Harris County Voters: Kim Ogg Should Return Donations From Scandal-Plagued Strip Club Owner

Last month, Houston Watch reported that Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has accepted over $25,000 of campaign contributions from Ali Davari, who owns a mini-empire of strip clubs and has been alleged to have engaged in forced prostitution, human trafficking, money laundering, and wage theft.

As Harris County’s top law enforcement official, Kim Ogg is responsible for prosecuting those very same crimes, so Davari’s rather large contributions create at least the appearance of a serious conflict of interest.

We reached out to Ogg for comment because we thought she’d want to clear this up right away. 

After all, situations like this aren’t uncommon. Politicians accept a lot of campaign contributions; and, often unbeknownst to the recipient, some of those contributions turn out to be from less than savory people. It happens, and when it does it’s easy to return money that turns out to be problematic.

But that’s not what Ogg did. Instead, she ignored repeated requests for comment and appears to be standing by these highly questionable donations.

So, because she won’t talk to us about these campaign contributions, we asked the voters of Harris County what they thought.

As it turns out, by an overwhelming margin (39 percentage points), Ogg’s constituents – including most Democrats, Republicans and Independents – say that she should give the money back.

Poll results in hand, we reached out to Ogg for comment again. We will update the story if the District Attorney ever gets around to calling us back.

Polling Methodology:

Our poll of 422 Harris County likely voters was conducted on the Data For Progress infrastructure, and the sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is +/- 5 percentage points.