Creative Commons/Thomas Hawk

Ivory Madison

The woman who alerted police about an alleged domestic violence incident involving San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi has a history of speaking out, especially on women’s issues. She was also a generous donor to Mirkarimi's most recent campaign.

Ivory Madison lives a few doors down from Mirkarimi and his wife, Eliana Lopez, in a Victorian home in the Western Addition. On Jan. 4., Madison contacted the San Francisco Police Department to report that Mirkarimi had injured Lopez during an argument on Dec. 31.

When investigators interviewed Madison, she said that Lopez came to her home on Jan. 1 and told her about an argument she had with Mirkarimi the day before that became violent, resulting in a bruise near her right bicep, according to a police affidavit. Madison told officers she recorded a video of the conversation, in which Lopez said the fight marked the second time in 2011 that Mirkarimi had abused her, the affidavit said. Madison recorded the bruise, according to officers who viewed the video.

But when police asked Madison to give them the video, she refused, forcing police to get a search warrant for it. Mirkarimi now awaits arraignment Thursday on misdemeanor charges of domestic violence battery, child endangerment and dissuading a witness.

Since the incident, Madison has declined to be interviewed, leaving many questions unanswered, including why she waited four days to call police and then refused to surrender the video. In a radio interview with a Venezuelan radio station Tuesday, Lopez assailed Madison for telling police, saying Madison is part of a powerful political conspiracy designed to sabotage Mirkarimi's political future. But in interviews, half a dozen friends and former co-workers described Madison as a feminist with an acute sense of justice that has prompted her to confront a variety of perceived wrongs with zeal.

“She is always outspoken,” said Phil Bronstein, the former editor-at-large of Hearst Newspapers, Inc., who befriended Madison in 2005. “Knowing Ivory, she probably agonized over what was the right thing to do. It is a tough situation to be in, if someone were to come to you in a state of distress, to determine what is the right thing to do.”

Madison first met Lopez when she began attending a class Lopez was teaching. “I was giving classes for children in dance and expression on Saturdays,” Lopez said in Spanish Tuesday in an interview on Noticias24, a Venezuelan radio station. “I knew she was lonely, and that she had a baby, and I told her she and her child could attend my classes for free.”

Madison and her husband, Abraham Mertens, each contributed $500 to Mirkarimi's campaign for sheriff last year, the maximum allowed under campaign finance laws. They helped host a fundraiser for Mirkarimi in Hayes Valley last fall.

But on Tuesday, Lopez claimed that Madison had betrayed her and Mirkarimi. “This person took the law into her own hands,” Lopez said in the radio interview. “I merely told her we’d had an argument on New Year’s Eve. And she used that against us, which made me suspect that there are powerful interests behind this. She’s broke. She has no money. No health insurance. You know that to live in the United States without insurance or income is a precarious situation. Now, we’re suspicious of her motive for calling the police four days after I spoke with her about a marital argument that was in no way violent.”

Madison did not respond to multiple requests for comment Wednesday.

Mirkarimi’s supporters say law enforcement may have overreached in pursuing a domestic violence charge without the victim’s cooperation, adding a child endangerment count even though his son was not physically harmed, and requesting a protective order temporarily separating Mirkarimi from his family.

However, a domestic violence expert, and the police department’s own procedural manual, suggest officials played this case by the book.

According to the San Francisco Police Department’s General Orders on domestic violence, officers are not allowed to consider victims’ reluctance when dealing with domestic violence cases. They may seek protective orders if they believe victims are in danger of further violence.

As for the child endangerment charge, Minouche Kandel, an attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid, which provides legal assistance to low-income clients, said such charges are commonplace in domestic violence prosecutions — even in cases when children have not been physically harmed.

“In the past five or 10 years, there’s been a trend to recognize that children are affected when a parent is abused,” Kandel said. “Police are trained to ask whether there were children in the area, and whether they witnessed the abuse." According to court documents, Lopez told Madison and another neighbor in separate conversations that her 2-year-old son witnessed the alleged abuse.

Madison, a San Francisco native, dropped out of high school and later became president of the New Orleans chapter of the National Organization for Women in the mid-1990s. In that role, she helped pressure the Sugar Bowl committee, which oversees one of college football's top bowl games, to elect its first female members.

She went on to enroll at the now-defunct New College of California Law School in San Francisco. In 2001, Madison had a run-in with the editor-in-chief of the school's law review over an article that she said contained offensive material, according to Lou Lesperance, a paralegal in San Francisco, who is a longtime friend of the former editor.

Madison, a law review staffer at the time, had deleted a section of the piece in which the author recounted reading Playboy magazine on a bus, Lesperance said. The editor disagreed and reinserted the material, prompting Madison to file a complaint with the school’s grievance board, saying his decision amounted to sexual harassment. The school’s grievance board disagreed and the content was printed.

Madison received a law degree from the school in May 2003. But instead of practicing law, she helped found a consulting firm and then, in 2002, started the Red Room Writers Society, named after a White House room frequently used by Eleanor Roosevelt.

The society became Redroom.com in 2007, a social networking and marketing site for authors ranging from Salman Rushdie to Barack Obama, initially backed by $1.25 million in funding from investors including Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.org. Madison's husband is the site's general counsel.

In 2009, Madison published a graphic novel, "Huntress: Year One," about a female vigilante who fights sexist institutions.

Her background suggests she may be a formidable force for Mirkarimi to contend with, Lesperance said.

“Knowing what I know about Ivory Madison, if I were Ross Mirkarimi, this is the last person I would want involved in this,” Lesperance said. “For a person who would go to the mat over the law article, you would be swinging for the fences over something like this.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly characterized the relationship between Abraham Mertens and Ivory Madison. They are married. Also, the article incorrectly stated when Phil Bronstein met Madison. It was in 2005, not 2007.