MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin legislator has pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct in connection with a bitter feud with her caucus over being excluded from resolutions honoring Hispanics and breaking with her party on state budget and legislative district boundary votes.
Prosecutors in Milwaukee County charged state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez in February. The Milwaukee Democrat pleaded no contest during a hearing Friday, and Judge Paul Malloy ordered her to pay a $300 fine and submit a DNA sample. She could have faced up to 90 days in jail.
A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt, but means the accused will offer no defense. The plea is treated as a conviction in the criminal justice system.
Ortiz-Velez said in a statement after the sentencing that she will pay the fine and remains focused on her constituents, not caucus infighting.
“My voting choices caused a rift that has been ugly and bitter,” she said. “My constituents did not send me to Madison to litigate internal caucus disputes or be distracted by the personal feuds — they sent me there to deliver results.”
A spokesperson from Assembly Democratic Minority Leader Greta Neubauer did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The feud began in August as Democratic members of the state Assembly were planning resolutions honoring Hispanic heritage and Hispanic veterans in observance of Hispanic Heritage Month in September, according to the criminal complaint.
Ortiz-Velez grew angry because she believed an unnamed lawmaker drafting the heritage resolution had intentionally excluded her from working on it.
The complaint states that she had been invited to work on the resolution in June and chose not to participate but still wanted to help draft the language. She contacted media outlets saying she had been intentionally left out of the resolution work. She also told the resolution’s author that she felt excluded from working on another resolution that same legislator was crafting honoring Hispanic veterans, saying her late husband was a Hispanic veteran.
Two more unnamed lawmakers told investigators that Ortiz-Velez told them in separate phone conversations that she was going to spread “negative personal information” about the resolutions’ author to the media and that “they are going to do what I want them to do, or I’m going to x, y and z,” according to the complaint.
When one of the lawmakers asked her what that meant, she made comments about the resolutions’ author’s personal life and other legislators. The complaint characterized those remarks as “indecent and tended to disrupt the good public order” but does not elaborate or offer any more specificity.
Democratic leaders issued a statement in September saying Ortiz-Velez had made a comment about shooting three caucus members. That statement came a day after another statement announcing that Ortiz-Velez was leaving the Democratic caucus.
In interviews with the news website Wisconsin Right Now and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ortiz-Velez denied that she threatened her colleagues. But the Legislature’s human resources office barred her from entering the state Capitol for a day. A spokesperson for Assembly Republican Speaker Robin Vos said at the time that she shouldn’t have been banned.
Ortiz-Velez’s attorney, Michael Chernin, said in a telephone interview Friday that Assembly Democrats were already upset with Ortiz-Velez going into September because she had voted for the 2025-27 state budget and for new legislative maps Democratic Gov. Tony Evers drew up in 2024. Democrats opposed the spending plan in part because they felt it doesn’t adequately fund public schools and argued the state Supreme Court should have drawn the new legislative maps.
Rep. Priscilla Prado, another Milwaukee Democrat, wouldn’t allow Ortiz-Velez to participate in the Hispanic resolutions, he said. Two of the lawmakers who went unnamed in the complaint made allegations to investigators that Ortiz-Velez had threatened to expose unsavory elements of Prado’s personal life to the media, he said.
“It’s incredibly petty, and Sylvia didn’t want any part of this,” Chernin said. “Sylvia truly wanted to spare Prado any sort of embarrassment on this.”
No one immediately responded to messages left with Prado’s Capitol’s office seeking comment on Friday afternoon.
___
This story has been corrected to show Ortiz-Velez pleaded no contest. She did not plead guilty as was initially stated in the online court record. It was also corrected to show the defense attorney’s name is Michael Chernin, not Cernin.