Brandon’s Last Con

Brandon’s last con: After 17 protective orders in 3 states, he’s finally going to prison | Opinion

By Melinda Henneberger

Brandon Johnson first wrote to me from the El Dorado County Jail in Placerville last May, and opened by describing himself as “a proud father of two young girls” cruelly separated from them because “the county sheriff beat me almost lifeless from head to toe after approaching me over mistaken identity” on July 4, 2021.

Johnson was only in jail, he said, because the injuries he’d suffered in that unprovoked attack had so altered his personality and behavior that ever since, “I have acted out in ways I never have before in my life.” Well, no. Almost nothing that he told me in that initial letter was true, including even the part about being a proud father.

But one thing Johnson, who turned 44 in August, said is accurate: Law enforcement should have taken his lawbreaking over the previous 20 years far more seriously.

“Looking back over the years,” he wrote, “I wish the legal system had stepped in to offer me more help. Seeing a pattern of off the wall behavior, the most that ever happened was fines.”

Six women in three states collectively filed at least 17 protective orders against him, but what happened as a result was this: nothing.

Nothing was ever done to stop behavior that really was off the wall. His record includes three counts of domestic violence and one of entrapment, charges to which he pleaded guilty, then got a suspended sentence. After pleading guilty to insurance fraud, he was sentenced to community service.

He still has outstanding warrants in Washington state, where he’s from, for felony theft, reckless endangerment and eluding arrest on protective order violations — speeding away from patrol cars with their lights and sirens going — while his license was suspended and with his then 12-year-old daughter in the car. But Johnson was creative in his conduct, too, according to his exes, who said that he faked cancer, lab work, advanced degrees, jobs, and at one point, his own death.

He is a tech savant, with multiple aliases, and he also filed a number of protective orders, some of which both his first wife, Athena Klingerman, and his second wife, Amber Rasmussen, got voided in September of 2021 under a new Washington State law restricting abusive litigation.

Even from jail, he filed online paperwork alleging that Klingerman owed him child support, and succeeded in getting Washington to try and take some of her wages. Also from his cell in Placerville, he’s gotten others to report Klingerman to child services.

Five women with whom he’s been involved told me in interviews that he got away with so much for so long because he is pretty much the GOAT of con men. “He’s really good,” says Rasmussen, who lives outside Portland, Oregon. She has teamed up with Klingerman, who’s in the Seattle area, on a podcast about their mutual ex that they call, “Ex-Wives Undercover.”

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