Nicole Mitchell Meets Les Miz

Last year after Senator Nicole Mitchell stealthily entered her stepmother’s house(same house where Mitchell used to live)in dark recon gear in the middle of the night, everyone was stunned.

Then when she said she’d gone there to retrieve cherished personal items that her late father had wanted her to have, people were confused. Their confusion quickly turned to disbelief, however, when she added that she’d also gone there to check on her stepmother’s precarious medical condition. Really?

Something was terribly wrong with this picture. Senator Mitchell wasn’t just a dedicated public servant, she also proudly served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard. She hadn’t just done a stint as a broadcast meteorologist for KSTP-TV, she also had the guts to fly into the eye of a hurricane more than once. So why would a woman of such strength and courage want to open a basement window that Spring night and sneak into her stepmother’s home instead of knocking at the door during the daytime? Why would she want to jeopardize her political career like that?

Unfortunately, these questions were never answered by her in a way that made sense. Little wonder that over a year later on Friday, July 18th, 2025, a jury found her guilty of first degree burglary and felony possession of burglary tools.

In my op-ed posted on Monday, May 6, 2024(“In Defense of Nicole Mitchell”) I tried to delve deeper into what had happened and why so little understanding was extended to her. No doubt her own reticence to defend herself seemed to make her guilty in the court of public opinion. Defending herself, though, would have meant exposing her personal life she’d wanted to keep secret.

Could it be that her father’s death and stepmother’s subsequent ghosting of her adversely affected Nicole’s judgement? (I’ve always thought so.) Extreme stress inflamed by grief can do that to anyone. If you’re a busy mother, state legislator, and LT. Colonel in the Air National Guard, however, you might hesitate to admit you have such a problem. You might even consider such a problem to be a sign of weakness or defeat.

But bits and pieces of information reported by the media conjured up a mosaic of crazymaking episodes that would have confounded the most temperate, reasonable, forgiving human being. It wasn’t a case of an elephant in the living room, though. It was a case of 4 elephants and not enough peanuts but too much poo to handle.

ELEPHANT #1: STEPMOTHER vs. STEPDAUGHTER
Any way you slice it, this entire incident is a family matter — NOT a felony for the courts. It’s just the kind of familial drama that Eugene O’Neill should have handled in one of his plays — NOT the kind that any family court ever wants to step in.

On the surface it does appear to be a disagreement over the possessions of a deceased loved one. Dig a little deeper, though, and it sure feels like Stepmom never really liked Stepdaughter Nicole. Why?

Who knows? Maybe because she wasn’t HER child? Maybe because she thought Nicole’s reserved manner sounded too condescending, too aloof? Or maybe because she could never accept having a gay stepdaughter.

According to the “Family Background” heading of BiographyKind.com, “Nicole has largely kept her personal life private. She is married to a woman and is a mother…”

If she’s largely kept her personal life private, though, how can anyone say or report with conviction that she’s married to a woman?

Having a same sex marriage could explain her stepmother’s hostility towards her. Whether we like it or not, there are still some people in the 21st century who remain intolerant of anybody or anything that’s not heterosexual. Perhaps Nicole’s Stepmother is one of those people.

Certainly, that kind of rejection could have driven Nicole, or anyone for that matter, to uncharacteristically act in that unreasonable, bizarre way of breaking and entering. And yet, defending her actions by disclosing her sexual preference would also mean exposing her privacy. Even if that really had been the reason for Stepmom’s disdain, Nicole Mitchell would unfairly be accused of playing the LBGTQ card — and be forever epitomized as too “Left Woke.”

Since Nicole has chosen to be such a private person in the public eye — a rare, if not impossible, choice nowadays — such things about her marriage and personal life remain speculative. Even though I’ve come across other photos online that support this notion of her same sex partnership, I can’t say for sure that she’s Gay or that such Gayness bothered her stepmother that much.

In all fairness to Nicole (and her children) I can say without a doubt that her stepmother’s treatment of her remains so unfair and puzzling that no one might ever know the real reason for it.

ELEPHANT #2: MYSTERIOUS, MISUNDERSTOOD DEMENTIA AND COGNITIVE DECLINE

According to medical records and court testimony, Nicole Mitchell’s stepmother had been suffering from some kind of dementia…but not necessarily one that incapacitated her 24/7 from rational, logical thought. Not one that was bad enough to land her in an assisted living home, either.

And yet, her kind of forgetfulness — the kind that would unpredictably come and go, here and there — WAS problematic enough to make family members(even estranged ones like Nicole) be worried and concerned.

So here was an aging widow suffering from a cognitive decline that even the medical establishment couldn’t properly or correctly define or categorize, with no effective medical treatment plan or tried-and-true treatment for her in sight.

Look closer at the police footage from that night, however, and you’ll see that this cute little old lady displayed a convenient form of her dementia. Even though it was dark and she was supposedly terrified that an intruder was on the premises, she managed to phone 911 and clearly gave them the info needed to quickly come to her aid. Even though she’d been sleeping and startled awake, she recognized Nicole Mitchell almost immediately after the police arrived on scene.

In fact, she had the cool presence of mind to tell an officer, “She’s a senator!”

Funny how her on-again/off-again memory loss seemed designed to impact her stepdaughter in the worst way. She also stressed how frightened she was and identified the intruder as “Nicole — I’m scared of her!” Were her comments intentionally directed to make her stepdaughter sound like the worst human being ever? Or, was she revealing another symptom of a real cognitive problem?

Once again, dear readers, I can only wonder “Who Knows?” We’re wading in uncharted waters here when it comes to understanding aging brains. Yes, there really is a form of dementia that’s on-again/off-again. No, scientists aren’t positively sure of why it happens or what form of dementia someone might have. So if renowned scientists and medical specialists don’t know where ailing elderly forgetfulness begins and ornery old lady subterfuge ends, then how is anyone supposed to know what’s happening and how to best deal with it?

ELEPHANT #3: DEATH, TAXES & PROBATE COURT NIGHTMARE

According to the information I’ve garnered, Nicole Mitchell’s father had no written will and no children with his second wife, Nicole’s stepmother. The State of Minnesota has Probate Law for Estate Succession in cases like this one. That is, “…if the deceased has children from another relationship, the wife(A.K.A. Nicole’s stepmother) typically inherits the first $225,000, plus one-half of the remaining balance. The children from the other relationship(A.K.A. Nicole) inherit the remaining portion.”

Of course, there’s no way to know if there was even $225,000 in this family that was available to be inherited. Or if Nicole actually inherited anything from their father’s estate.

Furthermore, the website Minnesota Judicial Branch(.gov)
offers further legal clarification: “It’s important to note that these rules apply only to assets that are subject to probate(assets owned solely by the deceased) and not to non-probate assets like life insurance policies or jointly owned property with rights of survivorship. These assets will pass directly to the named beneficiaries or the surviving joint tenant, regardless of the intestacy laws.”

As if to complicate matters further, Stepmom wanted her late husband to be cremated.

In Minnesota, cremation laws favor the one who pays for the loved one to get cremated — whoever that is. As long as you pay for it, you can come up with a legal contract to exclude all info about the cremation — when it happened, where the ashes were strewn or interred, even that the cremation ever happened — to anyone and everyone, including next of kin or children. That didn’t seem to happen in this case…And yet, the fact that Nicole wanted to give her father a funeral with patriotic and military flourishes and Stepmom made a point to cremate husband #2 indicate that another possible bone of contention between these two women existed.

ELEPHANT #4: HIDDEN POLITICAL AGENDA COLLIDES WITH HOMESPUN MORALITY

After the jury found Nicole Mitchell guilty on both felony burglary charges, a roving TV reporter began interviewing citizens about it. That meant that he wandered around and stuck a microphone in the faces of random citizens and asked “What do you think of the verdict in Nicole Mitchell’s trial?” What came out of their mouths was stringent legal interpretation peppered with Sunday school morality:

When you break the law you should go to jail.
She did something illegal and should pay the price.
I’m satisfied with the verdict. She was guilty all right.
If you’re a lawmaker you should obey the law.
That’s what happens when you break the law.

How many of these righteous citizens do you suppose voted for Donald J.Trump in the 2024 Presidential Election?

Since these interviews were conducted in a largely Purple County, yah ya betcha a lot of those interviewees voted for Trump — convicted felon, habitual liar, vindictive sociopath, and shady businessman. Don’t get me started about the way he keeps violating our U.S. Constitution. There’s not enough space here for me to list all the laws he keeps ignoring like some crazed warlord from an episode of Xena, Warrior Princess. And yet, these forthright citizens think nothing of supporting Trump while applauding the most severe punishment for ex-Senator Mitchell.

Her treatment brings to mind what happened to Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables. In this story, Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his seven nieces and nephews(his sister’s children) and gets sentenced to 5 years in jail, no mercy whatsoever extended for his intent. Then because he keeps trying to escape from prison, he racks up an extra 14 years and ends up spending 19 years in jail.

Needless to say, stealing food is not the same as invading a family member’s home to retrieve what you believe is rightfully yours and to make a welfare check on your stepmother. What makes these cases so similar is the degree of sentencing so many people wanted to inflict on both Valjean and Mitchell.

Then think about it: the only real difference between these 2 cases was that Valjean was caught with the bread while Mitchell was found in the house without any stolen goods on her person. The prosecution kept harping about her intent: what she was going to steal, what she wanted to steal wasn’t really hers, and how there were some papers found in her backpack. But nothing WAS actually stolen.

Furthermore, she had no weapons, she used no weapons. Nobody got killed, nobody got hurt or wounded. There was no attempted murder, or even murder planned that night. And yet, the prosecution knocked itself out making sure she would get prosecuted, then punished to the full extent of the law…even if the case was more of a family matter gone bad and not a true criminal act.

What’s really absurd here is that the items Mitchell believed were hers and so wanted to possess were more of a sentimental value rather than a monetary one. Even the papers the prosecution claimed were taken by Mitchell weren’t even worth $10. In fact, if she had actually taken all the stuff she’d been accused of “stealing,” her heist would have easily been less than $50 in total.

You know, at this point, I’m beginning to think that Barbra Streisand’s signature song got it all wrong. People who need people aren’t the luckiest people after all. The luckiest people are the ones who attempt murder and fail. Like that mother who put drugs in her son’s IV and made him sick but didn’t kill him. So far, no jail time for her. Or maybe the luckiest people are the ones who kill other people but then say they didn’t mean to. You know, like that cop who yelled “Taser! Taser!” then fired a gun at a driver and killed him. She got a light sentence, then got out early because the Judge explained keeping her in prison wouldn’t do her any good.

Hmm. Personally, I think Nicole Mitchell should have gotten some different lawyers to handle her case. She didn’t. So I hope she appeals her conviction. Justice is simply not served when killers and would-be killers do less time than a “thief” who hasn’t stolen anything.