Facing child porn charges, radio host breached court monitoring rules
MARCH 5--The San Francisco radio host facing child pornography charges lied to federal officials about his whereabouts after investigators recently received an alert that he had violated his "electronic monitoring schedule." Bernard Ward's bail violations are mentioned in a February 28 "status memorandum" sent by a pretrial services officer to Judge Maria Elena James (the memo provided James with an account of Ward's first months under electronic monitoring). The document, a copy of which you'll find below, does not describe where Ward, 56, went on December 21, when officials discovered his bail violation. During a subsequent court hearing, Ward admitted the monitoring violation and acknowledged giving "false information to Pretrial Services regarding his whereabouts" when first confronted by federal agents. The government memo notes that Ward was "strongly admonished" by James, who did not revoke his $250,000 bail package, which, among other things, limits his contact with children, imposes a curfew, and confines him to his home (except when he takes his children to and from school or when he goes to work). Following his arrest, Ward was fired from his job at KGO Radio, though last week he told a pretrial services officer that "there is still a chance" that he may be allowed to "return to work in the near future." In 1977, he earned a theology degree from the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley. The same year, he was ordained to the priesthood with the Society of the Precious Blood. Ward left the priesthood after two years. He has said that he wanted a wife and child and believed he could continue to serve God outside the clergy. He married a physician and they had four children.
After leaving the priesthood, Ward taught at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa and at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. From 1982 to 1985 he worked for then-Rep. Barbara Boxer as her chief legislative assistant.
He joined KGO in 1985, initially as a fill-in talk show host, then as a general assignment reporter, then as political reporter. He has won numerous national awards for his reporting, including an Associated Press award for his coverage of riots in Los Angeles.
In the mid-1990s, he partnered with reporters from the San Francisco Examiner on a series of investigative stories exposing financial and sexual improprieties within the San Francisco Archdiocese. He won a national award for those stories.
Billed by his station as "the lion of the left," he has appeared regularly on national television in recent years, railing against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.