Summary: Representative John Conyers has been accused by three women so far of sexual harassment.
After an explosive article was published this week by Buzzfeed, two more women have accused Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, of sexual harassment. One of the women filed a civil lawsuit earlier this year but voluntarily withdrew it when the judge would not grant her request to keep the case sealed. The second woman, an ethics lawyer, said that Conyers had summoned her to his office while he was wearing his underwear.
Maria Reddick was Conyers’ former scheduler, according to Politico. In her lawsuit, she said that the congressman sexually harassed her by “repeatedly coming to her desk, rubbing on her shoulders, kissing her forehead, making inappropriate comments, covering and attempting to hold her hand.” She said that she reported the unwanted advances to the Office of Compliance and tried to take medical leave to avoid the Representative. Instead of getting the harassment to stop, however, she was allegedly fired.
Reddick sought $110,000 in back pay and damages, but she voluntarily withdrew her motion when she learned that her case would go public.
The second woman Conyers allegedly harassed was Melanie Sloan, a Washington D.C. attorney. Sloan said that when she was a minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee Conyers summoned her to his office. When she arrived, she was shocked that he was wearing only his underwear.
“I was pretty taken aback to see my boss half-dressed,” Sloan said. “I turned on my heel and I left.”
Sloan told The Washington Post that she did not report the harassment at the time because Washington D.C. has a culture that values loyalty and she did not want to go against the grain.
“There was nothing I could do to stop it,” Melanie Sloan told the The Washington Post. “Not going to leadership, not going to my boss, not going to a women’s group, not going to a reporter. I was dismissed and told I must be mentally unstable.”
According to The Hill, Sloan is the first woman to go on the record about Conyers’ bad behavior, which was exposed by Buzzfeed. The publication discovered that Conyers had settled a claim in 2015 from an unidentified former employee who said that he had sexually harassed her.
In response, Conyers’ has denied the allegations against him, and his attorney Arnold Reed said that the lawmaker will address complaints after Thanksgiving.
Democrat Kathleen Rice, a House of Representatives member from New York, has called for Conyers’ resignation, and the House Ethics Committee is looking into the settlement reported by Buzzfeed.
“The Committee is aware of public allegations that Representative John Conyers, Jr. may have engaged in sexual harassment of members of his staff, discriminated against certain staff on the basis of age, and used official resources for impermissible personal purposes,” House Ethics Committee Chair Susan Brooks, R-Ind., and Ranking Democrat Ted Deutsch, D-Fla., said in a statement.
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