When Santa Monica resident Ashley Oelsen learned in 2020 that a Los Angeles-area rescue was flying 100 dogs saved from China’s meat trade to Washington state she jumped into action to help. However, by the time the animals had landed, she’d already gone from supportive to suspicious based on a single detail, every dog was a French bulldog.
“I went, ‘Everybody, hold off! Wait a second! This makes no sense,’” Oelsen said.
That moment set off a six-year effort by Oelsen to expose Wagmor Pets, the Studio City organization now at the center of a civil enforcement lawsuit filed by Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto.
The complaint, filed Oct. 22 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accuses Wagmor Pets, two affiliated companies and founder Melissa Bacelar of buying dogs from commercial breeders, including puppy mills, and reselling them to families as rescues, a practice known as “puppy laundering.” It seeks a permanent injunction, restitution for consumers and at least $7.3 million in civil penalties.
“Families who open their homes to rescue animals deserve honesty, not deception,” Feldstein Soto said in a statement announcing the suit.
Oelsen’s entry point was a phone call. Years earlier, before returning to school to study biodiversity and wildlife, she ran humane education and animal rescue programs for children in foster care. A former volunteer from that work was connected to Ellen DeGeneres and called asking for help on DeGeneres’ behalf regarding a rescue organization that Degeneres had worked with, Oelsen said.
The rescue had no one lined up to receive the dogs at the Canadian border in Washington, and the animals were already being loaded onto a plane at the time of the call so Oelsen connected the group with contacts in Washington. However, the breed of the animals raised a red flag prompting her to fly north to see the dogs herself.
“There’s going to be a day where I have to testify about these dogs,” she recalled thinking. “I just had this weird feeling.”
Oelsen said she had visited a dog meat market before and knew what those animals endure. The French bulldogs she saw were “friendly, well adjusted, loving, beautiful” and showed no signs of abuse, she said. “They looked like they had all been bred.”
She had recently completed an animal welfare and behavior program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and a fellowship on Capitol Hill with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. She called IFAW, which put her in touch with the director of an international humane organization’s Beijing office.
At the same time, she started running records searches. Within 48 hours, Oelsen said, a name search on the Los Angeles court records database and the California Secretary of State’s website turned up a lawsuit she identified as Green v. Bacelar, with seven plaintiffs and six dead puppies. She began contacting the plaintiffs from the airport.
On about the third day, the dogs’ health certificates arrived. Bacelar had initially said the records were in Chinese, Oelsen said, but she insisted they be with the dogs. Searching the names and addresses on the customs paperwork, Oelsen said, she linked a contact listed there to a network of other rescue groups, which she said Bacelar later worked with in 2023 to obtain dogs from puppy mills and auctions.
She ran those names through other states’ business registries and pulled court records from San Francisco, including deposition and witness testimony. Within a couple of weeks, she said, she began to understand what she calls a network of puppy trafficking.
Wagmor, meanwhile, was a fixture of local TV segments and celebrity-driven coverage. The organization’s website still features clips praising their work from local Los Angeles TV stations and nationally syndicated shows.
“Nobody did their research,” Oelsen said. “It’s one of those feel good clickbait stories with tons of celebrities. … Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say.”
That prompted Oelsen to build a website, The Truth About Wagmor Pets, which went up in 2022 to collect the records she had gathered.
“To me, it was clear as day what was going on,” she said. “But then I had to prove it.”
Over the following years, Oelsen said, she took her findings to the IRS, the state attorney general, consumer protection agencies and Los Angeles Animal Services, which she said did not act on her reports. However, she said the work did manifest in a state bill restricting the pet store sale of dogs.
The Los Angeles complaint echoes many of her early suspicions. It alleges Bacelar, often through intermediaries, bought dogs from breeders nationwide, including from a breeder auction house in September 2023 and a breeder called Diamond Doodles around November 2023, and imported them without required health certificates. It says the defendants falsely claimed dogs were rescued from “horrible conditions” or surrendered by owners, sold puppies sight unseen, and that some dogs died days or weeks after adoption.
The complaint also alleges the defendants routinely charged more than the $500 state cap on adoption fees for dogs displayed at pet stores, with Bacelar telling a city inspector in February that fees could reach $1,500. It says Wagmor kept claiming nonprofit status after the IRS revoked it, and that the companies operated their Studio City storefront, which reportedly closed this month, without required city permits.
The city attorney’s Public Rights Branch is handling the case, No. 26STCV33334. Anyone who bought a dog from Wagmor Pets or has information can email att.wagmorpets@lacity.org.