Rep. Katie Porter declined interview requests about her work for Ocwen, and advisers for her Senate campaign would not reveal how much she was paid.
Chris Carlson/AP Photo

Porter between 2018 and 2020 also received $2,250 in contributions to her House campaign committee from Phyllis Caldwell and Jill Showell. Caldwell, a director, chaired Ocwen’s Board of Directors from March 2016 to January 2023 while Showell served as senior vice president of government and community relations at Ocwen. Neither responded to inquiries.

Two current and former top employees with Ocwen who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters said they either had no recollection of Porter’s work for the company or were not close enough to it to speak about its precise nature.

A former Ocwen executive said in an interview that Porter would have been an attractive hire for the company because she was a law school professor and monitor familiar with both the laws and individual regulators in charge of enforcing them — “reading a regulation and understanding how it’s applied are not always the same thing.”

“A lot of people approached us and said, ‘if you pay me $50,000, I will make your troubles go away,'” said the former executive. “We didn’t pay fixers. Pragmatically and practically speaking, we couldn’t be sure if that was true” — meaning something they could really do. “What we preferred is somebody who had an attractive background who knew what they were talking about and who understood the personalities.”