Frequent County Board candidate Audrey Clement has taken issue with the amount of time her assailant was sentenced to serve for attacking her and a bystander outside a library in March.
The man, 47-year-old Jonathan Rogers, pleaded guilty to striking Clement in the back of the head and hitting a bystander in the eye when he intervened in the apparently unprovoked attack. Rogers was released from jail on Sunday after spending just 50 days behind bars — an amount of time that Clement believes is unacceptable.
“I believe that the conduct of the prosecution of this case represents a complete travesty of justice insofar as the victims, the interested public and ACPD have been entirely misled by the CA regarding its intention to enforce the law,” Clement said in an email exchange with a prosecutor for the case. “Instead the CA has opted to prosecute the victims and exonerate the perpetrator by trivializing the charges and waiving all but 50 days of the sentence.”
The Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office has disputed this, noting that the prosecutor informed Clement of the plea agreement for her case prior to the sentencing, and that the other victim did not want Rogers to serve active jail time for his case.
“Putting the needs of victims and their healing at the forefront of our consideration is second only to public safety,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti told ARLnow. “We met early and often with the victims in this case and fashioned resolutions consistent with their expressed needs and public safety.”
Rogers pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and battery, one against Clement and one against the other victim. For attacking Clement, he received a sentence of just shy of a year, but with all but 100 days suspended; for the other victim, he was sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence plus $16,050 in restitution.
Under Virginia law, people who are sentenced to a year or less for a misdemeanor only have to serve half of that time if they earn good conduct credit.
Clement, however, said she wasn’t informed that Rogers’ original charge for attacking the other victim — malicious wounding — had been reduced to assault and battery, resulting in his lighter sentence. As a practice, Arlington’s prosecutors don’t typically discuss their conversations with victims in-depth, even when speaking with other victims.
“Since I was not privy to your negotiations with either [the other victim] or the defense attorney, as you yourself point out below, I had no way of knowing that the felony charges against Rogers would be reduced to a misdemeanor or that the sentence for that more serious charge would be entirely waived,” Clement wrote. “Because I presumed that he would be sentenced on the more serious charge, I was willing to live with the proposed sentence on the less serious charge. ”
She argued that Rogers should have received a harsher sentence, regardless of what the other victim thought was right.
“Under the circumstances I believe that waiving a sentence for an aggravated assault constitutes a miscarriage of justice,” Clement said.
The incident in question took place on March 7 outside Central Library. Clement previously told ARLnow that she and an associate were preparing to wrap up the day’s signature collection drive when Rogers became enraged after she asked him whether he’d like to sign her clipboard.
“I said, ‘Have I asked you for your signature already?’ And he then came towards me and took a swing at me,” Clement said last month. “It was very quick. It was like you could see from the look in his eye that he was triggered.”
Clement said she turned around to absorb the blow and was struck in the head. She was dazed as a bystander saw the attack and confronted Rogers.
“Hey, you don’t hit a woman!” the bystander shouted, according to an officer’s report.
The two men dropped to the ground, fighting, when Clement’s associate, David Wingard, stepped in and placed the attacker in a chokehold, Clement said. A library worker named James also came outside and helped Wingard hold the man down until police arrived.
Clement said that Rogers seemed to be “in a psychotic state” and was removed from the scene on a stretcher with restraints.
Clement is running as an independent this year against County Board Chair Matt de Ferranti, who will face fellow Democrats Julie Farnam and James DeVita in the upcoming primary. She received 17% of the vote in the November 2025 County Board race, her best showing in recent cycles.
