Dana Nessel

Early life and education

Nessel was born in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, the daughter of Martin and Sandra Nessel. She is Jewish. She was raised in West Bloomfield and graduated from West Bloomfield High School in 1987, where she played soccer and was named All-State.

Nessel received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in political science from the University of Michigan in 1990 and a Juris Doctor from Wayne State University Law School in 1994. While in college, she also performed standup comedy for several years. While in law school, she was an intern in the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office.

Career

After graduating from law school, Nessel worked as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County for eleven years. She was the primary attorney on over 1,665 cases dealing with homicides, armed robberies, child abuse, sex crimes, carjackings and drug crimes.

In 2005, Nessel opened her legal firm, Nessel and Kessel Law with Chris Kessel, also a graduate of Wayne State Law School, where she handled criminal defense cases, civil rights actions, family law matters, and general tort litigation. While in private practice, she successfully represented the plaintiffs in DeBoer v. Snyder (2014).

Michigan Attorney General (2019–present)

In 2018, Nessel won the Democratic Party nomination for Michigan Attorney General over former U.S. Attorney for Western Michigan Patrick Miles Jr. She then narrowly defeated Republican state House Speaker Tom Leonard and three other candidates in the general election. She succeeded term-limited Republican Bill Schuette who ran unsuccessfully for the office of Governor.

Nessel was sworn into office on January 1, 2019. She is the first openly LGBTQ person elected to statewide office in Michigan. She became the first Democrat to serve as attorney general since Jennifer Granholm left the office in 2003, sixteen years earlier to become the new Michigan Governor.

Nessel immediately withdrew Michigan from eight federal lawsuits initiated by Schuette involving the separation of church and state, LGBTQ discrimination, environmental protection, and abortion.

Hate Crimes Unit

After a rise of hate crimes in Michigan for two years in a row, Nessel launched a Hate Crimes Unit within the Criminal Division of the Department of Attorney General. Before Nessel took office, the Michigan Department of Attorney General did not have any personnel assigned solely to the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes.

Conviction Integrity Unit

Nessel launched a new Conviction Integrity Unit within the Department of Attorney General's Criminal Appellate Division. The unit investigates credible claims of innocence and rectifies wrongful convictions. To do this, officials work with county prosecutors, law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, and innocence clinic projects.

Consumer Protection Division

Under her Consumer Protection Division, Nessel launched the state's first Payroll Fraud Enforcement Unit to investigate Michigan establishments that illegally misclassify workers or withhold wages and benefits. She also established the Department's Auto Insurance Fraud Unit, which received over 3,000 cases in four months.

Keeping her promise to protect and defend consumers and ratepayers, Nessel saved utility customers $3.6 million after intervening in SEMCO Energy's gas recovery plan case. As of the end of 2019, Nessel has helped save Michigan utility ratepayers a combined $355,809,700.

Elder Abuse Task Force

In collaboration with the Michigan Supreme Court, Nessel launched the Michigan Elder Abuse Task Force to combat physical abuse, financial exploitation, emotional abuse, and neglect of senior citizens. Nearly 50 different organizations including law enforcement, state agencies, the Michigan House of Representatives, Michigan Senate, Michigan Congressional delegation, and advocacy groups, have joined the task force. The task force initiatives include requiring professional guardians to become certified, developing statutory basic rights for families, reviewing the process of a guardian removing a ward from their home, and limiting the number of wards per guardian.

Michigan state COVID-19 pandemic policy

In March 2021, Nessel decided not to launch a criminal investigation into the impact of Governor Gretchen Whitmer's coronavirus pandemic policy of placing elderly patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in the same nursing home facilities as patients who did not contract coronavirus. At the time of Nessel's decision, an estimated 35% of all Michigan coronavirus deaths had occurred in long-term care facilities. The Michigan state government had been accused of underreporting deaths from COVID-19 that had occurred in long-term care facilities, and had denied freedom of information requests to investigate the matter. The Michigan Office of the Auditor General later reviewed the state's coronavirus data and found that the long-term care facility coronavirus death count up to July 2021 had underreported deaths in these facilities by 42%, while Governor Whitmer denies the findings in the audit. Auditor General Doug Ringler claimed that his office "didn't feel the word 'underreport' was fair. We cited it as a difference."

Robocall crackdown effort

Nessel started a statewide campaign to crack down on illegal robocalls targeting Michigan residents. This campaign includes initiatives to educate the public, toughen enforcement, and update state law. As of March 2020, over 2,400 caller complaints of illegal robocalls had been received by Nessel's office.

Additionally, Nessel joined a bipartisan group of state attorneys general in filing a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Barr v. American Assn. of Political Consultants, Inc.; the AGs argued in favor of preserving the anti-robocall provisions of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Twitter death threat

On March 2, 2023, Nessel announced that she was among several Jewish government officials targeted in antisemitic threats made on social media by a heavily armed Michigan man. Jack Eugene Carpenter III, of Tipton, Michigan, was charged in federal court with transmitting an interstate threat, a felony. Carpenter was accused of tweeting from Texas in February 2023: "I'm heading back to Michigan now threatening to carry out the punishment of death to anyone that is jewish in the Michigan govt if they don't leave, or confess." Carpenter possessed three handguns, a shotgun, and two rifles, and was under investigation for stealing a handgun, according to federal prosecutors. Commenting on the threat on Twitter, Nessel stated: "It is my sincere hope that the federal authorities take this offense just as seriously as my Hate Crimes & Domestic Terrorism Unit takes plots to murder elected officials." Carpenter was found incompetent to stand trial, suffering from a combination of unusually grandiose conspiracy theories and a persecution complex, with threatening posts toward others included a vow to execute Elon Musk.

2026 Michigan Convention Boycott

Dana Nessel, has claimed that she has faced antisemitic harassment and has said that she plans to skip the state party’s 2026 Democratic convention due to the threats of further abuse. In a statement regarding the convention Nessel said: “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel reportedly said. “I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying.”

However Nessel has also made statements telling American Jews that they need to prioritize the wider population's safety over their own, invoking the Queen Esther story from the Jewish holiday of Purim as an example. Saying in a statement at a meeting of Michigan Jewish Democrats that they need “to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”

High-profile cases and investigations

Nessel took over the department's investigation into Catholic Church sexual abuse cases from her predecessor, Bill Schuette. As of December 2019, the Department of Attorney General has received 641 tips on its clergy abuse hotline, identified 270 priests alleged to be abusers from dioceses in Marquette, Gaylord, and Grand Rapids, and received allegations involving 552 victims of clergy sexual abuse since the beginning of the investigation. So far, 1.5 million paper documents and 3.5 million electronic documents have been seized. The investigation team has reviewed 130 cases for potential charges, 50 of which were closed because the statute of limitations barred prosecution or the priest in question had died. Twenty-five cases have been referred back to the diocese for action because the priests were in active ministry.

In a February 2019 news conference, Nessel accused Catholic Church leadership of failing to cooperating with law enforcement, and criticized them for encouraging some victims to sign confidential settlements or nondisclosure agreements. Nessel told church officials to stop "self-policing" sexual abuse within the church and to encourage victims to talk with state investigators, adding "If an investigator comes to your door and asks to speak with you, please ask to see their badge and not their rosary." Some criticized Nessel for the "rosary" statement, viewing it as an insensitive barb against a devotional practice.

In October 2020, Nessel released interim report with results of her office's two-year investigation; the office's report accused 454 priests of sexually abusing 811 people in the state of Michigan across all seven dioceses. Eleven priests were charged in Michigan with sex crimes from 2019 onward: several pleaded guilty, with extradition proceedings against others were pending. In October 2022, Nessel released a detailed report on allegations of sexual abuse in the Diocese of Marquette, listing abuse allegations, dating back to 1950, against 44 priests. This is the first of seven diocese-by-diocese final reports that the AG's Office plans to release.

After the Larry Nassar scandal, Nessel's office launched an investigation into Michigan State University (MSU). Ultimately, Nessel charged MSU president Lou Anna Simon; Kathie Klages, the head coach for MSU's gymnastics team while Nassar was team doctor; and William Strampel, former dean of the MSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine, a former boss of Nassar. Strampel was convicted in a jury trial of one felony count of misconduct in office and two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty; an appeals court upheld the convictions in 2021. Klages was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2018 and sentenced to 90 days in jail, but the Michigan Court of Appeals vacated the conviction in 2022 on a 2–1 vote. The charges against Simon were dismissed in 2020; Nessel's office appealed, but a Michigan Court of Appeals panel unanimously upheld the dismissal in 2022; in a concurring opinion, Judge Elizabeth L. Gleicher criticized the investigation into Simon as a "sham" and wrote that the former university president was a "scapegoat" and "high profile target, selected to assuage public anger rather than to protect the integrity of the law."

Personal life

Nessel met her wife Alanna Maguire while they were both working on the legal case DeBoer v. Snyder, which was ultimately successful in striking down Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage. Nessel proposed to Maguire in 2015 outside of the United States Supreme Court. The couple married in July 2015 with the marriage being officiated by Judge Bernard A. Friedman, who had originally struck down Michigan's same-sex marriage ban in March 2014.

Nessel and Maguire have twin sons.