The Hartford Courant
Elizabeth Esty will likely spend the next several days defending her failure to take strong steps to protect a woman who’d been threatened and bullied – by a member of her own staff – by blaming the system and talking about the good she’s done in Congress.
She shouldn’t. She should resign.
After learning about the allegations against her chief of staff, Esty, the Democratic U.S. representative for Connecticut’s 5th District, should have ensured that her former staffer was safe and that the man who’d threatened her was held accountable. Instead, she circled the wagons, called the lawyers and kept things quiet.
That’s appalling.
The story is deeply disturbing. The staff member, identified by The Washington Post as Anna Kain, had dated Tony Baker, Esty’s chief of staff. Kain sought a protective order, claiming that Baker had threatened to kill her, punched her and harassed her in Esty’s office.
“You better f——-g reply to me or I will f——-g kill you,” Baker said in a recording left for Kain on May 5, 2016, according to The Post.
“The next day, I confronted him about this and said, ‘This is completely unacceptable,'” Esty told The Courant. “He did not deny that this happened. He was contrite. I told him he had to get anger management and basically stop drinking.”
What’s completely unacceptable is that Esty did not move to protect her former staffer.
Instead, she tried to sweep it under the rug. She said she contacted a lawyer who recommended an internal investigation. She kept Baker on the staff, and on the payroll, for three months.
She told The Post that “she was pressured by the Office of House Employment Counsel to sign” a nondisclosure agreement to get rid of Baker. In the deal, she agreed to help him get another job and pay him $5,000 severance.
And now, only after the allegations came to light, she’s contrite and acknowledges the lapse.
Too little, too late.
Esty had every opportunity – and every responsibility – to at least suspend Baker on the spot and hold him accountable for his behavior.
Instead, she went with the script that has cloaked sexual assault and harassment in Congress for decades. She is complicit.
Esty herself was among those who called for the resignation of fellow U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who stepped down late last year after allegations that he had sexually harassed female staff members.
Here’s what Esty had to say about Conyers at the time:
“I do think that reports that have come to light in the last 48 hours are of an extremely serious nature,” she said. “They involve people he had direct authority over, staff in his congressional office who are entirely reliant upon him for their livelihood. … I think it’s entirely unacceptable and I think he should resign.”
Esty’s responses so far have been disappointing. She has blamed the system and hasn’t taken nearly enough responsibility for her own actions.
“I was not the perpetrator of this,” Esty said. “I think there’s a whole record of what I’ve accomplished.”
On Friday morning, Esty told The Courant that she is now “trying to be a cautionary tale.” She didn’t see the warning signs because “people who do this can be very manipulative.”
Esty says she was following the rules designed to protect the House as an institution rather than the victim, and she now regrets that.
She should regret it. It was a colossal failure of judgment and an indication that her priorities are awry. She was elected to represent constituents, not abusive men.
“I should have suspended him right away, but I had no experience with this, and there wasn’t a process in place,” she told The Courant.
Unacceptable. When one learns that a woman’s life is being threatened by one of your own employees, you don’t need “a process in place.”
Perhaps most disturbing is that there is no evidence that the woman who was so concerned for her safety was ever formally involved in the deal to protect her alleged abuser.
Time was up for John Conyers.
And now, time is up for Elizabeth Esty.
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