It's the Political Fixer Podcast with your host, Shawna Presley Vercher. Welcome to the Political Fixer podcast. I'm Shawna Presley Vercher, and today we are addressing a warning that Democrats, in my opinion, cannot ignore. And this episode is going to get a bit intense. I want to begin by setting the stage for some events that unfolded just this past week. Eric Swalwell was only 32 years old. When he was elected to Congress in 2013 as part of the powerful California delegation. Just two years later, he was seated on the coveted Intelligence Committee, one of the most prestigious positions in Congress. After the 2016 election, Swalwell took to the airwaves and spoke forcefully against MAGA. Gaining hundreds of thousands of social media followers and national recognition. He briefly ran for president in 2020 alongside some heavy hitters, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren. Swalwell's backers at the time didn't necessarily think he would win the Democratic nomination for president, but they were using the opportunity to elevate his profile and set him up for bigger and better things. Then, last November, that opportunity arose. Eric Swalwell, who was only 45 years old at the time, decided to run to become the governor of California. Now, there are a lot of people running on the Democratic side, but Swalwell was polling well. He raised over six and a half million dollars. He racked up tons of endorsements. And he seemed like a front runner to help run a state that is so large and powerful that if it were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. You can almost see the Hollywood movie playing in the background with him heading directly to the White House in a few short years as the credits roll. But what we learned this week is that certain Washington DC insiders knew a different Eric Swalwell character. Not the kind of guy you cheer for, but the type of man you avoid. Senior staffers have said that they didn't know why, but you just knew to keep young staffers away from him. Women working on Capitol Hill referred to him as creepy. Not sure why, just a creepy vibe. And even major donors and lobbyists who had a strong working relationship with Swalwill now admit that there were questions that floated around, but they were never asked because people honestly didn't want to know the answers. Well, someone probably should have asked. And this is where I want to share a bit of a content warning about this episode. I'm going to do my best to be sensitive to the subject matter, but even so, there is a lot of this that might be difficult to hear, at least it was for me. Five women have come forward with allegations, including alleged unwanted messages and explicit communications, alleged non-consensual encounters involving intoxication, and let's listen to just 90 seconds of this statement by a woman named Lonna Drewes. My name is Lonna Drewes. In 2018, while I was living and working as a model in Beverly Hills, and I also owned a fashion and software company, I had contact with Eric Swalwell on three separate occasions after meeting him socially. He offered me connections to further my software company. And I also had an interest in local politics. He invited me to two public events. I knew he was married at the time and that his wife was pregnant. He was my friend. On the third occasion, I believe he drugged my drink. I only had one glass of wine. He, we were supposed to go to a political event, and he said he needed to get paperwork from his hotel room. When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated and I couldn't move my arms or my body. It had a profound impact on my mental health. I self-medicated in an unhealthy way. I did not want to live anymore. In a matter of days, Eric Swalwell has suspended his campaign for governor indefinitely. He has resigned from Congress. He's posted a public video apologizing for "mistakes" that were made addressing his wife specifically. And he has, for the record, denied all of the accusations. And so do with that information what you will. I have my opinions about Swalwell and the alleged predators like him, but my focus today is not actually on him. I want to focus on how this type of behavior is allowed to happen, particularly in democratic circles. I want share another story I've uncovered about a potential Swalwell type of character in Florida politics. And I also feel like it's really important that we talk about one of the brave heroes who helped these women come forward and to be believed when they were speaking out against one of fastest rising politicians in the country. Let's level set before we dive in. When alleged predators like Swalwell are publicly called out, we often find out that insiders already knew something, that their behavior was some sort of open secret. The tragic thing is that the prominence of sexual violence is America's open secret, I guarantee that right now you personally know someone who has been impacted by this. Statistically, it would be almost impossible for you not to. Here is the data. Nearly half of the women in the United States and nearly one in six men will experience some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetimes. Approximately 30% of women and 11% of men have been verbally sexually harassed in the workplace, just in the work place. Where we are forced to go almost every day in order to exist and provide for our families. Those numbers are related to experiences that people have had in their lifetimes. But in the past year alone, it is estimated that nearly seven million women and over two and a half million men are subjected to sexual violence. That is nearly 10 million people just in the United States and just in the past 12 months. This issue is so prominent that the Center for Disease Control considers it both a public health problem and a "common national experience". This is not a blue state or a red state problem. It has nothing to do with race, income, class, or creed. It is an epidemic. But there's an element that I find particularly troubling. When the perpetrator is a high profile celebrity, athlete, political figure, businessman, because of the way they live their lives, someone else had to know what was happening. Walk through this with me. Have you ever attended a political fundraising event or a rally or just seen a political event on TV, on the news? Think about how many people are around these men. Schedulers know where they are every moment of the day. Aides know who they are with, how long they are supposed to be there, and if they've even eaten lunch yet. You can barely get a high profile politician alone for three seconds to take a photo with them. There are press and donors, supporters and protesters, legislative staff and campaign staff, and usually an entire entourage that moves alongside anyone with this level of fame or power. For someone like Eric Swalwell to be sitting in a room, alone, with anyone, but particularly with other women, for an extended period of time, without someone coming up and asking for a photo, media asking for comment on something, voters asking him about an issue when they recognize him across the room, that takes coordination. That takes planning. And that takes the effort of more than one man. The idea that someone like Swalwell could have multiple encounters with women alone, like I just described, with that much coordination, just his calendar alone, without raising suspicion, it does not track, it does no track. The best we can hope for is that the people in his circle, who enabled this behavior, thought that the encounters were consensual. That they were only aware that a politician who millions of people are counting on to be successful in order to make their lives better was having affairs with other women while married and at one point allegedly while his wife was pregnant. And that this darling of the Democratic Party was illicitly acquiring women like they were lines of cocaine, a disposable commodity that the privileged are allowed to use at will. That the people that Swalwell trusted were simply enabling a habit of promiscuity, that apparently it's just an unfortunate vice, that us normal people have no way of understanding. That is our best case scenario, and it is not okay. There are other people who are culpable here, not just in this situation, but countless others, where a person rises to power. Then the people around them just accept whatever weird requests or creepy vibes or whispered rumors as the cost of doing business close to them. And if we don't fix this much larger problem of enabling, we will have a hand in creating and emboldening more men like Eric Swalwell. In fact, I believe there's another politico-predator across the country from California. In Florida as we speak. I was working on a political campaign in Florida and I met a young organizer who was eager to help my candidate. He had a lot of questions about where the candidate stood on certain issues, what he would be doing to reach out to voters, and then came one very specific question about a guy that we're going to refer to as Brady. The organizer asked if we were using Brady as a consultant on the campaign, but not in that tone that I often get, like, have you used this guy? He's great. There was something else going on. I let him know that Brady was not on our team, but I flagged it for later. When we had the chance to speak privately, I asked him about Brady, and the young man shared that he had a friend who was allegedly sexually assaulted by Brady, and that after asking around about him... He found other potential victims with similar stories. Just Google him, he said, you'll see what I mean. So I did. And after doing some research of public records, articles, blog posts, and after talking to some of the young men personally, I learned a lot about the alleged acts of Brady. A political staffer who was allegedly cornered and groped after a campaign event, a volunteer who was allegedly sexually assaulted when he was alone with Brady after a fundraiser, a student who was given alcohol while underage and then asked allegedly to perform sexual acts on Brady, a boy scout who is described in the report as "a young boy" who was taken allegedly by Brady to a nearby house for the night alone. Though to be clear, this particular act was not necessarily alleged since it later involved the Department of Children and Family Services and led to a formal letter from the Boy Scouts of America revoking Brady's membership and citing the incident. I have now read no less than seven accuser statements and depositions about Brady. The pattern of alleged behavior is always the same. Brady will have access to a young person alone, who is usually male, but not always. Brady would then allegedly sexually harass or assault the person, and then the alleged victim would be threatened or extorted to stay silent. But one of the stories stood out to me as being particularly chilling. Brady was at the time not yet a political consultant. But an associate professor who ran the political science internship program at a Florida university. Now the events I'm about to describe are in a probable cause affidavit prepared by law enforcement. But just assume that I am using the word allegedly about every five seconds just to keep this above board. The affidaviat states that Brady asked one of his students who was 19 at the time to stay after class. He invited him to dinner. Where he ordered him multiple alcoholic beverages and encouraged him to drink them"rapidly". When they were back in Brady's car, Brady mentioned sexual acts and the student said he was uncomfortable. It was then, according to the affidavit, that Brady first threatened to fail the student if he did not comply. I'm not going to go into detail about the things that transpired next, but it was as bad as many of you are imagining. The door was deadbolted. The evening was prolonged and cruel. And at one point, Brady said to the young student that he needed to "get into it or his grades would suffer". His threats ranged from grades in his own class turning to Fs to exposing the young man to his peers for ridicule. To expulsion from the university, to violence, because Brady knew where the young man lived. And then, allegedly, he ended their encounter with these words."Didn't we have fun tonight? Cheer up." Law enforcement was able to charge Brady with extortion, partly because there was recorded phone call between Brady and one of his victims. And after the young man describes some of the events on the phone call and says, you put me in a position I didn't want to be in concerning my grades and stuff, Brady responds, we were just fucking around. I apologize, I like you, you like me. I should have waited until after the semester to take you out for beer. That's what he said to the 19 year old, which you might note is not a denial of any of the sexual acts that were described during the call. With a student who was plied with alcohol and then threatening his grades, allegedly. This was so bad of a scandal that when they investigated the program that Brady ran, 21 of the 25 students in the program were impacted and had no qualifications to be in the program except that they had been hand-selected by Brady. The allegations against Brady are so far as recent as a few years ago and go back as far as the mid-1990s. Brady's political leanings shift over time. At one point, he's asked to leave from a Republican presidential campaign team because of accusations, and at another point he is accused of assaulting someone after a Democratic fundraiser. But regardless of his political persuasion or his background professionally, the question I have. At this moment, in the wake of the revelations about Eric Swalwell, is why the Florida Democratic Party has allowed this man anywhere near any of their functions, especially when young staffers would be vulnerable. Now, Brady is not a candidate that is known to much of the public, but he has, in the past 12 or 15 years, raised over$2.4 million in a political committee in Florida, where he is both the treasurer and the registered agent. And at first glance at the financials, it appears that over a million dollars has gone right back out to Brady, because of course it has. But hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to Democratic candidates or a division of the party itself. In fact, I found payments of over $150,000 just in the last eight years that went directly to the Florida Democratic Party, a county Democratic Party the Florida Senate Victory Organization or as my stomach churns when I say this, the Florida Young Democrats. So now to you or me,$150,000 is a lot of money, but is it enough money in politics to convince party leadership to turn a blind eye to the guy who's creepy? The guy that older staffers know to keep younger staffers away from? To the guy that has dark questions surrounding him that no one has apparently asked out loud because no one really wants the answers to. How much money buys the silence of Florida party leadership so that we can enable another Eric Swalwell. One of the key women who helped to investigate and break this story about Eric Swalwell is an elementary school teacher and an online influencer named Arielle Fodor. Some of you may recognize her by her social media name, Mrs. Frazzled. I've seen a ton of her videos where she is pretending to admonish the sitting president as she would one of her elementary school students having a tantrum. I'm sure you've come across a couple of them as well. An elementary school teacher, widely known on social media, usually she's sharing educational videos, but since she's been posting some commentary about the administration, she started falling into more political circles and she had an opportunity to attend an event for Congressman Eric Swalwell in relation to his run for the California governor. And she posted about the event afterwards saying, You know how I love to tell you when I meet a politician who acts like a normal human and not a robot. Eric is that. Now she then received comments and direct messages from multiple women on that post containing disturbing warnings about Swalwell and allegedly inappropriate relationships. To be clear, Arielle was not a victim of Swalwell's. But when she was contacted by some of them, she decided to do something revolutionary and not ignore them. Her first step in her quest for truth was to call people who knew Swalwell and just point blank ask them, have you heard any rumors about alleged bad behavior? Almost all of them said they had. Yes, we're familiar with rumors of something, but then the behavior was rationalized. They weren't sure what actually happened. They weren't sure what they were hearing was true and they didn't know of anything personally. They didn't think that speaking up would matter anyway because people probably wouldn't hold someone like him accountable. Or as one lobbyist in the Politico piece put it, did people see what they wanted to see and hear what they want to hear? Not asking the questions they didn't want answers to, 1,000%. Arielle would soon learn that multiple women who spoke out received cease and desist orders from Swalwell's attorney. There's always this question about why didn't they speak out sooner? It turns out at least some of them had, and they were threatened as a result. At least one consultant posted openly on social media about what he had been hearing and warned people to look into this matter before they got near him. Or endorsed him, he also was threatened by Swalwell's attorneys. So Arielle made it her mission to make sure that if she could help the women come forward a second time, this time they wouldn't be silenced. Now this, in my opinion, is the real Hollywood story. You're talking about a teacher who used her platform to work alongside other women and other influencers on behalf of other women. And break open the story of an alleged serial predator before he obtained immeasurable power. Now during her interview by Politico about the Swalwell scandal, she stated, we're in a place now where these campaigns will come for our necks personally. They will personally try to discredit us if we do something they don't like, and that's very scary. And yet these women persisted, and they prevailed. There are a lot of conversations about what to take away from the Swalwell scandal. And as more information comes forward, I'm sure there will be even more tough conversations that need to be had. People are asking, you know, does it matter that he's a Democrat instead of a Republican? Should we be having conversations about the fact that he was called upon to step down quickly and then wanting some sort of points for that compared to the other alleged serial predators that are out there. But here's the takeaway, in my opinion. Shame worked. Public pressure worked. People believing the stories of the victims worked. No charges have been filed yet against this man, and yet he has been taken down. And if even half. Of what these women are saying is true. This is not only a victory for them, but for who knows how many young vulnerable women in the future. So yes, the shame worked against an alleged predator like former Congressman Eric Swalwell. I'm simply suggesting that maybe a situation like this would not get quite as far If we begin shaming the enablers. As well. Alright everyone, that is our show for today. Make sure that you follow me @politicalfixer as we continue to talk about topics all over the board in this upcoming midterm season, make sure you listen to the podcasts wherever they are broadcast. I'm Shawna Presley Vercher and I will see you all soon. The Political Fixer podcast is produced by Reine Media and Tampa Bay Community Network. Executive producer and host, Shawna Presley Vercher. Audio producer, John Casimiro. Theme music by Soul Shifters. Content is for information purposes only and is the property of Reine Media and Shawna Presley Vercher. For more Political Fixer content and resources, visit politicalfixer.com.