A sixteen-year domestic relations judge from the Cleveland Celebrezze political dynasty bypassed Ohio’s random case assignment rules to hand-pick lucrative divorce work for the family friend she told colleagues she was in love with. The Ohio Supreme Court suspended her from the practice of law. The county prosecutor put her in jail.

 

THE QUICK ANSWER

Former Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division, was sentenced on June 1, 2026, to 60 days in the Cuyahoga County jail and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to a single felony count of tampering with records under Ohio Revised Code § 2913.42.

In a separate disciplinary proceeding, the Supreme Court of Ohio suspended her from the practice of law for two years, with one year stayed, after finding she committed fifteen distinct violations of the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct and the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct. Disciplinary Counsel v. Celebrezze, Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-45.

The conduct: she bypassed Ohio’s random case assignment rules across four divorce cases to deliberately route high-value work to herself, then appointed (or tried to appoint) Mark Dottore as receiver or mediator. Dottore was a childhood family friend, her father’s former political operative, and, by her own admission to colleagues, a man with whom she had fallen in love. In one divorce case alone, she approved more than $413,000 in fees to Dottore and his attorney.

 

Case File at a Glance

Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze
Court Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division (Cleveland, Ohio)—a multi-judge court
Time on Bench Sixteen years (elected 2009; resigned December 22, 2025)
Disciplinary Case Disciplinary Counsel v. Celebrezze, Slip Op. No. 2026-Ohio-45 (decided January 13, 2026)
Criminal Case State of Ohio v. Celebrezze, Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas (guilty plea February 2026; sentenced June 1, 2026)
Charge Tampering with Records, Ohio Revised Code § 2913.42 (third-degree felony)
Civil Sanction Two-year suspension from the practice of law, with one year stayed; costs of the disciplinary proceedings
Criminal Sanction Sixty days in the Cuyahoga County jail and a $10,000 fine
Sentencing Judge Visiting Judge Mark Wiest (retired, Wayne County Common Pleas)
Investigative Reporting The Marshall Project — Cleveland (Mark Puente, June 2023)
Federal Investigation FBI (no federal charges to date)

A Family Name That Carried Weight in Cleveland

The Celebrezze political dynasty in Cleveland goes back to the 1920s. Across the decades, members of the family have held offices ranging from Cleveland mayor and Ohio attorney general to seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the county benches. Leslie Ann Celebrezze was elected to the Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations bench in 2009 as the first female Celebrezze to run for office. The seat she took had been her father’s.

Her father, the late Justice James Celebrezze of the Ohio Supreme Court, had a longtime political operative named Mark Dottore. Dottore had served as a campaign manager for the elder Celebrezze. He later, the Ohio Supreme Court found, “aided” Leslie’s own election to the bench. The relationship Leslie Celebrezze would eventually be disciplined and prosecuted for was, in that sense, an inherited piece of the family political infrastructure she had grown up inside.

What the Marshall Project Found

On June 1, 2023, The Marshall Project — Cleveland published a report by reporter Mark Puente describing a pattern of Judge Celebrezze’s court-appointed receiver work going to Mark Dottore in lucrative divorce cases and including the results of a private-investigator surveillance commissioned by a litigant in one of those cases. The investigator had captured Celebrezze and Dottore exchanging a kiss on the lips outside a steakhouse where the two had spent more than two hours.

Pressed by reporters, Celebrezze denied a romantic relationship and attributed the kiss to a cultural greeting between two people of Italian descent. She told the Marshall Project she had been happily married to her husband for twenty-five years. Both of those statements would later be found by the Supreme Court of Ohio to have been false. A federal grand jury investigation followed the reporting. The litigant who had hired the private investigator, Jason Jardine, filed a grievance against Celebrezze with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Supreme Court of Ohio. That grievance became the basis of the case the Supreme Court would decide three years later.

Four Cases, One Pattern

The Ohio Supreme Court’s opinion documents four divorce cases in which Celebrezze, acting as the administrative judge of the Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Division, bypassed the random case-assignment rules required by Ohio Sup.R. 36.011 and the local court rules of her division.

Jardine v. Jardine (Cuyahoga C.P. No. DR-20-383667). The case was originally assigned to Judge Tonya Jones. In July 2021, Judge Jones appointed Mark Dottore as receiver at Celebrezze’s suggestion. More than a year later, Judge Jones voluntarily recused. Under former Ohio Sup.R. 36.019(A), the recused judge was required to send the case to the administrative judge for random reassignment. The administrative judge was Celebrezze. Celebrezze asked Judge Jones to issue an order assigning the case directly to her, instead of to the random pool. Judge Jones complied. Once on the case, Celebrezze granted Dottore’s motion to expand his receivership authority over the husband’s objection and approved fee payments. In the Jardine case alone, she approved $241,935 in receiver fees to Dottore and another $171,859.31 to Dottore’s legal counsel which was a combined total of $413,794.31.

Maron v. Maron (Cuyahoga C.P. No. DR-20-382494). Originally assigned to Judge Colleen Reali. In January 2023, Celebrezze approached the magistrate working the case and announced she would be taking it. She then contacted Judge Reali twice to offer the same. When Judge Reali later recused, Celebrezze directed the assignment commissioner to reassign the case to her and signed a docket entry falsely stating that the case had been randomly reassigned to her by electronic judge roll. After trial began and settlement was on the table, Celebrezze recommended mediation and suggested Dottore as the mediator. Both parties objected. Celebrezze recused herself from the case on August 18, 2023 which was the same day she was disqualified from the Jardine case by the Supreme Court of Ohio.

Abedrabbo v. Abedrabbo (Cuyahoga C.P. No. DR-21-384289). Also before Judge Reali. A mandamus action was pending in the Ohio Supreme Court against Judge Reali in this case. Celebrezze began pressuring Reali to transfer the divorce case to her. She suggested that the mandamus action would “go away” if Reali made the transfer. She told Reali that if Reali did not continue the case, Celebrezze would continue it herself. On one occasion, Celebrezze invoked a “motion to continue” filed on a non-existent “administrative docket.” When Reali pushed back, Celebrezze said: “I still think you should give it to me anyway.” When the case was ultimately reassigned to Judge Diane Palos rather than to Celebrezze, Celebrezze approached Judge Palos’s bailiff and explained that Palos could simply transfer the case to her. Judge Palos refused.

Rennell v. Rennell (Cuyahoga C.P. No. DR-19-37900). Judge Jones again. When Jones recused and informed Celebrezze the case was set for trial, Celebrezze told Jones she could accommodate the trial dates. Jones transferred the case directly. Celebrezze then manually reassigned it to her own docket again bypassing the random-assignment requirement. Within two months, on a party’s motion, Celebrezze appointed Dottore as receiver, and a week later appointed an attorney for Dottore.

The Conflict She Never Disclosed

To at least two of her judicial colleagues (Judge Reali and Judge Francine Goldberg of the same domestic-relations division) Celebrezze had said, in separate conversations, that she was in love with Mark Dottore. The Ohio Supreme Court found, on her own stipulation, that her marital difficulties (about which she had also consulted divorce counsel) had led her to develop “a deeper emotional attachment” to Dottore over time. The Board of Professional Conduct specifically found that the relationship did not include sexual contact.

When the disciplinary investigation reached the topic of the relationship, Celebrezze’s position changed. She told the Office of Disciplinary Counsel that she and Dottore were “close personal friends,” that the steakhouse kiss had been a cultural greeting between two Italians, and that she had been happily married to her husband for twenty-five years. The Ohio Supreme Court found, on the basis of her contemporaneous statements to her colleagues and her stipulations in the disciplinary record, that each of those statements was false. Whatever the precise character of the relationship between Celebrezze and Dottore, the Court found, she failed to disclose it to a single one of the parties in any of the four cases she had routed to herself.

Why Random Case Assignment Matters

A Structural Rule, Not a Technicality

Ohio Sup.R. 36.011 requires the random assignment of judges to cases in multi-judge courts. The commentary to the rule explains that the purpose is not only to prevent judge-shopping and to distribute cases equitably, but “to maintain public confidence in the judicial system by ensuring that cases are assigned impartially and not deliberately to a certain judge.” Former Sup.R. 36.019(A) extended the same principle to recusals: when a judge in a multi-judge court recuses, the administrative judge must randomly reassign the case among the remaining judges who can hear it.

The Ohio Supreme Court has called attempts to manipulate the random case-assignment process “subject to universal condemnation.” The reason is structural: when an administrative judge can decide which cases come to which judges, every case in the courthouse loses the assurance that the judge who hears it was chosen impartially. The litigants in the four divorce cases Celebrezze handled are not the only people harmed by what she did. Every other litigant who appeared before that division during those years was supposed to be drawing from a random pool. That pool no longer existed as advertised.

What the Judge Said in Her Defense

At her March 2025 disciplinary hearing before the Board of Professional Conduct, Celebrezze invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, citing the pending federal grand jury investigation. She answered no substantive questions. She had, however, stipulated to all fifteen rule violations and entered into 158 written stipulations and 90 joint exhibits with the Disciplinary Counsel. Her counsel before the Ohio Supreme Court (Monica A. Sansalone and Matthew T. Norman of Gallagher Sharp, L.L.P.) argued the appropriate sanction was a public reprimand.

At criminal sentencing on June 1, 2026, her defense lawyer, Ian Friedman, told Visiting Judge Mark Wiest that Celebrezze had been on self-imposed house arrest with electronic monitoring since early February of that year, which she had paid for out of her own pocket at a cost of more than $40,000. Friedman emphasized her decades of public service as a registered nurse, magistrate, and then judge. He told the court she had “left a legacy of good” and that she hoped one day to return to nursing. He sought probation. Moments before the sentence was announced, Celebrezze read a brief prepared statement. She choked up. “I am genuinely sorry,” she said. She had asked her family and supporters not to attend the hearing because she wanted to stand by herself for sentencing.

The Rules She Broke

The Ohio Supreme Court found Celebrezze had committed fifteen separate violations of the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct and the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct, distributed across seven distinct rules:

Rule Count What it requires
Jud.Cond.R. 1.2 3 A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.
Jud.Cond.R. 2.5 3 A judge shall perform judicial and administrative duties competently and diligently and shall comply with the guidelines set forth in the Rules of Superintendence.
Jud.Cond.R. 2.9(A) 1 A judge shall not initiate, receive, permit, or consider ex parte communications.
Jud.Cond.R. 2.11(A) 3 A judge shall disqualify herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
Prof.Cond.R. 8.1(a) 1 A lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of material fact in connection with a disciplinary matter.
Prof.Cond.R. 8.4(c) 1 A lawyer shall not engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.
Prof.Cond.R. 8.4(d) 3 A lawyer shall not engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The Sanction — Two Forums, Two Outcomes

The disciplinary sanction. On January 13, 2026, the Supreme Court of Ohio, in an opinion by Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy joined by Justices Patrick F. Fischer, Joseph T. Deters, Daniel R. Hawkins, and Megan E. Shanahan, suspended Celebrezze from the practice of law for two years, with one year stayed on the condition that she commit no further misconduct. (Justices R. Patrick DeWine and Jennifer Brunner did not participate.) The Court rejected Celebrezze’s request for a public reprimand and rejected the Disciplinary Counsel’s recommendation of a one-year suspension with six months stayed, holding that both were too lenient. The Court placed the conduct between the lighter sanctions in cases like Hale and Goulding (involving isolated, single-case judicial conflicts) and the indefinite suspensions in cases like Hunter (felony conviction) and Carr (more than 100 stipulated incidents). It found her conduct most closely paralleled Disciplinary Counsel v. Jacob, a 2017 case in which the Court had imposed the same two-year, one-stayed sanction on a judge who had falsified court records to bypass procedure. Chief Justice Kennedy wrote that Celebrezze’s actions caused “incalculable harm to the public perception of the legal system.” Costs were taxed to Celebrezze.

The criminal sanction. Celebrezze pleaded guilty to a single count of tampering with records, Ohio Revised Code § 2913.42, a third-degree felony, before any grand jury was convened. The factual basis of the plea, as Judge Wiest recounted at sentencing, was specifically the Maron case which was the docket entry in which Celebrezze certified that the case had been randomly reassigned to her, when in fact she had directed the assignment commissioner to send it to her. The maximum sentence for that felony was three years in prison. The prosecution did not seek jail time. Judge Wiest imposed sixty days in the Cuyahoga County jail and a $10,000 fine. His reasoning, in his words from the bench: “What makes it more serious is you held public office. That helped you facilitate the crime.” Sheriff’s deputies led Celebrezze from the courtroom to begin serving her sentence at the end of the hearing. As a felony conviction, the plea is expected to result in the loss of her Ohio law license as a separate matter from the suspension.

How It Played in the Press

The case has been an ongoing project of The Marshall Project — Cleveland. Reporter Mark Puente broke the story on June 1, 2023, with the first piece on Celebrezze’s pattern of appointments of Dottore in divorce cases. The Marshall Project followed with reporting on the receiver fees Celebrezze had approved (ultimately documenting nearly $500,000 paid to Dottore’s company, Dottore Cos. LLC, between January 2017 and June 2023) and with reporting on the FBI grand jury subpoenas that followed.

Court News Ohio, the Ohio Supreme Court’s own publication arm, issued an official summary of the January 13, 2026, disciplinary opinion. Ideastream Public Media, the Cleveland-area NPR affiliate, covered both the disciplinary decision and the June 1, 2026, sentencing. The American Bar Association Journal and Toledo Legal News carried national-bar coverage. The disciplinary opinion and the criminal docket are both fully public; this case leaves no doubt as to the identity of the judge involved.

The Takeaway

What distinguishes this case from the run of judicial misconduct files is that the rule Celebrezze repeatedly broke is a structural one. Random case assignment is one of the few mechanisms American multi-judge courts use to prevent judge-shopping and to guard against precisely the kind of “I will take this case from you” scenario the Ohio Supreme Court found Celebrezze had run, in four cases, for almost a year. When the administrative judge of a multi-judge court bypasses the rule four times to route high-value cases to herself (and then routes the receivership work in those cases to a man she has told colleagues she is in love with) the harm reaches every litigant in that division, not just the four whose names appear on the disciplinary case caption. The Ohio Supreme Court’s specific finding that her conduct caused “incalculable harm to the public perception of the legal system” was not rhetorical. It was a description of what the conduct does to the random pool that every other litigant in the courthouse was, by rule, supposed to be drawing from.

That the criminal sentencing judge (a retired colleague from another county) grounded the sixty-day sentence specifically in the public-office dimension of the crime, when the prosecutor had not sought jail time, says something about how this particular kind of conduct registers within the judiciary itself. Wiest’s observation about the hundreds of Ohio judges who follow the rules of superintendence every day, and the harm done to them when one judge does not, is the part of the sentencing colloquy worth reading twice.

Where Is She Now?

Leslie Ann Celebrezze is presently serving a 60-day sentence in the Cuyahoga County jail, having begun the sentence at the conclusion of the June 1, 2026, hearing. She resigned the bench on December 22, 2025, while her disciplinary case was still pending before the Supreme Court of Ohio. She is currently suspended from the practice of law in Ohio for two years, with one year stayed on conditions, and is expected to lose her law license entirely upon final disposition of her felony conviction. She has stated through counsel that she hopes one day to return to work as a registered nurse, the credential she held before becoming a magistrate and a judge.

 

When the Judge Has a Stake in the Outcome

Every defendant and every litigant is entitled to a courtroom where the judge’s loyalties are not in question. Watching for that, and pushing back when something is off, is part of the job of any defense lawyer worth hiring. At Deandra Grant Law, we know how to ask the questions other lawyers don’t think to ask. If you are facing a DWI or criminal charge in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, or McLennan County, put our experience to work for you.

Call (214) 225-7117   •   texasdwisite.com

The Gavel of Shame   •   National Edition   •   Case File No. 14

By Deandra Grant   •   Deandra Grant Law   •   Published June 2026

Sources

Primary source

  • Supreme Court of Ohio, Disciplinary Counsel v. Celebrezze, Slip Op. No. 2026-Ohio-45 (January 13, 2026). ohio.gov
  • Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct, Rules 1.2, 2.5, 2.9(A), and 2.11(A). ohio.gov
  • Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct, Rules 8.1(a), 8.4(c), and 8.4(d). ohio.gov
  • Ohio Rules of Superintendence for the Courts of Ohio, Rule 36.011 and former Rule 36.019(A). ohio.gov
  • Ohio Revised Code § 2913.42 (Tampering with Records). ohio.gov

News coverage

  • Mark Puente, “Former Cuyahoga County Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze Sentenced to 60 days in Jail and $10,000 Fine,” The Marshall Project — Cleveland (June 1, 2026). org
  • Matthew Richmond, “Former Judge Leslie Celebrezze sentenced to 60 days in jail for falsifying records,” Ideastream Public Media (June 1, 2026). org
  • Kevin Davis, “Former judge sentenced to 60 days in jail for falsifying records,” ABA Journal (June 2, 2026). com
  • Dan Trevas, “Court Suspends Former Domestic Relations Judge,” Court News Ohio (January 13, 2026). gov

This post summarizes the public disciplinary opinion of the Supreme Court of Ohio and the public criminal docket of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. All findings and quoted material are drawn from those public documents and from published news reporting. This is general commentary on a matter of public record, not legal advice.