked for an extension “to whatever may be your next actions in these lawsuits,” citing insufficient funds. “My businesses have been considerably damaged over the past 16 months by the publicity and public protests resulting from the allegations coordinated by your law firm,” he wrote.
On May 12, 2017, seemingly out of options, McLean made his next move. “By this letter, I advise that I am prepared to offer $200,000 to the five plaintiffs,” he writes. “I don’t care how the proceeds are divided. In exchange for this offer, I would expect a full, final, and complete release of all liability. I make this offer in an effort to bring this unfortunate litigation to an end.”
In his emailed response for this story, McLean made it clear that the settlement offer was not a confession. “I attempted to negotiate a settlement and offered a sizable amount of cash, not as an admission of wrongdoing,” he wrote. “I did so in the interest of settling this matter, which was damaging me and hurting my family and hurting the businesses I own and the people that depend on them for their livelihood.”
The plaintiffs insisted on another condition: McLean would need to be deposed. “He would of course try to deny that he did anything wrong,” said Adams. “But having him have to face lawyers under oath and try to explain his way out of this would have been a small triumph.”
McLean wrote back to Anderson—opening the letter with “Hello Jeff”—to say that because he was having trouble liquidating assets in order to afford legal counsel, he would like to personally take the video depositions of the women suing him.
“I would not have agreed to him deposing me. Never in a million years,” said Adams.
If McLean thought his duck-and-dodge tactics were working, he would soon learn otherwise. When he didn’t appear for a court-ordered deposition scheduled for August 22, 2017, a Hennepin County judge granted a default judgment to Jane Doe 114 for $2.5 million. The court’s memorandum cites “significant psychological injuries” based on a confidential affidavit by a forensic psychologist, filed by the plaintiff’s attorneys.
*****
Looking at the court documents, you might conclude that McLean was both out of his depth and too clueless to realize it. He was attempting to freelance a legal resolution with a plaintiff’s firm that has collected individual settlements that reach into the tens of millions of dollars. Another possible interpretation, however, is that McLean was, quite shrewdly, playing for time.
McLean spent the summer of 2017 cashing in his assets. He sold the Varsity Theater for $2.51 million on June 30, 2017, according to the Minnesota Department of Revenue. The buyer of the Varsity is listed as 1308 SE 4th ST LLC, which shares an address with Downtown Properties, a Los Angeles real-estate developer that owns historic buildings in Los Angeles, London, Chicago, and New York. Asked about the sale, a receptionist for Downtown Properties said the company doesn’t respond to media requests. The Varsity has resumed its live music lineup.
That July, McLean also sold 1618 Harmon Place, a small multi-use building (and previously the home of Lunalux printing), which he’d originally bought in 1993 for $150,000. The buyer, who paid $375,000, was local: an LLC called Bunkhouse Design, managed by Kurt Vickman of the celebrated neighborhood food store Good Grocer. Vickman did not reply to two emails and a phone call to Good Grocer from Mpls.St.Paul.
On July 31, 2017—just a month after the Varsity sale—McLean unloaded the Pasta Bar building for $1,855,000 to a partnership of four longtime employees, including Lynn Nyman, the restaurant’s manager. The partnership also purchased the business itself, for an undisclosed sum. (Nyman’s attorney stated that McLean holds no current ownership stake in the now-renamed Loring Bar & Restaurant.)
Nyman started working for McLean in 1990, after she answered a want ad for a cook. She eventually became the front-of-house manager of the old Loring Café. She worked at the Pasta Bar since the day it opened, in 2001. Former colleagues describe her as kind and a tireless worker. Lynn “doesn’t deserve to have to carry any of the baggage,” said St. Paul restaurateur Bob Parker.
Nyman originally declined to talk about the events surrounding McLean, except to say that she and the rest of the Pasta Bar team learned about the lawsuits on the news. “I was shocked, as was the entire staff,” she said. “I have no communication with Jason McLean.”
She explained the decision to buy the business as a way “to continue working in our jobs and to preserve the jobs of our staff.”
She added, “We’ve been running it for years,” a reference to the fact that McLean had relocated to California more than five years earlier. “A lot of people know me as the face of the Loring.”
Did Nyman and her associates hesitate to write a check for $1.8 million to McLean?
Asked that question directly, Nyman wrote in a follow-up email, “My partners and I wanted to own the business and property. My bank supported the acquisition as a smart business decision and a sound investment, one that would provide jobs and save a very important slice of Dinkytown.”
For his part, McLean laments that he sold at a discount—“around 50 percent of market value,” he wrote in an email, “due to the forced selling circumstances.” At least, McLean concluded, he’d managed to “salvage that fraction of what I’d spent 30 years building.”
*****
While McLean’s legal issues generated headlines, news of the Varsity’s sale put Burke and Anderson on alert. Burke said she suspected “he was moving around his assets, and he was hiding them from any potential liability in the lawsuits.” At the time, Burke and Anderson assumed McLean continued to reside in California.
That assumption changed when they received an email on September 30, 2017, from an American named Gert de Herrera. He’d met with McLean to discuss the purchase of a hotel in Cabo San Lucas, the beach resort town on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. In an affidavit, de Herrera, whose company manages resort properties in Mexico, stated, “I met with McLean personally with his realtor in my office. He told me about restaurants and nightclubs he had run in Oakland, California.” During the negotiation, McLean told de Herrera that the property he purchased needed to generate income.
De Herrera said that McLean seemed unconventional: His “hippy dippy” demeanor and casual outfit—bandana, jeans, flip-flops—were unusual for an investor looking to make so large a deal. Otherwise, though, their meeting didn’t raise any red flags. According to the affidavit, McLean offered to pay $1.4 million of the purchase price in cash and asked de Herrera to finance the remaining $400,000.
As part of his due diligence, de Herrera performed an online search for “McLean” and “California,” which turned up the negative reviews of the Loring Cafe, but nothing else that might spook a seller.
That deal eventually fell apart, but when McLean circled back, de Herrera remembered that one of those reviews had mentioned Minneapolis.
He typed in a second online search then. The lawsuits, the allegations, the women charging childhood abuse—de Herrera formed a new picture of what McLean might be attempting.
“It looked to me like he was coming to Mexico so that people couldn’t come after his income,” he told me in a recent phone call.
A relative stranger, de Herrera saw McLean in a way that his close colleagues and associates in Minneapolis either couldn’t or didn’t want to see. He went back to the property seller and informed him that there was a problem with this buyer. Then he contacted the lawyers suing McLean.
*****
The way Jason McLean sees it, he had no other choice than to move to Mexico. “As it was clear from the beginning that a fair hearing was impossible—as Mr. Anderson had so thoroughly corrupted due process through his media manipulations—my legal defense options were severely limited,” he wrote to Mpls.St.Paul in an email. “So, I figured that the only logical and legal option available was to sell off the assets, quit Minneapolis, and invest elsewhere, which I have done.”
He added, “Bottom line is this: Had I remained an actor working in the theater, earning a marginal living, as most career performers do, this cruel action would never have been contemplated. My more comprehensive abilities to create and sustain profitable businesses made an attractive target.”
In this version of events, McLean believes he is guilty only of becoming too successful.
In his affidavit, de Herrera states that McLean may have succeeded in purchasing a 6,500-square-foot home, which he could rent out to Cabo vacationers and employ as an event space. (Since that date, de Herrera asserts, the sale went through.) The real-estate listing, included in the court documents, reveals what looks like a stunning piece of property. Located in a gated community, it offers panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, tangerine sunsets, and a pool poised on the edge of a cliff. The asking price was $1.595 million dollars, and the listing shows the tag “sale pending.”
Taking legal action against an asset McLean may have purchased in Mexico will be difficult, according to H. Allen Blair, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Under Mexican law, foreigners cannot own properties that lie within 50 kilometers of the water. As a result, a Mexican bank owns the house in a trust. Any attempt to collect an American court judgment on the asset would likely need to partly target that bank, and no treaty exists between the United States and Mexico that would enforce such an action.
Likewise, Small Wonder doesn’t appear to be owned by McLean or any legal entity associated with him. The civil cases in Minnesota would require McLean to discuss his possible ownership stake in the property, but he hasn’t made himself available to answer those questions.
Burke reports that her firm has hired outside counsel to help with ways to recover McLean’s assets. “So what if he’s in Mexico?” she said. “We are not going to stop.”
As for the women, they’ve lived with their knowledge of McLean for three decades. Together, they’ve shared their account of what happened. Yet to date, they’ve won nothing, and certainly no financial gain. It’s difficult to imagine the latest wave of #MeToo accusers looking at this long, sad saga and finding comfort or encouragement.
Yet if anyone knows how to take the long view, it’s these women. Having heard the accounts of the other accusers, Adams, the Guthrie wigmaker, said, “I’m even more steadfast in my resolve to see this thing through to the end.”
A recent photo of McLean in the Mexican resort town of Cabo San Lucas
Mclean - Mexico
Meanwhile, McLean was last spotted strolling through downtown Cabo San Lucas on February 27, 2018. He’s 64 years old now, and in the photos that were provided to me, he’s wearing his trademark rolled-up jeans and sleeveless tee, his eyes hidden behind a pair of white sunglasses.
McLean has left Minneapolis behind, along with all that went on here. There is nothing legally to prevent him from returning home—he faces civil damages, but no criminal exposure. (The default judgment could conceivably present a hassle.)
In an email, the wayward showman discussed his next act. “My business plans in the future, locations not yet known, are to contribute positive visions of life and styles of living that enrich, refresh, and provoke imaginations in similar directions,” McLean said. “Eat, drink, and be merry.”
Editor’s note: Laura Adams, one of the plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse against Jason McLean, has become a public advocate for women who’ve survived sexual misconduct. To read her conversation with reporter Elizabeth Foy Larsen about trusting women, transparency, and telling her story, please see “We Want to Believe That People Are Good.”
Editor’s note: As part of the reporting for the magazine’s feature “The Exit Strategy,” author Elizabeth Foy Larsen emailed restaurateur Jason McLean. Mpls.St.Paul asked McLean about his career in restaurants, such as the Loring Café, the allegations and the lawsuits against him from his days as an instructor and performer in youth theater, and his surprising departure from the Twin Cities. McLean asked that his entire response appear in connection to this article. To read McLean's full response, click here.
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