The News
Eight months after their sexual misconduct allegations doomed his congressional campaign, Virginia state legislator Dan Helmer is suing a group of Democratic Party activists for defamation, conspiracy, and $15 million in damages.
The lawsuit, filed in Fairfax County court last week, resurrected a controversy that briefly panicked Democrats last year. Well into the early voting period for the June 18 primary, a then-anonymous activist accused Helmer of groping her, and four local party leaders claimed that “Helmer’s inappropriate behavior” inspired their own sexual harassment policy. Helmer denied the “baseless claims,” as rivals and the state’s chapter of the National Organization for Women called on him to quit the race.
He stayed in it, and narrowly lost the nomination to now-Rep. Suhas Subramanyam. Helmer now says that the scandal badly hurt his reputation and mental health; Charles King, the attorney for the accuser and a defendant in Helmer’s lawsuit, told Semafor that he’d provided “an accurate narrative of the events told to me by my client.”
Helmer’s narrative was very different. In it, a party activist called him in early May, warning that people were spreading rumors that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with her. In a text, provided to the court, the activist called this “typical Republican tactics,” to divide their party.
One month later, the same activist was telling reporters that Helmer had groped her. Avram Fechter, one of the local Democrats who’d backed up the harassment story, funded a PAC whose last-minute ads claimed that Helmer was “credibly accused of sexual assault.”
In this article:
Know More
Other Democrats have stayed quiet about the lawsuit, filed by a two-term state delegate who’s running for re-election this year. In Virginia and D.C., they have been consumed by opposition to the second Trump administration, and by resistance to its decisions to freeze federal spending and push out government employees.
But Helmer brought his case at a moment when allegations of sexual misconduct have lost some of their power to disrupt. Trump won his new term after losing a defamation case against E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of sexual assault. Old allegations of impropriety against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and new allegations against Pete Hegseth, did not pry off many Republican votes for either man’s cabinet nomination.
“My playbook on these confirmations was to remind people of the Kavanaugh confirmation, and remind people that the #MeToo presumption of guilt is un-American,” said Mike Davis, a conservative attorney whose Article III Project organized tens of thousands of messages in support of the Hegseth confirmation.
Helmer’s experience found Democratic voters feeling differently about last-minute allegations of impropriety. The 12-way race for Virginia’s 11th district had no clear front-runner; Helmer had a spending advantage, thanks to outside groups like the crypto-funded Fairshake PAC, but Subramanyam had the support of Jennifer Wexton, the first Democrat to represent the seat, whose struggle with an aggressive form of Parkinson’s made national news.
But in other races, Democrats have shown signs of #MeToo fatigue. In New York City, Democratic candidates for mayor are girding for the potential candidacy of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his last office over sexual harassment allegations but now leads in public polls. One of Cuomo’s potential rivals is former city comptroller Scott Stringer, whose 2021 mayoral bid imploded after a former campaign aide accused him of sexual misconduct.
Neither story has loomed large in the race against Mayor Eric Adams – who was himself sued last year by a woman claiming that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. (“Never happened,” Adams said of her allegation.) And the accusations against Stringer were challenged at the time, as progressive allies un-endorsed him.
Four years later, none of his opponents have brought up the allegations in their candidate forums. Reached this week, none of the progressive endorsers who withdrew their support for Stringer in 2021 wanted to comment on the record; leaders of the Working Families Party, which pulled its 2021 support for him, told podcaster Ben Max last week that its endorsement was “open to anyone who is running for mayor.”
David’s view
The simplest explanation of why misconduct allegations don’t move voters or partisans like they used to is that Donald Trump won. There was no one day when Democrats decided that an allegation of misconduct was no longer a career-ending offense. They had second thoughts about the forced resignation of Al Franken; they didn’t believe Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who emerged in 2020 to claim that Joe Biden had assaulted her.
But Democrats clearly thought differently about the #MeToo standard of evidence and public behavior after Donald Trump shook off multiple accusations of misconduct. The party quietly benched Bill Clinton during the 2018 midterms, a cycle when multiple members of Congress quit over personal scandals. He was back out on the trail last year, campaigning for the first female presidential nominee he wasn’t married to. And when he made bad news for the party, it was about debating the particulars of Gaza with protesters.
One cynical read: Democrats got tired of subjecting their candidates to a standard that Donald Trump never even tried to meet. Republicans adopted Saul Alinsky’s fourth Rule for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Had Helmer won his primary, they were ready to pummel him over the allegations, while working to elect a president accused of worse behavior.
The result has been a general desensitization. On Tuesday, the new administration announced that Sean Parnell, a Republican veteran who ended his 2022 Senate campaign in Pennsylvania after damaging revelations about his marriage, would become spokesman for Hegseth’s Pentagon. There was some outrage at his political resurrection. But not very much.
“I avoid referencing it, because there were some small kids involved,” said Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who won the race that Parnell abandoned. “I won’t add to the whole thing, and I hope their family is in a good way.”
Room for Disagreement
The shifting norms showed up in coverage of the Trump cabinet nominees’ hearings, too. Since 2018, Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono has asked every nominee that comes before her whether they have made “unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature,” and whether they “faced discipline or entered into a settlement” for that conduct. She did this, she told the New York Times, because “there was every potential for the #MeToo movement to be swept under the rug.”
For a long time, Hirono’s opening questions didn’t need explaining. But when she asked them year, conservative media outlets asked what in the world was wrong with her. Did she think Pam Bondi had committed sexual harassment? Doug Burgum?
“I always ask the question as one of the ways that we gauge the fitness of anyone to serve,” Hirono told Semafor. “And you know what? You should ask them why they don’t seem to care.”
But did the American people care less about these issues than they did four years ago? “I hope not,” said Hirono.
Notable
- In the New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix asks whether the #MeToo era is over, in Hollywood and elsewhere: “The standard of ‘believing women’ did not really become a standard. Stories of harassment and abuse now receive a curdled, cynical, and exhausted reception.”