Animal welfare champion pleads not guilty to attempted kidnapping of former employee

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The founder of a Southern California animal welfare organization pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges he plotted to kidnap a former employee who had won a $6.7 million wrongful termination and discrimination judgment against him.

Leo Grillo, 77, entered his plea at a brief arraignment hearing before a U.S. magistrate judge in downtown Los Angeles.

“Not guilty, your honor,” Grillo said after affirming that he had read the charges and understood his rights.

The judge set a provisional May 5 trial date, though typically trial dates get postponed to give the defense more time to prepare or to seek to get charges dismissed ahead of a jury trial.

Grillo, who has also produced and starred in movies, has been in federal custody since his arrest on March 3. He is the founder of Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals, an animal welfare organization located at a 115-acre mountain-top ranch in LA County.

The nonprofit Grillo started in 1981 is purportedly the largest no-kill, care-for-life sanctuary of its kind of the world, with two veterinary hospitals and a full-time veterinary staff on its premises. It’s home to about 1,500 dogs, according to the organization’s website.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in LA say he spent months plotting to have the former employee abducted and flown to Mexico, where she would be held hostage until she agreed to settle the wrongful termination lawsuit that had resulted in the $6.7 million judgment against his organization, known as DELTA Rescue.

The charge carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

The government claims that in December 2025, Grillo sought out a contact — who is now a cooperating witness — and asked to meet in person. He insisted on face-to-face meetings, demanded his contact leave his cellphone in the car and communicated in what an FBI investigator described as coded language, referring to the kidnapping scheme as a documentary or production.

At a second meeting in January at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, Grillo described what he actually wanted, according to an FBI agent’s testimony included in the criminal complaint: “He wanted the woman who had sued him to be kidnapped along with her young child and for them to be transported to Mexico and held against their will.”

With the appeal of the $6.7 million verdict pending and a settlement conference approaching, prosecutors say Grillo wanted leverage over the woman who had beaten him in court.

If the case were retried and the plaintiff could not appear, Grillo told the cooperating witness, the outcome would be simple: “There’s no plaintiff! … I’m her, I’m not showing up for the retrial.”

DELTA Rescue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2025 and is appealing the November 2024 verdict, in which a jury awarded the former employee $5.68 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.

In February 2026, Grillo mailed the cooperating witness a $20,000 check from an account called “Animals Are People Too,” of which Grillo is president. The memo line read “Production,” consistent, prosecutors say, with the coded terminology Grillo had adopted for the plot.

Grillo, meanwhile, had changed the plan to kidnapping the former employee and her husband, rather than the child, and fly them to Mexico.

Days later, in a recorded phone call monitored by FBI agents, the cooperating witness laid out the plan in explicit terms, telling Grillo: “They can get her and the husband to the airport willingly and at that point they are going whether they want to or not. That flight’s taking off for a remote part of Mexico.”

Grillo responded: “Alrighty, we are good.”

The scheme purportedly unraveled on March 3. The cooperating witness met Grillo at the equestrian center and showed him a fabricated photograph on his cellphone appearing to depict the victim and her husband bound with zip ties, duct tape over the woman’s mouth.

Told that the kidnapping had gone according to plan but that a new flight route to Mexico was needed, Grillo wrote a second check for $10,000. Federal agents, monitoring the meeting in real time, arrested him at the end. Two firearms were recovered from Grillo.

After receiving his Miranda warnings, Grillo agreed to speak with investigators. He acknowledged recognizing the woman in the fabricated photograph and said that her inability to testify at a retrial would be a favorable development for DELTA Rescue. He claimed the payments were for a legitimate documentary.

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