Chicago City Wire

Jennifer Bonjean, a prominent plaintiff attorney who has represented celebrity clients and numerous others in wrongful conviction cases, told prosecutors in a profanity filled YouTube rant that “you suck,” and the only reason you won is because “90 percent of the time the judge is predisposed to rule against the defendant.”

“In the process you came to believe you were good,” said Bonjean, who has represented comedian Bill Cosby and rapper R. Kelly, “that you were smart. That you knew what you were doing, then you get out in the mean bad world of the capital marketplace and there you can’t get a f…ing client without some judge handing it to you. Then you’re going to bill the taxpayers a bunch of sh..load of money. You suck. You suck then, you suck now. You will forever suck.”

It's unclear where the two-month-old video was filmed.

A call to Bonjean’s law office asking if she were referring to prosecutors in general, or any in particular, was not returned.

Bonjean is currently representing Devon Daniels, convicted of a 1996 double murder, in a wrongful conviction case where Daniels alleges that former Chicago detective Kriston Kato forced him to confess to the crime.

The trial, and a separate wrongful conviction case, are being held in Will County due to a conflict in Cook County,

In a recent motion, Bonjean tried to have two special prosecutors, Fabio Valentini  and Maria McCarthy, dismissed from the case because they “labor under numerous debilitating conflicts of interest that preclude them from serving as conflict-free Special State's Attorneys and discharging their ethical obligations as prosecutors.”

The motion was filed just hours after the prosecutors challenged the constitutional authority of the 14-year-old Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which referred the Daniels case for a new evidentiary hearing. The General Assembly created TIRC after allegations of abuse by former CPD Commander Jon Burge. In 2018, its jurisdiction was expanded to allegations of abuse against any Chicago police officer. TIRC has since become a pipeline of new clients for plantiffs’ attorneys.

TIRC, McCarthy wrote in a memorandum to the court, lacks both the constitutional and statutory authority to refer the cases where police abuse is alleged.

“The plain language of the TIRC Act and the ARL [Illinois Administrative Law], when read together, do not provide a legal basis for evidentiary hearings under the TIRC Act,” McCarthy writes.

In response to the Bonjean motion to dismiss, the prosecutors wrote: "The filing of a specious and unsupported motion mere hours after Ms. McCarthy filed a substantive motion supported by extensive legal precedent shows Ms. Bonjean’s true motivation in her attempt to remove Ms. McCarthy from this case, particularly where there had never been any objections to Ms. McCarthy’s role as the Special Prosecutor at any of the numerous court hearings over the eleven months since her appointment,” the response said.

In addition, the prosecutors’ response notes that the “petitioner’s motion is not only factually inaccurate, it is utterly devoid of any legal merit. Specifically, petitioner wrongly asserts that the CCSAO (Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office) was removed from this matter due to a conflict of interest. Such a statement is blatantly false, as this Court is well aware that even though no disabling conflict of interest existed in any of these cases…”