Real estate investors from Bei- jing pumped money into a weed patch in St. Helens

BLOWING SMOKE: Pacifi c University’s mascot is a long-missing qilin statue called Boxer.

Strawberry Fields Forever

A Pacific University dean’s past life growing weed is coming back to haunt her.

BY LUCAS MANFIELD lmanfield@wweek.com

In 2016, Jennifer Yruegas had a stellar résumé as a businesswoman and corporate lawyer. She’d worked in high-level legal positions at some of Oregon’s best-known brands: InFocus, Keen and Nike. A year later, Pacifi c University in Forest Grove hired her as its director of human resources and legal affairs. Soon after, the university promoted her to general counsel and, in 2021, dean of its business school. The provost cited her success in “building relationships and trust.” But back in 2016, Yruegas’ career took a sharp turn that Pacifi c University doesn’t cite, and perhaps never knew. Yruegas lined up investors, purchased an old strawberry farm in St. Helens, and started a new business: growing weed. Yruegas claims the business went belly up after tough weather decimated the crop. Her investors, however, say she misled them and pocketed half a million dollars of their money. They fi led suit in Columbia County Circuit

F O Court in 2018 E S Y demanding OC U R T repayment. The two sides settled a couple of years later for

P ACIFIC UNIVER S I T Y

JENNIFER

YRUEGAS

$150,000. The Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund covered half. She’s paying the rest back in installments. But the case is coming back to haunt Yruegas as she steers Pacifi c University through a series of lawsuits fi led in Washington County Circuit Court, involving former male professors at Pacifi c who say Yruegas pushed them out. The internal strife at Pacifi c, a 173-year-old private university with around 4,000 students,

“I can get millions.”

is now becoming public. And lawyers are attempting to discredit Yruegas because of what happened 30 miles north on that pot farm. In another lawsuit against Pacifi c, also fi led last year but without Yruegas as a defendant, lawyers have attempted to discredit Yruegas using hundreds of text messages, emails and legal documents dug up during the cannabis investors’ earlier lawsuit. The relevance of the information to Yruegas’ personnel decisions is debatable, but it raises questions about her role as dean of the business school. One of the investors who claims he was bilked by Yruegas is now CEO of Jupiter Systems, a tech company based in Silicon Valley. And Sidney Rittenberg Jr. holds a grudge. “Jennifer Yruegas was a con artist,” he tells WW. Neither Rittenberg, his co-investors, nor Yruegas would answer specifi c questions about the 2018 case. When asked if administrators at Pacifi c knew of the allegations against Yruegas, a spokeswoman for the university released a statement, reading in part: “We were not involved in this matter and it would, therefore, be inappropriate for us to comment on it.” In a statement released by her attorney, David Elkanich, Yruegas denies the investors’ allegations and says she settled the case on the advice of counsel. “Unfortunately, the [cannabis] operation was not successful (as many aren’t) and the investors lost money. They brought this lawsuit against Ms. Yruegas in an attempt to recoup some of their funds,” the statement reads. The trove of documents unearthed during Pacifi c University’s ongoing legal battles, however, tells a more complicated story.

In the early 2000s, Rittenberg and Yruegas crossed paths while working as executives at InFocus, once one of Oregon’s premier tech companies. The friends stayed in touch, trading texts of workplace gossip and startup ideas, documents show. Their paths crossed again in 2016. Rittenberg was dissatisfi ed with his current job. Yruegas, meanwhile, had begun a side hustle growing cannabis. Rittenberg was shocked. “I know, I’ve never even smoked it before,” Yruegas wrote back. “But I do have both a biology and botany degree.” Yruegas, documents show, claimed to have nearly tripled a “$30-35,000” investment in six months. With Rittenberg’s help, she said, she could scale the business up. Rittenberg, it turned out, had rich friends from Beijing who were buying up houses in Seattle’s suburbs. “I can get millions,” Rittenberg told Yruegas. So Yruegas put together an ambitious business plan forecasting profi ts within a year. Rittenberg was initially skeptical, saying the projected returns were “hard to believe.” But the two hammered out a deal, according to the documents, and Natural by Design Inc. was born. In 2014, Oregon became the third state in the U.S. to legalize recreational marijuana. But it wasn’t until two years later that the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission began issuing permits to legally grow the drug for recreational use, triggering a gold rush. “It was a wild, wild West back in 2016,” says Mark Pettinger, spokesman for the state’s recreational marijuana program. The result was many messy fallouts between business partners. “I hardly know any that have lasted,” says Andy Shelley, a former inspector for the OLCC turned consultant. “There are a ton of lawsuits out there right now with people who have lost money.” According to Yruegas, the business lost everything. Over the next year, Rittenberg and the two other investors would wire $580,000 to the company’s bank account, documents show. Yruegas used the money to buy the farm and transferred nearly all of the rest to a personal account shared with her husband, Michael Hopkins, a chiropractor, according to bank records obtained by Rittenberg’s attorney, Leslie Johnson. In legal fi lings, Yruegas claims her investors failed to appreciate the risks of the business and invested too little to see it through. In turn, Johnson alleged nearly all of that money was put to Yruegas’ “personal use.” Where the money actually went is unclear. The case settled for $150,000, a small fraction of the amount Rittenberg and his associates lost. By 2017, after Rittenberg and Yruegas agreed to cut their losses, she sold the property. The cash from the sale was wired directly to Yruegas’s personal bank account, documents show. After Rittenberg pressed Yruegas for cash from the sale, she ghosted him. According to the documents, her last text to Rittenberg was sent Sept. 8, 2017. Pacifi c University had announced her hiring the previous day. Rittenberg has been left bitter, his long friendship with Yruegas now over. In an email to WW, he calls Yruegas not only a “con artist” but also “shameless and malicious.” He adds, “We lost a lot of money.” As for the land, there’s no sign left of Yruegas’ business—or that it was ever used to cultivate cannabis. Terry Brooks, who bought the property from Yruegas, is sure it never did. There wasn’t much indication that Yruegas did anything with the land, he says, besides hauling in some rock and tearing out a septic tank. “There was never a marijuana farm,” Brooks says, “I guarantee you that.”