Former college classmate of KY Rep. Daniel Grossberg alleges he assaulted her
A former college classmate of Kentucky state Rep. Daniel Grossberg alleges he assaulted her during her first semester when he was a 26-year-old senior more than two decades ago.
The woman’s account is documented in a local police department report from 2005. Christina Ross, now 38, did not file criminal charges, but she reported Grossberg’s behavior to campus security at Grinnell College, a liberal arts institution in Iowa. Campus security then reported it to the city of Grinnell’s police department.
Ross told the Herald-Leader she felt that Grossberg’s interactions with her in an incident that took place in her dorm room amounted to sexual assault. Ross said she denied Grossberg’s requests for sex and attempted to leave; Grossberg then grabbed her arm in anger and tried to prevent her from leaving, she said.
Ross, an 18-year-old freshman at the time, said she still refused even after Grossberg wouldn’t let go. In that moment, alone in her dorm room with Grossberg, a man eight years her senior, “I was scared,” she said in an April phone interview with the Herald-Leader.
“He grabbed my arm right at my wrist and kept pulling me,” Ross said. “I remember being worried I needed to just play it cool. I didn’t like how he seemed when he was angry. I did not want that.”
The Grinnell Police Department report noted that Grossberg had previously been “aggressive” with Ross — a series of events that culminated that night in her dorm room.
“The victim told the suspect no several times and on one occasion had to push him away, at which time, the victim ended their relationship,” the police report states.
Had she not been able to convince Grossberg to leave, Ross said, “I was afraid he would rape me.”
They eventually left Ross’ dorm room and she met up with her friends at a dance. Ross believes the incident took place Aug. 26, 2005, a date that lines up with journal entries she provided to the Herald-Leader. The following Monday, Aug. 29, she filed an incident report with local police detailing Grossberg’s alleged harassment and intimidation.
Ross provided a copy of the police report to the Herald-Leader, and staff at the Grinnell Police Department confirmed its authenticity on April 28. Journalists also spoke with two former classmates who knew Ross in college and confirmed aspects of her story.
Grossberg, a Democrat who has served in the Kentucky House for more than three years, denied the allegation.
“After twenty years, this is the first I am hearing of these false claims. I was never contacted by anyone about this,” Grossberg wrote in a statement. “Not the college, not the police, and certainly not by Ms. Ross. None of this has ever come up before, because it did not happen.
“I am disappointed but not surprised by this desperate attempt to discredit me on the eve of my reelection in order to clear the way for my political opponents.”
He added that he would be “undeterred” in his work representing his district.
The Grinnell Police Department told the Herald-Leader it does not have records showing anyone interviewed Grossberg and referred reporters to the school for further inquiries. Grinnell College would not confirm whether it had any reports of or investigations into Grossberg’s alleged misconduct; a college spokesperson said federal law prohibits them “from disclosing students’ educational records beyond directory information and confirmation of degrees conferred.”
Ross, now an educator in California, is the latest of several women to accuse Grossberg of sexual harassment and misconduct.
Since July 2024, eight women have come forward with allegations against Grossberg. Those accounts, reported by the Herald-Leader, include messages he sent that made multiple women uncomfortable, invasive questioning about one woman’s body and sexuality in Grossberg’s legislative office, and an alleged assault that earned Grossberg a lifetime ban from a Louisville strip club.
In light of these allegations, top members of his own party have called for him to resign. Grossberg, now 47, has refused.
Running for a third term to represent part of Louisville for House District 30, Grossberg will face challengers Cassie Lyles, Max Morley and Mitra Subedi in the May 19 primary. There is no Republican running in the district, which makes the primary winner the likely eventual officeholder.
The 2005 police report and the incident narrative, written by the Grinnell Police Department officer assigned to the case, notes Grossberg was increasingly aggressive with Ross, whose maiden name was Woods.
“They did meet 6-7 times approximately at Grinnell College. Their relationship was considered a friendship to the victim,” Officer Randall Hanssen wrote.
Ross told the Herald-Leader that in the days leading up to the incident in her dorm, “He kept pushing sleeping together. We would kiss, but then he would start groping, and I would tell him that wasn’t okay. I remember pulling back from him repeatedly and being like, ‘No, don’t do that.’”
Hanssen in his incident report wrote, “Through seeing each other, the suspect did become more aggressive. There were a couple of incidents where the suspect did attempt to kiss (Ross), which (she) stated was alright, however, then the suspect continued by attempting to touch the breast and vaginal area of the victim,” he wrote.
The police reports do not mention interviewing Grossberg about the incident.
Ross told the Herald-Leader she was on the fence about pressing charges against Grossberg then.
“I went to the police station, and I wasn’t sure at the time if I wanted to pursue anything criminally, because I was scared,” Ross said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was worried that they would think I was, like, the bad guy.”
Grossberg graduated from Grinnell roughly a year later, in 2006, according to the college’s records. Before he transferred to Grinnell in 2001, Grossberg previously attended Pitzer College in Claremont, California, from the fall of 1999 to the fall of 2000, according to the college’s admissions records.
Some of the previous public allegations against Grossberg were investigated by the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission.
In February 2026, Grossberg was formally reprimanded by the commission and agreed to pay a $2,000 fine, in part for threatening the manager of Foxys Gentlemens Club after he was kicked out and banned. Hours before a public hearing into his conduct was scheduled, Grossberg took the settlement, in which he conceded there may be enough evidence to find probable cause that he violated the ethics code.
Grossberg has repeatedly denied the accusations against him and has mischaracterized the commission’s settlement as exonerative, saying he had “been fully cleared of these frivolous allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.”
Grossberg and his attorneys have blamed the representative’s neurodivergence as a reason why his behavior has made women uncomfortable. They’ve also at times cited antisemitism, as Grossberg is Jewish.
Sarah Ritter, a former candidate for the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2024 and one of the women who alleged Grossberg sexually harassed and was physically violent with her, said Grossberg’s actions toward her “caused lasting physical and psychological harm.”
“I did not feel safe refusing him. I did not feel safe leaving. I did not feel safe fully asserting boundaries,” Ritter said in February. “No one, especially someone elected to represent their neighbor, should be permitted to behave this way without accountability.”
‘I refused time after time’
Ross, who had gone on a few dates with Grossberg before the incident in her room, also recounted her experiences with him contemporaneously in a LiveJournal — an online semi-private diary practice that was popular at the time. She shared those entries with the Herald-Leader.
Ross met Grossberg in-person in her first two weeks at school, she said; he first reached out to her on the social media platform MySpace months before she arrived on campus, when she was 17. The police report notes their first contact was on or about Dec. 4, 2004; at that time, she was still a high school student in California.
“I put on my MySpace profile that I was going to Grinnell College. He was the first one to contact me, asking me about why I liked it, where I was from, all the normal stuff,” she wrote Aug. 27, 2005. “Then he started calling me his little sister. It was cute, I liked it.
“From there, he started to get weirder. He kept calling me beautiful, and saying he felt a connection. It was a little offputting, but not too much,” she wrote.
Grossberg gave Ross his cell number, and a few days after she arrived on campus for the semester, she called him. They went to dinner. The next night, “he kept begging me to take him on a date, but I kept saying no,” Ross wrote.
But eventually, Ross wrote, she agreed.
The day before the incident in her dorm room, Ross wrote in her journal that Grossberg “wanted me to tell him that I loved him. He also kept pushing the sleeping together thing. I refused time after time. The age difference was too much.”
That night when Ross refused him, she wrote, “he called me an anti-Semite. I wanted him to leave so, so badly. So, I told him I would think about it, but that I just needed time by myself. I took a long shower and cried.”
The day of the incident she reported to police, Grossberg showed up at her dorm room and said again that he wanted to date her.
“He told me he was deeply in love with me. He wanted to make love to me,” Ross told the Herald-Leader. “I told him he needed to leave, and then I got up and started to walk to the door. He reached out and grabbed my wrist with his hand and would not let go. I told him to let go. I did it in a coy, kind of playful way, because I didn’t want him angry. And then I did convince him to let go of my wrist, then we walked out together, where he left me at the dance.”
When she filed the police report Aug. 29, Ross told the investigating officer that Grossberg had “several nicknames and has a reputation of picking up first year college female students and attempting to have sex with them,” according to the report.
One of those nicknames was “Sketchy Dan,” the Herald-Leader reported in 2024. Grossberg, who also penned a satirical advice column in Grinnell’s school humor newspaper under the same pseudonym, recommended that “lonely,” “horny,” and “creepy” young men aggressively pursue women on campus, even if the women weren’t interested.
In one letter, a fictitious student wrote: “Dear Sketchy, I have been seeing this girl for about a week now and want to kiss her. How long should I wait?”
Grossberg replied, “A whole week and no play!?!? She’s clearly a prude. Find yourself a new one.”
Since the Herald-Leader began reporting allegations against Grossberg, including from his time at Grinnell, he and his attorney have blamed the women accusing him for misunderstanding Grossberg’s neurodiversity.
“Even today, a lot of those people who have not put in the work and time to educate themselves on autism spectrum-related behaviors are still discriminating against people because we find them weird or creepy, because they don’t act like the rest of us,” Anna Whites, Grossberg’s attorney, told the Herald-Leader in 2024 in response to questions about the college writings.
Whites disparaged what she described as a “general expression that this guy is creepy, this guy is weird, simply because he is different.”
After reaching a settlement with the ethics commission in February 2026, Whites again blamed people around Grossberg for not understanding his “neurodivergent diagnosis.”
“This case is about how (House Democratic) leadership in the public treated someone with a disability,” she said. “Being neurodiverse does not make you sexually harass anyone.”
Ross, now a special education teacher who works with neurodivergent students, said blaming that diagnosis for aggressive, non-consensual behavior is “disgusting.”
She added that it’s “ableist to assume that because someone is on the spectrum, they’re incapable of understanding consent.”
Other Grinnell students’ stories
One of Ross’ classmates, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the story, lived in the dorm room next door. She said that she witnessed Grossberg hanging around the dorm, being friendly with Ross and another first-year classmate, but then “there was something that kind of stopped.”
“I remember her saying that he was a creep, but I don’t remember her telling me any specifics (about the incident),” she said.
She also said Grossberg’s reputation as “Sketchy Dan” jibed with what she’d heard from peers.
“He definitely had a reputation as being somebody who particularly hit on a lot of freshmen girls, and maybe was a little bit pushy,” the woman said, adding that a student adviser warned her to stay away from him.
Another classmate, who was Ross’ student adviser and also requested anonymity, had similar recollections about what happened. The adviser and Ross both recall her warning Ross about Grossberg because of his campus reputation.
Two factors guided her warning about him, the adviser said. For one, Grossberg made “gross” comments about her appearance on campus. And, her own student adviser had warned her when she was a first-year student.
“I remember him saying, like, stay away from him. Everyone’s pretty chill (at Grinnell), so for someone to say, ‘Hey, don’t hang around that guy. Don’t let that guy talk to you,’... that was a big deal,” the adviser told the Herald-Leader.
The student adviser also remembers Grossberg hanging around with Ross a lot and then, abruptly, not at all.
“At that time, we just brushed it off. I wished we had done something more. I wish (Ross) had told me all the things that happened,” she said by phone. “We definitely didn’t have all the training when it comes to sexual harassment (and) sexual assault.”
After the incident in her dorm room, Ross said she cut off contact with Grossberg.
Once she filed her complaint with the police, “they promised me that they would tell him to leave me alone,” she added.
But then, “he just started showing up places,” Ross said, like inside the dining hall next to her dorm even though he lived off campus, or outside a lecture hall when she was leaving class.
Each of the times this happened, “he would just stare at me,” Ross said. “He wouldn’t approach me, he wouldn’t talk to me, he would just stare.”
This story was originally published May 7, 2026 at 10:06 AM.
