Like her husband, former county Supervisor Andrew Do, Judge Cheri Pham held a top leadership position in Orange County. As assistant presiding judge of the Superior Court of Orange County, she was in line to take over as presiding judge, which would have had her overseeing the nation’s fifth largest trial court.

Instead, the judge now spends her days in Orange County family court overseeing domestic violence cases.

Pham is no longer assistant presiding judge, and she decided not to submit her nomination for presiding judge last fall, shortly before local and federal law enforcement leaders announced that her husband, Do, agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy to receive kickbacks from contracts meant to feed needy seniors. Pham hasn’t said publicly why she decided not to seek the county’s top judgeship. She did not respond to LAist’s interview request for this article, instead referring LAist to Kostas Kalaitzidis, a spokesperson for Orange County Superior Court.

Do and Pham’s two adult daughters, Rhiannon and Ilene, each got some of the more than half a million dollars Do admitted to stealing, according to law enforcement officials’ indictment and Do’s plea agreement. Do is due in court Monday for sentencing, and faces up to five years in prison.

No charges have been filed against Pham. The public might never know whether, or how much, she knew about her husband’s misdeeds.

But here’s what we do know about Pham and her career before and after her husband’s downfall.

Pham's backstory

Like Do, Pham came to the United States as a refugee — and thrived.

Pham and her family fled the communist regime in Vietnam and arrived in the U.S. in 1975. She studied business and economics at the UCLA, graduating summa cum laude, and then earned her law degree from UC Berkeley in 1990. She worked at the Orange County public defender’s office, where she met Do, according to a recent court filing from Do’s attorneys.

Pham also worked at the alternate defender’s office and the district attorney’s office before being appointed as a judge in 2010. She later ran unopposed. Pham will be up for re-election in 2028.

Her first long-term judicial assignment was in family court, Kalaitzidis, the court spokesperson, confirmed. She later moved on to felony trials, and in 2020 Pham became the criminal supervising judge, a powerful position charged with assigning cases.

Then-Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do, and his wife, Judge Cheri Pham, to his right, made for an attractive power couple while they were out and about at public events.

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Screenshot of a public video posted by Do’s official YouTube channel

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In 2022, Pham was chosen by her fellow judges to serve as Assistant Presiding Judge of the Orange County Superior Court. In a 2023 podcast interview with local lawyer Mary-Christine Sungaila, Pham said her duties included responding to complaints from the public about judicial officers. She also chaired the court’s finance committee, overseeing a budget of some $250 million.

Pham talked about the responsibilities that comes with leadership during the interview:

"It's important for a person in a leadership role to be accountable and to understand that you are ultimately responsible for any job and any decision that you delegate to others,” Pham said during the podcast interview. She added: “Every decision I make, I have to own up to it. I have to be accountable for it. I cannot put the blame on anything else. I can't make excuses other than they were my decisions. They were my own doing. That's my motto."

Typically, the assistant presiding judge serves a two-year term and then takes over as presiding judge, according to multiple sources and an LAist review of these positions since 2010. (Both the assistant and presiding judge can be elected to serve additional one-year terms.)

But that pathway has not materialized for Pham. She would have been the first Vietnamese American to serve as a presiding judge in the Superior Court of California.

“Which is why this whole thing is so disappointing,” said Thai Viet Phan, a member of the Vietnamese American Bar Association of Southern California and a Santa Ana City Council member.

Her husband’s criminal conduct

At the heart of the charges against Andrew Do is a scheme to cover up the misuse of taxpayer funds intended to provide relief to Orange County residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The roots of the scheme were first reported by LAist.

Do admitted, in his plea agreement, to it working like this: As supervisor, he directed close to $10 million to a charity, Viet America Society, referred to as VAS, whose leadership included Rhiannon Do. That charity, in turn, used other companies to channel kickbacks to Do in the form of payments to Rhiannon Do and his other daughter, Ilene Do, as well as a $381,500 down payment on a home for Rhiannon Do in Tustin.

As part of what prosecutors called a “package deal” in conjunction with her father’s plea agreement, Rhiannon Do, who graduated last month from the UC Irvine School of Law, admitted to filing a falsified mortgage application that disguised her use of taxpayer dollars to purchase her Tustin home. The deal called for her to be placed on three years’ probation through a pretrial diversion program. Federal and local prosecutors agreed that if Rhiannon Do and her father comply with all of the provisions of the agreement, prosecutors will not criminally prosecute Rhiannon.

Authorities never mentioned Pham by name in court filings. But according to a recent court filing from the U.S. attorney’s office, former Supervisor Do used $14,849 in kickbacks from VAS “to pay property tax for two properties in Orange County that defendant owned with his wife,” one in North Tustin and another in Westminster. On Aug. 22, 2024, federal agents searched the North Tustin home and Rhiannon Do’s Tustin home.

Andrew Do and Pham sold their Westminster home a week later, on Aug. 30, 2024, according to county records.

What do public records show?

Records obtained by LAist through a Public Records Act show that substantial renovation work on Do and Pham’s North Tustin home was managed by the leader of the same nonprofit from whom Do admitted to receiving kickbacks.

County emails obtained by LAist through a Public Records Act request show that Peter Pham, the founder of VAS, was a primary contact for the renovation work on Do and Pham’s North Tustin home — a bathroom addition and remodel of the master bathroom and kitchen, among other work, in 2021. On Friday afternoon, federal prosecutors indicted Pham on several charges related to bribing Do and defrauding the county, calling him a "fugitive from justice."

The county also has a pending civil lawsuit against Peter Pham, Rhiannon Do, and others officers and associates of VAS in an effort to recover millions in pandemic relief funds given to VAS for the meal program and for building a Vietnam War memorial in Mile Square Park, which the county says was never completed. An attorney for VAS has disputed the allegations, calling the county’s action a smear job and "a disgrace.”

LAist has found no familial relationship between Peter Pham and Judge Cheri Pham. Pham is a common Vietnamese surname.

To date, it is unclear what Cheri Pham knew about her husband’s deceptions before they were made public.

Emails obtained by LAist through the California Public Records Act show that Cheri Pham was copied on Do and his advisers’ conversation about early drafts of a public statement to blast LAist for its reporting into Do’s then-suspected misuse of county funds, and to deny wrongdoing. It wasn't clear from those records if Pham saw the statement.

A few weeks later, the final version of that statement was released, and it called for LAist to fire Nick Gerda, the reporter who broke the story, saying “The LAist needs to hold him to account for publishing falsified material and fire him immediately.” LAist did not fire Gerda and federal prosecutors credited the media's reporting when announcing the indictment.

The U.S. attorney’s office, in a court filing requesting the maximum sentence allowed for Do’s confessed crime, cited Do’s lashing out at the press as an “aggravating factor.” “Rather than acknowledging wrongdoing or expressing remorse, defendant doubled down,” the U.S. attorney wrote.

Judge Pham at work

Fifteen years after she began her career as a judge, Cheri Pham is now back where she started, assigned once again to family court at the Lamoreaux Justice Center in Orange.

Did she want to return to her roots in family court?

Or was she exiled in the wake of her husband’s high-profile crime?

“It’s very hard to draw any reliable conclusions about any of this stuff,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, a Chapman University law professor and former federal prosecutor who has closely followed Do’s criminal case.

A lawyer who works in Orange County courts, for their part, said they believe Pham has been sidelined because of the bad press around her husband: “She’s getting siloed right now,” the person said of Pham. The lawyer would only speak to LAist on the condition they not be named so as not to jeopardize their career.

Pham’s courtroom sits on the first floor, next to the lactation room. It’s small, with seats for just 35 people in the gallery. Day in and day out, she oversees cases driven by pain, anger and abuse.

On a recent Thursday, 22 cases were on the docket, all of them regarding domestic violence. Most of the plaintiffs were there to ask Pham to keep someone away from them, via a restraining order. In a third of the cases, the parties didn’t show up, and the cases were dismissed. The hearings that did happen took mere minutes to adjudicate.

All of this — the heavy caseload, the no-shows, the rapid-fire hearings — are typical of family court, said Anne Sidwell, who teaches family law at UCLA.

To an outside observer, it can seem tedious. But family court can also be “highly emotional, highly personal,” Sidwell said.

A restraining order, for example, could leave a person homeless, or prevent them from seeing their children.

The lawyer who works in Orange County courts put it more bluntly: “Family law is painful.”

Earlier this year, LAist sat in on another of Pham’s morning dockets. That day, the cases included a woman living at a shelter who needed help locating another woman, unhoused, in order to serve her with a restraining order. Pham sent her to the court’s self-help desk.

In another case, which required a Mandarin interpreter for the plaintiff, Pham pushed back against the plaintiff’s hesitance to ask for a long-term restraining order against his wife, who had recently gotten out of jail and had a pending criminal case.

“This is the woman who hit you in the face with her palms,” Pham said from the bench, reading off a list of physical abuses by the wife from the man’s case file. “You want her to come back and do the same thing?”

Ultimately, Pham issued a restraining order against the wife for five years.

What is required of a judge?

If Pham knew or suspected that her husband was involved in illegal acts, did she have the duty to report it?

Not legally, Rosenthal, the Chapman law professor said.

“You could ask a moral philosopher that question and you might get an affirmative answer, but there is no law in California that requires you to report a crime,” Rosenthal said. He noted an exception: Witnesses do have to report certain serious crimes against minors.

Judges are required to comply with the California Code of Judicial Ethics “to preserve the integrity of the bench and to ensure the confidence of the public.”

The code’s second canon states: “a judge shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all of the judge’s activities.”

This includes judges’ personal and professional conduct, according to the California Supreme Court Committee on Judicial Ethics Opinions.

The scandal’s effect in the Vietnamese American legal community

Phan, the member of the Vietnamese American Bar Association of Southern California and Santa Ana official, said the scandal around Do is “just really disappointing to me and, I think, to the community.”

Phan noted that she was the first Vietnamese American public official in Orange County to publicly call for Do’s resignation, on social media.

“There are not a lot of Vietnamese American attorneys on the whole, and as a minority, whenever there’s some kind of scandal, it feels like it’s reflected on your whole community even though it isn’t,” Phan told LAist.

Phan said she first met Pham as a law student, along with Do, who is also a lawyer, although his license is currently suspended because of his felony conviction. Phan said Pham had served as a mentor and role model for Vietnamese American lawyers.

Now, Phan said, “I don’t think anyone is going to go put her as a reference.”

Still, Phan said she tries to give people the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t have a fully formed view of Judge Pham. I do of her husband,” she said.

LAist's Nick Gerda and Ted Rohrlich contributed to this report.