Women ‘fed to the sharks’ under Texas Senate sexual harassment policy, Texas Monthly reporting finds

Young women working in the Texas state Senate have little protection against sexual harassment and assault, an investigation by a leading magazine in the state has found.

A Texas Monthly report published last week uncovered numerous cases of female staffers and volunteers who said they had been propositioned, groped or otherwise harassed by state senators or senior staff.

Beyond the specific allegations against lawmakers or staffers, reporters Olivia Messer and Cara Kelly say they found something more pervasive: a long-standing resistance by Texas Senate leadership to deal with the body’s endemic problem with predatory sexual misconduct.

This, sources told the Monthly, has led to a situation in which young women are effectively hazed out of careers in politics while senators with serious allegations against them go uninvestigated by leadership.

Political consultant Jen Ramos told the Monthly that lack of oversight means many state senators “feel like gods in the building.” 

On Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) — the president of the state Senate — attacked the Monthly’s reporting.

“Texas Monthly has falsely maligned me and the nearly 75 different senators I have proudly served with as a Senator and as lieutenant governor,” Patrick said in comments reported by The Texas Tribune.

“The members and I take this issue very seriously. Harassment of any type is not tolerated on my own staff.”

Messer and Kelly say Patrick has mischaracterized their reporting, which presents a pattern in which Senate leadership has repeatedly declined to act — or at least, to provide any evidence of their action — against senators who send graphic photos to, forcibly kiss or grope young women. 

“Based on the reporting, we found women in the capitol believe that Dan Patrick has not taken sexual harassment seriously,” Messer said. “It is interesting that his response to that is to say ‘our policy is good’ and that they don’t need to change it.”

Messer came to this story more than a decade ago as a legislative intern at The Texas Observer. 

Before she and her cadre of early-20s women went off to the state Capitol, she told The Hill, her editor gave them a list of “which senators not to be alone in a room with.”

Working in the Capitol as a young woman, she said, “felt akin to fending off advances like I was in a bar.” Having grown up in Texas but returned after going to journalism school in Montreal, she was struck by “the way that people spoke to me in the Capitol, you know, older men calling me ‘sweetheart’ in one-on-one interviews, asking my age, asking if I had a boyfriend, touching my arm — things I didn’t feel to be appropriate.”

In a story Messer wrote for the Texas Observer in 2013 about sexism in the Legislature, she quoted Houston Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman calling it “probably the last of the good ol’ boys clubs.”

In a 2017 story for The Daily Beast, she reported allegations that two Democratic legislators had sexually harassed, groped or forcibly kissed staffers or women at political events. 

She also uncovered a secretly-circulating “Burn Book of Bad Men,” which she reported functioned as a semipublic version of the list her editor had handed her years before. It comprised a spreadsheet of 38 political insiders — “campaign workers, legislative staffers and lawmakers” — accused of infractions that ran the gamut “from pay discrimination to creepy comments and sexual assault,” she wrote. 

The Texas state House faced its own sexual misconduct issue last year, when allegations arose against one of its members. 

But the body collaborated with the University of Texas on a multiyear process to clarify its policy on sexual harassment, to empower a specific committee with subpoena power to investigate it and to unanimously vote to expel the representative in question after the internal investigation found he got one of his staffers drunk, then had sex with her. In contrast, the Monthly found, the Texas Senate has taken few formal steps to ensure the safety of women in the building. 

In a statement to the Austin American-Statesman, Patrick said “the Senate does not like” the House’s way of handling sexual misconduct, which effectively allows members to investigate one another — a dynamic Patrick argued “leaves too much room for politics.”

The Monthly story, Messer saId, is not “an exoneration of the House” so much as an exposure of how few protections there are in the Senate, where official policy creates what Kelly called “a two-tiered system of reporting” that effectively swallows complaints.

Under the Senate’s policy, women who feel they have been harassed are instructed to either file an official complaint — or tell their supervisors, in which case complaints appear to be largely handled informally by Senate leadership, without being formally reported or recorded, the Monthly reported. 

In 2017 hearings that followed Messer’s Daily Beast reporting on harassment in the Senate, Patsy Spaw, the chamber’s secretary and the person charged with processing complaints, told legislators she had received just one “official complaint” since 2001 — a case in which the body fired three Senate Media Services staffers accused of taking a younger staffer “to a restaurant that was predominantly lesbian” and attempting to forcibly indoctrinate her into homosexuality.

Other than that case, Spaw told legislators at the time, complaints were largely dealt with inside congressional offices, or, if escalated to her, she would tell members, “‘You gotta cut it out. Knock it off.’”

In 2018, the Senate passed reforms to the reporting process, mandating in-person sexual harassment training for members — while also clarifying that senators would not be able to investigate each other, and leaving complaints to be channeled to Spaw, with Patrick as ultimate decider.

And Patrick, the Monthly reporting alleged, had repeatedly given plum committee assignments to one state senator, Charles Schwertner (R), who had been credibly and repeatedly accused of harassing young women. The Monthly reported Schwertner had received those assignments without facing any investigation from within the Senate.

“It’s no surprise to see the liberal media use anonymous sources and baseless allegations to engage in a character assassination against one of the most conservative and effective members of the Texas Senate,” Keats Norfleet, spokesperson for Schwertner, told The Hill.

The Hill has reached out to Spaw and Patrick for comment.

The lack of official reporting or follow-up on harassment allegations, Kelly argued, created an environment in which “official complaints” represented the very fine tip of a very large iceberg. Most incidents went unreported, because women feared retaliation or thought nothing would come of them, the Monthly reported.

“All of these things — that does have an impact on the people being willing to report,” Kelly said. “They throw up their hands and are like, ‘Why am I going to put myself out here? Risk retaliation, risk losing my job, or have a bad reputation?’”

And when women working in the Senate did report — generally to their supervisors — those complaints didn’t become part of the public record or lead to any public investigations, the Monthly found.

Messer and Kelly said senators themselves didn’t appear to acknowledge the gravity of what was going on.

“I had elected officials and former elected officials say, ‘Well, these things happen, but it’s not illegal,’” Messer said. But under the Texas penal code, she noted, “one, it is a crime, and two, it’s also a potential civil violation, which opens them up to legal liabilities that potentially taxpayers should be concerned about.”

The result of the ways the Senate handles sexual misconduct, sources told Messer and Kelly, is that women are squeezed out of public life. 

The women who spoke to them, Messer said, “just want to be able to work in the building without fear, or to be able to recommend that someone’s daughter work in the building without fear.

“And at this point, I would not, based on what I know, I would not suggest to a young woman who’s 20 or 21 — like I was — going into that building.”

She added that “I felt like every intern, for every newsroom, for every lawmaker’s office, they were being fed to the sharks with very little warning and no guide for what their rights were.”

— Updated at 3:31 p.m.