Josh Lopez has been known to send some spicy text messages during his long career courting controversy in D.C. politics. But none of those texts have ever been so spicy as to land him in legal trouble—until now.

Court records show that D.C. police arrested Lopez, a longtime ally of Mayor Muriel Bowser and the rest of her Green Team, on a misdemeanor charge Friday. He’s charged with threatening one of his fraternity brothers with bodily harm on two separate occasions via texts in a group chat, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant filed on Sept. 14.

In a pair of texts sent July 24, Lopez allegedly told Jamil Mian that “on everything I’m gonna beat the shit out of you on site you bitch ass mutherfucker,” and “on everything I will blow your mutherfucking head off next time u pull that shit.”

Mian reported the incident to police later that day and shared screenshots of the messages, according to the affidavit. He told detectives that he “believes [Lopez] can carry out these threats because he is friends with a former D.C. mayor and has special connections,” police wrote in the affidavit. Lopez hasn’t held any official government role since resigning from the D.C. Housing Authority board amid scandal in 2018, but his work as a lobbyist and outspoken advocate for Bowser has certainly kept him close with the city’s establishment.

“He travels the world with [Adrian] Fenty, he does whatever for Muriel, so I said, ‘Look, I don’t want somebody running up on me and hurting me, or finding out where I am and where I live,’” Mian tells Loose Lips. “You gotta take these things into account.”

Neither Lopez nor his defense attorney, Gregory Copeland, responded to LL’s requests for comment. Lopez entered a not guilty plea during his arraignment Friday, court records show.

Mian, who runs his own home exterior restoration business when he isn’t taking classes at UDC, says this dispute started after Lopez stiffed him on a bill for his contracting work. Mian says he initially met Lopez when they both worked on D.C.’s 2008 elections, and has been friends with Lopez since then. He says Lopez has regularly hired him for various contracting jobs, so Mian thought nothing of it when Lopez offered to hire him in June to help out another friend, Ron Moten, the longtime activist who also runs in Green Team circles.

Specifically, Lopez said he owed Moten a favor and agreed to pay to have paint stripped off his pool. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of the cost of it,” Lopez said, according to Mian.

Mian claims he finished the job after about a week of work, and billed Lopez $2,400 in total. Mian says Lopez balked at that price, so Mian offered to charge $2,000 instead. Lopez countered with $1,000, a price that Mian claims barely covered his expenses, but he was still willing to accept. After all, the pair both belonged to the same UDC fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi.

“I really did do it for nothing,” Mian says. “But he was my friend.”

Moten says Mian initially quoted the two men between $500 and $1,000 for the job, and they were surprised by the much higher final price tag. He didn’t think the job warranted anything close to the $2,400 Mian demanded. Moten adds that Lopez had recommended Mian in order to do him a favor, and that Lopez and Moten both gave him a few hundred dollars to cover his expenses. In the end, Moten says he finished the work himself because there was still some paint left on the pool. He says he doesn’t know anything about the dispute between Lopez and Mian that, in his view, “should have never made it into the courts.”

But even after sending Lopez multiple invoices, Mian says he still wasn’t paid. So in late July, he decided to swing by Lopez’s house in Randle Highlands to confront him directly.

“He opens the door, and asks ‘What are you doing here?’” Mian says. “And the only words that I spoke were: ‘Do I even have to ask?’ He’s in his underwear, his lady was there with his kids and everything. I’m not there to cause any problems. But if you know somebody for over a decade, we can at least talk this out, right?”

Mian says he left Lopez’s home without any cash in hand, and those aforementioned texts arrived in a group chat with other fraternity members soon afterward, without any mention of the payment dispute that prompted this clash. Mian consulted with a few of his other fraternity brothers who work as attorneys, and they urged him to report the incident to the police, which he did later that night.

Lopez filed his own police report that same day, claiming that Mian “banged on his door and refused to leave,” according to the Sept. 14 affidavit, and that his “hands were clenched into fists” during the interaction. Lopez later provided video to the cops from his doorbell camera, but it apparently contradicted his own account.

The video showed Mian “knocking on the door in a normal fashion rather than banging on the door and his hands do not appear to be clinched into fists,” the affidavit says. Lopez told detectives in a follow-up interview that he “deleted the threatening texts because he had a talk with his fraternity brothers and regretted” sending them, but police still opted to arrest him a few weeks later. They have not pursued any charges against Mian.

“I’ve forgiven him, spiritually,” Mian says. “But you tried to slander my reputation within the fraternity, you tried to make it look like I’m a violent person, showing up to people’s houses, and even the police are like, ‘No, that’s B.S.’ … If you want to play dirty politics and do that, that’s on you. But now you have to reap what you sow.”

Mian says he decided to go public with this story in part after seeing LL’s previous coverage of Lopez’s last spin through the court system, when he asked a judge to stop the manager of the @DCHomos Twitter account from posting about him. (The case was quickly dismissed.) Despite their long relationship, Mian says he’s grown concerned that this behavior has become a pattern for Lopez.

As he researched court records for his case, Mian says he noticed another misdemeanor charge filed against Lopez in October 2022. In that case, police charged Lopez with simple assault, claiming that Lopez got into a brawl with another fraternity brother during a party at the Marriott Marquis hotel downtown.

Michael Roberts Jr. told the police that he was in a hotel suite with Lopez on Oct. 1, 2022, when Lopez “challenged his fraternity membership by asking him various questions,” according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant filed by police on Oct. 31. Roberts says Lopez punched him in the face “without provocation,” causing him to “fall to the floor and curl into a fetal position.”

“[Lopez] then began to kick and stomp on his face and body,” according to the affidavit. Three other witnesses later confirmed this version of events, with one telling police that Lopez was “actively stomping on [Roberts’] face” as he lay on the floor. (Roberts told police that he didn’t know Lopez before the party, but he was able to identify him later after viewing photos from his Facebook page, as well as an article from City Paper’s website.)

Lopez’s attorney, Lee Smith, later told police that the scuffle was not as one-sided as the witnesses claimed. Smith argued it was “mutual combat,” according to the affidavit. Superior Court Judge Gregory Jackson ultimately found Lopez not guilty of the charge during a bench trial in March 2023.

There’s no date set yet for additional proceedings in Mian’s case against Lopez. Mian says he also plans to file a civil suit against Lopez to try and recover the money he believes he’s owed. He found himself so upset by the incident that he even forwarded information about Lopez’s arrest to Bowser’s mayoral email account, as well as to the Metro DC Hispanic Contractors Association, where Lopez serves as vice chair of the board.

Mian says he’s always known that Lopez has drawn some negative headlines in the past, but he’s “never gotten involved in his politics.” He can remember offering Lopez a receptive ear during the last big blowup that threatened to drive him from public life, when he held a microphone for a speaker who made antisemitic remarks at a rally. Mian can’t understand why Lopez would turn on him in this way after all these years.

“I tried to be a supportive person,” Mian says. “And for somebody to turn around and do that, and then talk bad about you, threaten to kill you. I mean, I think it’s all just crazy.”

This story has been updated with additional comment from Ron Moten.