Deposition reopened scab of sexual harassment at Kentucky Capitol. What’s changed?
After several sexual harassment scandals shook up the political dynamics of the Kentucky legislature last year, there were rallying cries for reform to protect staffers and lawmakers from harassment.
This week, those calls only got louder after the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting detailed allegations contained in a sealed court deposition against former House Speaker Jeff Hoover.
The report said Hoover was accused of inappropriately touching his then 21-year-old staffer on a frequent basis — in elevators, in his truck, and during meetings. The revelation quickly reopened the scab of a scandal House Republicans had thought they put behind them.
Since the MeToo movement started in 2017, 13 state Capitols enacted policies to address sexual harassment. Kentucky wasn’t one of them. Instead, changes in Kentucky have mostly been made at an administrative level, not by rewriting laws.
At the time of the alleged harassment between 2015 and 2017, there was no clear-cut procedure for how partisan staffers — the people hired to do the political work at the Capitol — should report sexual harassment. When there was a policy in place, it often involved reporting harassment to the chief of staff for a legislative caucus, a person with a vested political interest in the situation.
The Senate Republican Caucus was the first to reform by deciding to adopt for its partisan staff the Legislative Research Commission’s policy that applies to all other LRC employees, then the LRC enacted changes in January so their procedures for reporting harassment would apply to partisan staff as well as non-partisan.
“We have already seen positive corrective action on this front,” House Speaker David Osborne said in December. “There is an updated policy manual published by the Legislative Research Commission that was revised to ensure that equal procedures were in place for all employees, both partisan and non-partisan, with which we comply.”
Yet, as a legal battle wages over whether two staffers were retaliated against for reporting harassment, there are some lawmakers who think that more must be done.
“Nothing much has changed except the entrenchment of tolerance for sexual harassment for elected officials,” said Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington.
During a brief special legislative session in December, Flood went around the Capitol handing out “pink slips” — pink pieces of paper with a few statistics and information about a sexual harassment bill she pre-filed with Rep. Attica Scott, D-Louisville — in an attempt to whip up support.
Her bill would officially make sexual harassment by a lawmaker an ethics violation and allow the Legislative Ethics Commission to investigate claims against lawmakers, lobbyists or employees.
The Legislative Ethics Commission investigated allegations of sexual harassment made against then-House Speaker Jeff Hoover and four other Republican House members last April after Rep. Jim Wayne, D-Louisville, filed an ethics complaint.
Sexual Harassment is not specifically cited as an ethics violation, but the Legislative Ethics Commission investigated anyway and dismissed the complaints against Jim Decesare, Michael Meredith and Brian Linder and reached a settlement agreement with Hoover.
“We don’t yet define it as wrong, therefore it is deemed OK,” Flood said in December. “The attitude really has been that it’s part of the privilege of serving. The power. What comes with the power is the ability to lose self, to lose touch with basic human decency and it creates tolerance for bad behavior.”
Flood’s bill builds on one sponsored by Reps. Kim Moser, R-Taylor Mill, and Ken Fleming, R-Louisville, that passed through the House last year but faltered in the Senate.
Fleming pre-filed a similar bill but then lost his reelection bid. Moser has introduced the bill for this year’s session.
“We want employees to feel safe in their workplace and know what the expectations are,” Moser said.
Moser’s bill has a broader definition of harassment than Flood’s — it includes discrimination, for example — and it would establish a tip-line, which she said will help people report claims while maintaining some level of privacy.
Even in the aftermath of outrage over Hoover’s behavior — he acknowledged exchanging inappropriate text messages with a female staffer but has denied having any physical sexual contact with her — Moser’s bill still failed to gain traction in the Senate last year.
“I think what is evident is that given there’s still an active case, there’s enormous pressure to not do legislation that creates opportunity for the opposition to come after you,” Flood said.
Osborne, R-Prospect, agreed that the process could be improved, but he didn’t guarantee a harassment bill would be passed.
“There is always a need to improve processes, and this is no exception,” Osborne said in December. “Multiple pieces of legislation have already been pre-filed that seek to strengthen the ethics code, and we will give those ideas due consideration.”
Meanwhile, Flood has pledged to continue to raise awareness about the lack of harassment policy in the ethics code throughout the legislative session.
“There are too many women and some men that I know who are desperate for someone to be an adult in the room and say ‘enough,’” Flood said.
This story was originally published January 18, 2019 at 11:24 AM.
