Tip of the iceberg

While we’ve heard new tales of rampant sexual misconduct in the House, most of those claims were anonymous, and it seemed the lower chamber might be spared from a high-profile harassment scandal. That changed on Monday night, when BuzzFeed reported that Democratic representative John Conyers, the longest-serving member of Congress, settled a 2015 complaint from a former staffer who said she was fired after refusing his sexual advances. To make matters worse, the payout was the result of a secretive bureaucratic process Congress uses to handle harassment claims, and the money came out of Conyers’s taxpayer-funded office budget.

[...]

The complaint includes four signed affidavits from other former Conyers staff members who said [hers] was no isolated incident. One former staffer reported witnessing a “variety of inappropriate sexual advances” from Conyers, directed toward herself and other female staff members. Another former staffer said, “I was asked on multiple occasions to pick up women and bring them to Mr. Conyers apartments, hotel rooms, etc.”

A male employee said he saw Conyers rubbing the complainant’s legs and other body parts “in what appeared to be a sexual manner,” and saw him doing the same with other women. The employee said he warned Conyers to be “more careful” and Conyers said he would “work on” his behavior. Then the employee set up a December 2011 meeting to discuss “mistreatment of staff and his misuse of federal resources.” The affidavit says Conyers agreed to make improvements, “as long as I worked directly with him and stopped writing memos and emails about concerns.”

  NY Magazine

I don't know where I saw it, but yesterday someone was tweeting out warnings that something was going to come out about Democrats from alt-right Mike Cernovich, and it was going to be false, warning everyone not to believe it. This sounds pretty darned believable to me.

And, guess what? It is.

The documents were given to BuzzFeed by the alt-right’s Mike Cernovich, who’s known to peddle conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. He said if he did the reporting himself, Democrats and congressional leaders would “try to discredit the story by attacking the messenger.” While this raises questions about why someone opted to leak the documents to Cernovich, BuzzFeed said it confirmed the authenticity of the documents with four people involved in the case, including the woman who filed the complaint.

The accuser, who wants to remain anonymous because she fears retribution, told BuzzFeed that the Office of Compliance’s process left her feeling like she had no option but to take the settlement and remain silent. “I was basically blackballed. There was nowhere I could go,” she said.

The office gives employees 180 days to report sexual harassment. Early on in the process — which involves mandatory mediation and the option to take the claim to federal district court — those involved are forced to sign a confidentiality agreement.

In this case, the complainant was offered a $27,111.75 settlement — in which Conyers did not admit guilt — in exchange for remaining silent. While such payments usually come out of a special U.S. Treasury fund, this settlement involved Conyers’s office rehiring the woman as a “temporary employee,” though she would not come into the office or do any work. After three months, once the woman had received $27,111.15 in payments from the congressman’s office budget, she was removed from the payroll.

We need some new rules in Congress. Three of them are: sexual predators pay their own legal bills, complainants will not be required to keep quiet, and settlements will not be hidden as if they were employment compensation.

Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, has been pushing to reform the process for reporting sexual harassment in Congress for years. She and Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand recently introduced bipartisan legislation that would add more transparency and resources for victims. It would require the naming of lawmakers who enter into a settlement, and set up a victims counsel to guide accusers through the process (currently, the office of the accused can use the House’s counsel for free, but accusers have to pay for their own legal representation).

Let's see which Congress critters object to the bill.

One former Conyers staffer told BuzzFeed that people were afraid to speak up due to his reputation in Congress. “Your story won’t do shit to him,” they said. “He’s untouchable.”

[...]

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver notes, “Politics is a male-dominated institution, and a conservative institution, and conservative, male-dominated institutions have pretty much no interest in flipping over the sexual harassment rock and seeing what comes crawling out from underneath it.”

The claims against Conyers may be appalling to outsiders, but it appears he followed the procedures Congress established for addressing such matters. Why would fellow lawmakers call him out, particularly when many of them benefitted from the same process?

Good point, but we'll see.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.