“The most diverse Council we’ve had in Ann Arbor history”
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Welcome to Episode 10 of Hollow Hype. In Episode 9, Ann Arbor city leaders beat back local campaign finance reform as local news outlets chose not to publish anything about Heidi’s criminal record. Students at the Michigan Daily eventually published the story in March 2025.
The Michigan Daily article laid out a cluster of damning facts: Heidi’s criminal history, the favorable policy she had extracted from members of Ann Arbor City Council, and the money she had given to their campaigns, as one of their biggest donors. I was sure that the reaction to this article would be massive. People in Ann Arbor would be horrified that their city government - both elected leaders and high level city staff - had been taken in by a convicted felon. Heidi was finally exposed.
DAN RUBENSTEIN:
Either on Nextdoor or Facebook groups, I don't know, she was courageous enough to put herself out there and discuss these things in public
My understanding is that there were essentially two times when she was convicted of something and she tried to argue in both cases that it was either a misunderstanding or it wasn't what it appeared to be and she did everything she could to try to do the right thing. You know she just tried to whitewash and that was my impression of her is that she was making excuses for herself.
[MUSIC]
ELIZABETH NELSON:
My name is Elizabeth Nelson. From 2018 to 2022, I served on Ann Arbor City Council. That experience taught me a lot. Mostly, I learned: people will say just about anything if they think you’ll believe it. This is HOLLOW HYPE.
When the Michigan Daily finally published their story about Heidi, I was in Chicago, helping pack up my mother-in-law’s apartment.
[Sound effect, cabinets opening]
While emptying closets and kitchen cabinets, I tried to explain the significance of this article to my sister in law, Kristin, and her Aunt Martha. They knew nothing about what had happened years earlier. My FBI encounter was not exactly a fun anecdote to share at family functions. I showed Kristin and Martha the headline and tried to describe the City government that now existed in Ann Arbor, all that had gone wrong in the space of five years.
It was weird to be away from home when that story broke. I could only imagine its impact. Other local news outlets would be eager to report on the convicted felon who had so much influence in Ann Arbor. Right? They were not.
JOHN GODFREY:
The ensuing silence was stunning. And it is, to my mind, an indictment of the deterioration of local journalism… indictment is probably the wrong word. It's the consequence.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
That’s my friend John. He and his wife Irma have lived in Ann Arbor about ten years longer than me. Their children grew up here.
[MUSIC]
JOHN GODFREY:
I'm an academic. We came to Ann Arbor in 1993, where I joined the University of Michigan as the associate director of the International Institute. Before that, I'd been at Northwestern where I'd been an administrator and taught for four years and prior to that at Yale, And since joining the University, I went on to be an assistant to the provost and then one of the deans at the Rackham Graduate School.
We live south of Stadium in a great neighborhood close to St. Francis. It's pretty diverse. It's great to see change and turnover in the neighborhood. Those new families are moving in and it's an exciting time.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
John publishes a newsletter for his neighbors.
JOHN GODFREY:
I think it was when I was close to retirement from the university,
We both realized, Irma and I realized that we were just not as informed as we needed to be to understand what seemed to be happening to the city, which was the beginning of a period of growth and encouragement of new development.
We decided to try to put together a kind of a layman's lowbrow journalism effort by putting together a newsletter - just for the neighborhood association - in which we would try to track
what was happening in the city and how these processes of development for approval were taking place inside of local government. And try to understand how local government actually operated. And this was entirely new to me. My life to that point had been absolutely wrapped up inside the university and its vast, complex internal workings. And I realized I knew nothing effectively about how the city governed itself and how decisions were made. So we began a newsletter and it went out roughly every week,
ELIZABETH NELSON:
He started that newsletter shortly after the explosion of money in our city elections. The candidates who would use this money were chosen carefully. They had agreed to approve every agenda put in front of them. Once elected, they did. Unanimously.
In 2024, John and I worked together on the local initiative for campaign finance reform. We were both very disappointed by the approach of elected leaders, distorting that issue and other strategies to expand participation in our democracy.
JOHN GODFREY:
There were many disingenuous claims being made. And it wasn't substantive. I'm an academic, I understand debate. But I also understand intellectual dishonesty. And that is unfortunately what I saw.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
The same campaign finance reform had been implemented in Evanston, Illinois. This is how city leaders in Evanston discussed the value of publicly financed campaigns.
[Recorded presentation 2018]
BOBBY BURNS:
Right now we have a small group of people who donate to campaigns we have a small amount of people who determine elections local elections and statewide elections because they actually vote.
Ultimately we have a system that is really focused on investing and prioritizing people with money and people who vote and so what happens to the majority of folks who feel disconnected from their local governing bodies and state and national governing bodies. So both of these programs - whether it's voucher or whether a small donor - are gonna answer the question how do we get more people engaged
DEVON REID:
By implementing a small donor match program or a voucher program I think we can increase the number of folks who are running from throughout the city and we can also increase participation in folks throughout the city and that's the goal of my office as the local election official.
Get involved in the campaign and contact the mayor, contact your aldermen and let them know that you support public financing of campaigns and that you want to see Evanston be a Midwestern leader in making sure that all of our voices are heard in our democracy
ELIZABETH NELSON:
This is how Mayor Christopher Taylor defended a unanimous City Council - supported by a common network of wealth and political action committees - that had tripled the amount of money spent on city campaigns in Ann Arbor:
[Television broadcast 2024]
MAYOR CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR:
This is the most diverse Council we’ve had in Ann Arbor history and it’s little surprise to me that folks are trying to change the rules.
[Radio broadcast 2024]
We don’t have $425,000 to pay out to political candidates
ELIZABETH NELSON:
The Michigan Daily story was published just four months after so-called progressive City leaders banded together to block local campaign finance reform.
[MUSIC]
Heidi was Exhibit A for what can go wrong when a small number of large donors own every seat in a local government. She was the example of what happens when all dissent is extinguished.
JOHN GODFREY:
Our, let's call it our city's elite - the decision makers, elected officials, the networks of money and influence that shape those leaders - is very small and very tightly held. In larger places, there are opportunities to organize, to emerge institutions that have countervailing views that make things more complicated, that challenge the assumptions of the ruling elite.
In a larger city, there are lots of opportunities for advancement. Here, there is a more restricted entry point to this. So, you know, in a way it's, I guess, it's simply a function of size. If Ann Arbor was a half a million people, I think it'd look quite different.
Who Heidi Poscher was, how she was operating as an enterprising businesswoman, how she was cultivating relationships with decision makers and influential networks in the city. That is a story of, I think extraordinary complexity, and it is as much about the city of Ann Arbor as it is about Heidi herself.
Who she was, where she had come from, what her criminal record was, how she was establishing influence through political donations and cultivating relationships with elected officials and decision makers. This strikes me as being one of the paramount political stories in Ann Arbor, maybe in decades. And it was astonishing that there was no local coverage of it, that there was a willful turning of a blind eye. Why that was, one can only surmise it was fear.
We basically have one reporter covering city politics. He doesn't have companions, fellow journalists in the same newsroom who are struggling to land a good story. So everything falls quiet. Everything falls silent. There's no incentive. There's only fear, retribution, being cut off from sources, being cut off from influence, not having access. Those are very powerful levers. And officials who know how to manipulate those levers, this is part of the ways in which they can be successful.
The Detroit press is retracted from statewide coverage. They've cut back their newsrooms terribly. They're not going to cover Ann Arbor unless it's another scandal with the athletic department or something really, really serious happens in the city. We're just outside of their event horizon. Boom. That's it.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Most people in Ann Arbor never saw the Michigan Daily article.
When it was shared on social media, apologists for the mayor mostly dismissed Heidi’s criminal record as insignificant or unimportant. They pivoted quickly to attacks on everyone quoted in the article: the people who raised concerns about Heidi had lost elections or they were NIMBYs or they were conspiracy theorists or something worse. Loud voices online argued, essentially, that the Michigan Daily article was FAKE NEWS.
JOHN GODFREY:
The social media community in Ann Arbor is actually very small. It sounds loud to participants, to people who participate in it, but you're like, do the body count, and the numbers aren't very big. And poking past that is, you know, into this great void. I mean, how, how do you, how do you reach further out into the community? It's a real problem.
NANCY LEFF:
It didn't surprise me that it wasn't posted on the LoBuPa email group because we had had this real dust up, previous. And I think people just didn't want to go there. Obviously no one went there and I just don't know how many people actually saw it.
[MUSIC]
DAN RUBENSTEIN:
I've lived here on and off since the early 80s moved here permanently in 1994, bought our house here in 96. My wife taught at Community High School which is what kept bringing us back here, and she basically did most of her entire career there so she was there for 30 years on and off. Because we settled here, I went to work for Ford Motor Company.
I have a PhD in political science and then I combined that later in my career with an MBA from from Ross here. So when I do consulting work now I'm a China political and economic risk management consultant
ELIZABETH NELSON:
That’s my friend Dan. He started paying attention to local politics around the same time I did. He and I are frustrated by many of the same things.. How public debate is so often dominated by ham-fisted rhetoric. How nuance is lost in that rhetoric and leaders avoid the substance of issues. Reaction to the Michigan Daily article was typical.
DAN RUBENSTEIN:
I think it fit a larger pattern which I've definitely seen in Ann Arbor politics which is you know the people who opposed the mayor's people - mayor's coalition - in any way, their reputations have been smeared and so that now there's a guilt by association any information that comes out from certain people in the community is pretty much automatically discounted because it comes from that person.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi had done everything she could to identify as part of the Mayor’s coalition, building relationships with key players.
In 2023, Heidi and her wife Marge co-hosted a dinner for State Representative Jason Morgan. The fundraiser at Venue generated over $10,000 for Jason Morgan’s campaign. Morgan would be a very strategic friend– in 2024, his husband Jon Mallek was elected to Ann Arbor City Council.
In 2024, the Poschers persuaded State Representative Felicia Brabec to write a glowing endorsement of Southtown. In 2025, Marge Poscher made months of recurring donations to Brabec’s campaign for State Senate, right up until her untimely death.
Heidi and Marge gave thousands to other political committees and individuals in state government.
They donated to State Senator Stephanie Chang, and State Representatives Mai Xiong and Reggie Miller. They gave to Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Legacy PAC founded by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson who, in 2026, is the democratic candidate for governor.
The Michigan Daily article raised questions about money and influence in city government, but that wasn’t even the whole story. Many of us knew that the problem was much bigger than Heidi.
DAN RUBENSTEIN:
It was discounted as either being exaggerated, as Heidi tried to whitewash and justify herself. It was being exaggerated or it was just so unfair because this person had already paid their debt to society and why are we punishing them. And any suggestion that the $5,000 that she gave to Taylor's PAC or any money she gave to other council members, if you suggested that there was any kind of a quid pro quo there or that that even influenced their vote in any way they got very indignant. You know this is “you can't be accusing people of that” but of course we all know - and the Democratic Party agrees - that our campaign finance system is legalized corruption. It's like, this is not a controversial progressive position, but yet the people who were backing the mayor would just, you know, vociferously deny it.
[MUSIC]
ELIZABETH NELSON:
In Ann Arbor, Heidi had joined a network of political donors who are now a major source of funds for the democratic party at the state and federal level.
Senator Elissa Slotkin has famously said that she raises more money in the living rooms of wealthy Ann Arborites than she does in cities on the coast.
Political donors in Ann Arbor believe they are doing good work when they write big checks to support candidates. At the state and federal level, the stakes are high. Reproductive rights for women, social safety nets for the poor, and fundamental human rights for other marginalized groups hang in the balance. These elections matter, a lot. When the political fundraising season brings superstars like Rahm Emanuel and Senator Jon Ossoff into Ann Arbor living rooms, the local hosts don’t see themselves as buying access or influence. The deep pockets in Ann Arbor are helping. Money is needed. As big donors, they are making a positive difference.
Big donors have a real impact.
Since 2018, former City Council member Linh Song has given over $700,000 to political campaigns in Michigan. In 2020, she gave over $20,000 to her own campaign for city council. For her, it was a relatively small price to pay for a seat at the table. In her four years on City Council, Song’s biggest achievement was directing over $3 million in federal funds to a public safety program that did not exist. Three years later, the money had to be reallocated, because the program still didn’t exist. At her last City Council meeting in 2024, a parade of elected officials lined up to offer public comments, praising Linh Song – she had donated thousands to their campaigns.
[MUSIC]
In 2024, the local debate about campaign finance reform highlighted an ugly truth about Ann Arbor politics. Big money was driving the bus and elected leaders would fight hard to keep it that way. In 2025, the story of Heidi highlighted another ugly truth: when money drives the bus, it can come from anyone, even a convicted felon with an agenda.
JOHN GODFREY:
We're dependent on ever larger amounts of money. They don't want to rock anything. They don't want to approach anything that's going to create scandal or threaten the money flow. Absolutely.
DAN RUBENSTEIN:
It's an inconvenient truth and it hurts them so they're gonna just not talk about it or downplay it or deny. It in this case it was mainly downplaying and just being silent about it
I think that she became part of that group and it took a while for people to kind of emotionally cut those ties and to say “oh I made a mistake, I'm friends with the wrong person.” You know, that's hard for anybody so I think part of it is that kind of just a social dynamic. You know, you're gonna initially try to defend the people who are in your group, because you think you're the good group, you're the good guys.
You know it's one thing to say well she's a private actor, we can't stop her from doing this and plus we kind of like that this is a development building more housing and it's another thing to bend over backwards to change public policy to accommodate someone who has lost so much money and been convicted of fraud and to me those are two very different things
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Reaction to the Michigan Daily story died down quickly. There was no followup, no additional reporting from anyone else. I was amazed. Our community was supposed to care. We should be more engaged. The gamesmanship around campaign finance reform was exasperating, but the news about Heidi was beyond the pale. How could a city as educated as Ann Arbor be so disconnected from what was happening?
Established city journalists wouldn’t report on Heidi’s criminal background. When student journalists reported it, no local media outlet would share it. I wondered: was there a way to tell this story outside of our local echo chamber? Outside of Ann Arbor. Perhaps even outside of Michigan.
[MUSIC]
I started filming interviews in the summer of 2025. I talked to everyone I could think of who had some insight into what was happening in our local government. Heidi wasn’t the whole story. She was a symptom of a much bigger problem. I put together 45 minutes of interviews, with minimal narration. I tried to take myself out of the story, but that edit felt incomplete and superficial.
It bothered me that I had so little of the backstory, before Heidi came to Ann Arbor. The Michigan Daily had published a few court records about Heidi’s felony convictions, but those records included very few details about how she did it, what exactly happened. Heidi was ready with excuses. I wanted to know the facts.
I made my first trip to Ohio and West Virginia earlier this year. I found a treasure trove of newspaper clippings and archived government papers, none of which are available online. The newspaper stories were particularly compelling. The sheer volume of reporting made me realize how much the Ann Arbor community has lost in terms of local journalism.
Twenty years ago, Heidi’s felony convictions in California were exposed in Marietta, Ohio. The Marietta Times and Parkersburg News and Sentinel published multiple articles, questioning local leaders. Journalists interviewed the people who did business with Heidi and publicized the local organizations that had supported her schemes. The newspapers tried to explain how a convicted felon had gained so much influence in the community. The news was not buried. It was reported, in detail. In the years that followed, Heidi’s indictment, conviction, sentencing, and plea agreement generated multiple headlines.
This year in Ann Arbor, a lot of news about Heidi is not reported. Next month, the bankruptcy of Southtown will have a final hearing in Detroit. One proposal to settle that bankruptcy will allow Heidi to walk away with $13 million, based on the financial interests of her recently deceased wife, Marge.
Thanks for listening. Visit HollowHype.com to find more information about this episode.
Coming up in episode 11: The bankruptcy of Southtown attracts new investors and enough money to pay off $30 million in debt. Heidi stands to gain $13 million plus an interest in the future development.
If you have something to share about Heidi’s activities in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, or California. Please reach out to hollowhypepodcast@gmail.com
