SANTA ANA – A Corona del Mar attorney pleaded guilty Thursday and was ordered to perform eight hours of community service for a domestic dispute with his girlfriend.
Jerry Raymond Schaffer pleaded guilty to violating a protective-stay away order and making annoying telephone calls, both misdemeanors. He was ordered to take a batterer’s treatment program and was placed on three years of informal probation.
Schaffer is ineligible to practice law because of a suspension for failing to pay fees, according to The State Bar of California.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue in May substituted in an attorney from the Orange County Public Defender’s Office for Schaffer, a private defense attorney, in the case for Zachary Pickrell, 21, who is charged with the fatal shooting of a friend in Anaheim and threatening his girlfriend’s mother, his girlfriend and their then-unborn baby.
Schaffer was hospitalized Dec. 2 for about six weeks due to a head injury, he told Donahue by telephone at a hearing in May.
“I’ve been out for a while,” Schaffer said.
Donahue noted that the defense attorney had previously said he felt dizzy standing up. Schaffer said his doctors said he was unable to come to court then because of the head injury.
Previously, Pickrell had “waived” a conflict that Schaffer might face defending the client while also facing the misdemeanor charges.
Donahue also noted in May that Schaffer was in a “fees dispute” with the state bar for about nine months that led to a suspension of his law license. The judge also said there were a couple of court dates when court officials and prosecutors could not reach him.
Schaffer’s live-in girlfriend in Corona del Mar filed for a restraining order against him in May 2022, alleging he struck her with his bike, “grabbed me by the (the) neck, hit me,” and threatened her, but she did not show up to court and the case was dropped, according to court records.
In a letter to a judge in the criminal case in July 2023, she said the two got into a dispute because she was “suspicious of him being unfaithful in our relationship.”
She said his bike “got caught to my knee and caused the scratch in that area,” which heightened “tension and a loud argument,” she wrote.
When Schaffer was packing up his belongings to leave the home she was concerned he would take some of her property and when police said she could only sort it out with a restraining order she filed for one but regretted it.
She asked for a restraining order in the criminal case removed “since I’ve never felt any threat, of any kind, from Mr. Schaffer and never will.”
