Detroit lawyer: My friend, JD Vance, ditched beliefs for ‘money and power’

• Michigan attorney releases trove of email communications with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance 
• In 2016 emails, Vance called Donald Trump ‘morally reprehensible,’ criticized law enforcement and expressed a belief in systemic racism
• Sofia Nelson, who is transgender, said her friendship with Vance ended after he took office and introduced a youth gender reassignment ban

A Michigan attorney is stepping into the national spotlight by releasing personal emails that she says reveal the “political opportunism” of JD Vance, the Ohio Republican senator now serving as former President Donald Trump’s running mate. 

Listening to his current rhetoric “really broke my heart," Sofia Nelson told Bridge Michigan on Sunday after first sharing the story of her broken friendship with Vance in The New York Times. 

Nelson, a progressive who grew up in Michigan but met Vance at Yale Law School in Connecticut, provided the Times – and subsequently Bridge – with years of emails and text messages between herself and Vance.

Their emails document a political shift for Vance, a conservative but once-strident critic of Trump. 

A month before Trump was elected president in 2016, Vance called him “such a fucking disaster” in an email to Nelson. “He's just a bad man,” Vance wrote at the time. “A morally reprehensible human being.”

Vance also expressed sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement, indicated a belief in systemic racism and expressed openness to the idea of universal basic income – positions generally opposed by Trump conservatives. 

He told Nelson he saw impoverished inner-city neighborhoods as “the direct consequence of efforts to segregate and keep Black people out.” 

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Nelson and Vance had formed a friendship despite their ideological differences. But Nelson, who is transgender, has said their friendship ended after he voiced support for a 2021 Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. He later sponsored similar national legislation.

In an interview with Bridge, Nelson said was motivated to share her experience with Vance so transgender youth can see “these leaders who are attacking them aren't doing so because they're actually scared of them or think they're bad — they're doing so from a place of political opportunism."

Nelson said she still cares “a lot” about Vance but felt an obligation to expose what she has seen of his political transformation.

“The fact that Mr. Vance has turned his back on what I believe to be his core values in order to amass money and power is a reflection on his integrity and trustworthiness,” Nelson told Bridge. “I felt a duty to my community to give them information, to be able to make an informed decision.”

‘My only really liberal friend’

Nelson grew close to Vance as part of the same friend group at Yale and maintained correspondence within him for nearly a decade afterward. 

That group is mentioned in Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which refers to Nelson as an “extremely progressive lesbian.” In emails, Vance and Nelson referred to one another affectionately and openly shared their takes on current events. At one point they mulled creating a podcast.

“I think you're my only really liberal friend with whom I talk openly about politics on a deeper sense,” Vance wrote her in 2015.

The next year, she told him, “What I value in you is your genuineness, curiosity, kindness and desire to make a difference.” She called him “a true friend.”

Since then, however, Nelson said her opinion has changed. 

“The way that he talks about people without children, about trans people, about immigrants, I don't think is reflective of the basic respect that those of us who grew up in the Rust Belt treat our neighbors with,” Nelson said.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Bridge Michigan. But in a statement to the Times, Vance spokesperson Luke Schroeder called it “unfortunate” that Nelson “chose to leak decade-old private conversations between friends.”

“Senator Vance values his friendships with individuals across the political spectrum,” Schroeder said. 

“He has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he changed his mind on President Trump. Despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best.”

A love for Michigan

Nelson grew up in Wayland, a small community of several thousand in Allegan County, on the Lower Peninsula’s west side. 

“I grew up in an overwhelmingly conservative community, and those friendships that I forged I still have today, across religious divides, across political divides, because the truth is, once you get to know somebody, you understand that what unites us is greater than what divides us,” she told Bridge. 

Nelson now works as a public defender in Detroit after previously working at the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office. 

She said she isn’t interested in attention despite the national attention her story has already generated. 

“I'm not a public person, and nor do I have any particular desire to be one. I enjoy my privacy and my simple life,” Nelson said.

Her desire to speak up and share her past communications with Vance came from her own background, she said, and a love for Michigan.

“We are home to the largest Muslim population in the United States, we certainly have many LGBTQ residents. Over half the state is women, and these are all constituencies that would suffer under Vance's leadership,” she told Bridge. 

Changing views

Nelson said Vance has changed his stances on abortion, gay marriage, rights for transgender people, immigration and policing tactics.

Vance has expressed empathy with Black Lives Matter and in 2014, as the killing of Michael Brown became national news while protests erupted in Missouri, Vance wrote to Nelson he supported a requirement for police to wear body cameras.

“I hate the police,” he wrote. “Given the number of negative experiences I've had in the past few years, I can't imagine what a black guy goes through.”

Immediately after, Vance explained that some planning conflicts would prevent him from traveling to Michigan for a football game between Michigan State University and Ohio State University.

Throughout 2015 and 2016, Vance and Nelson discussed Trump’s political rise, and misgivings Vance had about the soon-to-be president’s impact on the nation.

“The more white people feel like voting for Trump, the more black people will suffer,” he wrote Nelson in September 2016. “I really believe that.”

Vance wrote that he didn’t feel Trump’s supporters were racist, but said those views were “coexisting with … rather than driving his support.”

“If there's a feeling of resentment that drives Trumpism, it's the resentment of other white people who think they're better than you and are voting for Hillary, but I think even that is simplistic,” Vance wrote to Nelson a week before the 2016 election. 

“I am really trying (and failing) to articulate and understand it, but there's a core cultural divide, along with the racism of some, that is driving the ship.”