Leslie Ann Celebrezze Removed

Leslie Ann Celebrezze, a Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations judge, manually assigned a divorce case to her own docket — bypassing the court's random-assignment system — and then filed an official journal entry falsely stating the case had been randomly assigned to her. She then appointed Mark Dottore, a longtime friend, as the case's receiver, a paid position overseeing the couple's assets. Celebrezze has since conceded in court records that she loved Dottore at the time.

Prosecutors charged her with felony tampering with records over the fabricated journal entry, dated to January 2023. She resigned from the bench in December 2025 as the felony charge proceeded, and pleaded guilty in February 2026. In June 2026, she was sentenced to 60 days in the Cuyahoga County Jail, fined $10,000, and ordered to pay court costs.

This wasn't simply a judge favoring a friend for an appointment — a bad but survivable judgment call. She created a false official court record specifically to obscure how she'd steered a valuable case to a man she was personally involved with, then put him in a paid position with authority over the litigants' assets. That's not a lapse in discretion; it's dishonesty deployed to enable self-dealing, and she admitted to it in a guilty plea.