Officials overseeing the Conservative Political Action Conference knew about past accusations of sexual misconduct by chairman Matt Schlapp but failed to investigate or remove him from his powerful post, an amended sexual battery and defamation lawsuit claims.
In one alleged incident, during a fundraising trip to South Florida in early 2022, Schlapp was accused of stripping to his underwear and rubbing against another person without his consent, according to the filing. In 2017, at a CPAC after-party, Schlapp attempted to kiss an employee against his wishes, the lawsuit claims.
In both cases, according to the suit, the alleged victims reported the unwanted advances to staffers at CPAC’s parent organization, the American Conservative Union, but no action was taken against Schlapp, a longtime Republican power broker and prominent backer of former president Donald Trump.
The new allegations were added one week ago to a lawsuit filed in January by a former Republican campaign staffer, Carlton Huffman, who accused Schlapp of groping him in October 2022. The alleged additional victims are not identified and are not joining the suit; the court filing says their allegations were obtained through the discovery process.
Schlapp’s attorney, Benjamin Chew, did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
The amended lawsuit adds to the financial and political pressures on the ACU, a standard-bearer of the conservative movement that has endured an exodus of board members, staffers and corporate sponsors amid mounting concerns about Schlapp’s leadership and financial stewardship. Schlapp and the ACU have not responded to the amended complaint in court yet.
The new complaint in Alexandria Circuit Court adds the American Conservative Union as a defendant and asks for an additional $3.7 million in punitive damages and costs. Previously, only Schlapp and his wife were named as defendants in the $9.4 million suit. ACU had paid more than $1 million in legal fees as of August, as the discovery process was in the early stages, according to a former board member’s resignation letter.
The lawsuit began in January when Huffman, a staffer on Herschel Walker’s U.S. Senate campaign in Georgia, alleged that Schlapp groped his crotch during a campaign trip to Atlanta last fall. Call logs, texts and videos provided by Huffman and his confidants to The Post and in his lawsuit broadly matched his account of quickly sharing the allegation with six family members and friends, and three Walker campaign officials confirmed to The Post that he told them about the alleged incident that night or the next day.
Schlapp, 55, has acknowledged going to two bars with Huffman that night but has denied any wrongdoing. Huffman initially filed the suit anonymously, and Schlapp’s allies accused him of trying to avoid scrutiny of his own record, which includes expressing extremist views on a white-supremacist blog and radio show more than a decade ago.
Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.
So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.
“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign. Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting . . . .
Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.
Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.
John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.
“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.” He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”
Nearly 60 percent of the 198 school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in contested races across 10 states were defeated in 2023, according to an analysis by the website Ballotpedia, which tracks elections.
Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, found in a recent study that the group had an outsize presence in battleground and liberal counties. Yet in those areas, the policies championed by Moms For Liberty are broadly unpopular.
“The politics have flipped on the Moms for Liberty, and they’re turning more people to vote against them than for them,” Mr. Valant said.
In November, the group announced that it had removed the chairwomen of two Kentucky chapters after they had posed in photos with members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. That came several months after a chapter of Moms for Liberty in Indiana quoted Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The year before, Ms. Ziegler publicly denied links to the Proud Boys after she had posed for a photo with a member of the group at her election night victory party.
Anne Pogue Donohue, who ran for a school board seat in Loudoun County, Va., against a candidate endorsed by the group, said she saw a disconnect between the cause of Moms for Liberty and the current concerns of voters.
“There is a pushback now,” she said. “Moms for Liberty focuses heavily on culture-war-type issues, and I think most voters see that, to the extent that we have problems in our educational system that we have to fix, the focus on culture-war issues isn’t doing that.”
[O]pponents have started showing up to school board meetings in force, trying to counter the group’s message — including in Sarasota, where Ms. Ziegler’s critics turned out to try to push her out.
The school board, which includes several conservatives who have aligned with Ms. Ziegler before, voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday for a nonbinding resolution urging her to resign; Ms. Ziegler was the only one on the board to vote against it.
No comments:
Post a Comment