They came to lobby against online sexual abuse and found lawmakers wrestling with abuse within their own ranks.
For four years running, policy experts and survivor advocates with RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence advocacy organization, have come to Capitol Hill for a day of lobbying. This year, their annual advocacy day came amid a reckoning over sexual misconduct in the halls of Congress.
As survivors gathered Monday evening at a hotel in downtown Washington for a panel discussion and to prepare for their advocacy day, news broke that two House members accused of sexual misconduct, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California and Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, announced they would resign from Congress amid a bipartisan push to expel them. It represented a swift and stunning fall for both — and underscored the culture of silence surrounding sexual misconduct in Congress.
RAINN staffers, around 40 survivor advocates from over a dozen states and Tay Lautner, a registered nurse, mental health advocate and podcast host, arrived on Capitol Hill the next day as lawmakers grappled with the fallout.
“What a day, what a week,” Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania said in addressing the group at a breakfast Tuesday.
“Two congressmen are out,” she continued. “I am furious. Furious that it takes this long, furious we have a culture that silences those kinds of behaviors, and furious that these women have to come forward in shadow, sometimes for their own protection.”
“I’m here to say with you, we will be change makers,” Dean said in concluding her remarks. “And it’s not just legislation. We must change our culture.”
Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in March after the San Antonio Express-News reported on his inappropriate relationships with staff members, one of whom is now deceased. Swalwell dropped out of the California governor’s race Sunday and later resigned from Congress after the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN released reports days earlier on assault allegations against him. He has apologized for what he said were errors in judgment but has denied all of the accusations of sexual assault, with his lawyer calling them “a calculated and transparent political hit job.”
Scott Berkowitz, RAINN’s president and founder, said in an interview that he was glad to see the resignations but that it shouldn’t have taken so long.
“This stuff has got to stop happening, and when it does happen, we’ve got to do something about it a lot quicker and not wait for victims to come forward to a reporter,” he said. “We’ve just got to change the way things are done here.”
Some survivor advocates said they learned about the Gonzales and Swalwell resignations for the first time at the Tuesday breakfast.
“I heard about that for the first time when they announced it at the front, and I haven’t even had time to check my phone,” said an advocate named Katie. “I think it just speaks to how prevalent this issue is, and how it’s everywhere in every room in every part of the country.” She and other survivors who spoke to The 19th are identified by only their first names to protect their privacy.
“I feel like the last several years have been just reckoning after reckoning,” said Anna, another survivor advocate. “It never ends, and I don’t know that it ever will, because we know that the majority of people who perpetrate these crimes are people we know and people we trust.”
But in what can be a sharply divided political climate, bipartisan coalitions in Congress have mobilized behind survivors.
Two women lawmakers — a Democrat and a Republican — prepared resolutions to expel Gonzales and Swalwell, spurring their resignations. Last year, three Republican women sided with Democrats to compel the release of files connected to the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And advocates secured a major victory last spring with the passage of the Take It Down Act, which made distributing nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated explicit deepfakes and so-called revenge porn, a crime.
But to advocates, the continued proliferation of tech-enabled sexual abuse and misconduct scandals in Congress shows how little support and resources there are for survivors.
Brooke Nevils, a writer and author of “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe,” joined the advocacy day to lobby for federal funding for the national sexual assault hotline, which is operated by RAINN and has not received federal funding in years. In writing her book, Nevils found that survivors often don’t have a safe, confidential place to go to process what happened to them, a crucial service the RAINN hotline provides.
“RAINN is the difference between life and death for a lot of these victims,” she said. “It is the only place they can go.”
Nevils knows what it means to come forward about an assault by a powerful person. In 2017, she was a producer at NBC when she reported “Today Show” host Matt Lauer for sexually assaulting her at the Sochi Olympics three years earlier, leading to NBC firing him the next day. Lauer admitted to having extramarital affairs but claimed his interactions with Nevils were consensual and denied abusing or assaulting anyone.
“It’s no secret that people don’t want to think about this. They don’t want to talk about it. We don’t think it’s ever going to happen to us, and so we’d just rather not think about it at all,” she said. “If the events of the past few weeks have made nothing else clear, it should be that it is time for Congress to start thinking about it and doing something about it. And funding this hotline is the bare minimum.”
RAINN was also advocating for a slew of bipartisan bills targeting tech and artificial intelligence-enabled sexual abuse. They include the DEFIANCE Act, which would allow survivors to sue the creators and perpetrators of nonconsensual intimate imagery, and other bipartisan bills seeking to crack down on the proliferation of child sex abuse material, to protect minors from the harms of AI chatbots and protect people’s likeness from being used for AI without their consent.
Quaydaisha, an advocate who has participated in all four annual RAINN advocacy days, said there’s tremendous value in putting a face and a powerful story behind a piece of legislation when lobbying lawmakers and staffers.
“Whatever the subject we’re talking on today, just know that there are really people out here with these stories that have lived it, and they need to know that whatever they do plays a part in our lives,” she said.
First Lady Melania Trump’s support was key to passing the Take It Down Act, but the White House and the Trump administration have broadly opposed and sought to undermine state-level AI regulation.
Berkowitz said RAINN, with its package of bills specifically addressing abuse, sees tech companies as partners and not necessarily adversaries.
“We’re not trying to stop AI, we’re not trying to make these companies into our enemies,” he added. “We’re trying to work with them, partner with them, to make sure that these trillions of dollars are invested in something that not only changes the way we work and live, but also keeps people safe.”
On Tuesday afternoon, advocates joined Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, and New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez for a news conference on the STOP CSAM Act, which seeks to bolster protections for survivors of online exploitation and crack down on the proliferation of child sex abuse material. Durbin and Hawley slammed tech platforms, which Durbin likened to the big tobacco companies, for how they said those platforms enable child abuse and exploitation.
Hawley said the moment is about “a simple principle,” that “no amount of profit by the big tech companies justifies destroying the lives of America’s children.”
“You know who has the most money of lobbyists of any group in this Capitol? It’s big tech,” Hawley added.
Monique, a RAINN advocate who spoke at the news conference, is a mental health counselor and professor who works with young people and sees firsthand the harms of technology-enabled abuse, which she said is affecting children at younger and younger ages. “It’s a big problem,” she said.
Tech platforms are nearing a May deadline set by the Take It Down Act, by which they must formalize a process for victims to request that images be taken down within 48 hours. Berkowitz said RAINN met with the Federal Trade Commission, tasked with implementing the law, for an update last week and said he’s “hopeful” they’ll meet the deadline.
“One of the things we’re trying to work on with the platforms now is to take the burden off the victims,” he said.
Nevils said lawmakers also have a chance to pass laws and enact lasting change to take the burden off survivors when it comes to technology-enabled abuse and the culture that enables sexual misconduct by powerful people in Congress.
“Usually, what happens is that victims suffer the consequences of sexual abuse for decades before lawmakers act,” she said. “We saw that with the clergy abuse scandals. We’re seeing that with the Epstein files. And what we saw yesterday, and what we’ve seen with the Take It Down Act, is that victims are not going to allow that to happen this time, and there is a rare opportunity for lawmakers to stand up.”
Congress, she said, “can actually be leaders in preventing this stuff from happening instead of remedying a wrong that has been going on for years.”