That former Rep would be New York Democrat Eric Massa, whom you may remember for his famous defense to charges that he had groped a male staffer. Not only did I grope him, Massa told Glenn Beck a few days after he resigned in 2010, “I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe.” They were just playing!
He lasted slightly more than a year in Congress. But that was long enough to have triggered a secret payout from the Office of Compliance to the staffers he groped, according to ABC. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first confirmation we have of a sexual harassment settlement being authorized by the office. (Conyers’s settlement with his former staffer was paid out of his House office budget, remember.) Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier claimed a few weeks ago that Compliance has paid upwards of $17 million in settlements over the last 20 years or so but that’s the figure for *all* workplace settlements involving Congress, not the number for the subset that have to do with sexual misconduct specifically. Now we know that at least $100,000 of that figure went to compensation for sexual wrongdoing. At least.
How many more? And when was this paid? ABC doesn’t say but presumably it was in 2010, the year Massa resigned, when feminist icon Nancy Pelosi was in charge of the House.
The “Congressional Accountability Act” is a perfectly Orwellian name for a process constructed to avoid accountability. It’s your money that’s paying for some congressional parasite’s misbehavior but you have no right to know the amount, the details of what happened, or even the fact that anything happened in the first place. The victims can’t discuss it publicly. Massa’s situation is actually the best-case scenario in that he paid a price by being forced out of Congress; imagine how many representatives have misappropriated taxpayer funds by triggering sexual-misconduct settlements and been reelected because their constituents never knew about it. Your employees are covering their filthy tracks with “company money” and you don’t even get to know which ones, because you might fire them.
AAN Staff
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