Indianapolis has had a bright spotlight on it in 2024. The Olympic swimming time trials in Lucas Oil Stadium, the NBA All-Star game, and the arrival of the biggest name in sports, Caitlin Clark. Now the city is ground zero for something shameful. Mayor Joe Hogsett is under fire for his mishandling of numerous sexual harassment allegations made against former Chief Deputy Mayor Thomas Cook.
The first known allegations were made in 2017, and in recent weeks, extensive reporting has been done on the matter by the Indianapolis Star and Mirror Indy. What we already know from their reporting is terrible.
More terrible news is coming. Count on it.
The book, “Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics” and its movie adaptation have been on my mind the last few weeks. This roman é clef, French for “novel with a key,” was first published by Anonymous in 1996. It’s an insider’s tale of a fictitious southern governor, Jack Stanton, and his 1992 primary campaign for the presidency.
Read the book or watch the movie. “Stanton” is Bill Clinton. The author was later to be revealed as Joe Klein, a columnist for Time magazine who covered Clinton’s real-life 1992 campaign. The book detailing this corrupt, womanizing character, and importantly, his campaign team, was published more than two years before the world met Monica Lewinsky.
Lauren Roberts was a deputy campaign manager on Hogsett’s 2015 reelection campaign. She was apparently the first to complain about Cook’s harassment via email in 2017. Hogsett’s initial unresponsiveness led to her direct, in-person report to the mayor in 2019. Hogsett claims action was taken, though it wasn’t ever communicated with Roberts. She has since relocated to Denver. But she kept all of the receipts.
Caroline Ellert’s story about Cook is similar. Her victimization followed Roberts’s. Ellert worked for both the campaign and the city, but she has since relocated to Washington, D.C. She complained in September of 2023, which led to Cook’s firing from Hogsett’s reelection campaign last year.
Until Roberts first decided to “go on the record” a few weeks ago, the public was unaware, but that is secondary. It remains unclear the depth of the problem, whether there are other victims, or other episodes of clear unresponsiveness by those who should have prioritized the safety of these women. Until last week, there doesn’t appear to be any documented effort to address the safety of every other employee in the Hogsett administration’s charge either.
What we know and what we don’t
The reporting has been detailed and excellent, but it is simply not believable that a comprehensive understanding of the hostile culture is yet known. I appreciate all of the suggestions being made by members of the City County Council going forward, but this is a situation that is impossible to move past without knowing the extent of what has already occurred.
Getting to the bottom of the whole damn thing should be priority one.
Based on what we already know, it is a safe assumption that this story is not just about one bad employee doing one, or two, or three bad things. All of the things we know could not possibly have been unknown to everyone around them. Much of the harassment happened right in front of people who should have acted and didn’t. Why didn’t they?
The political campaign marketplace has somehow slipped through the lessons other markets learned from modern workplace protocols, akin to the cleanse that came during the #metoo movement. I can’t explain why that is. Maybe it’s the temporary nature of the work. Maybe it’s the intensity of it, with months of round the clock demands for every campaign’s entirety. Maybe it’s because it’s not just a paycheck; it’s a passion.
The presence of that passion, most of all, is why the betrayal detailed in Roberts’s and Ellert’s stories is so intolerable. I haven’t met these two strong, young women, but I predict they became involved with the Hogsett campaign originally because they truly believed in him or it.
I am a feminist. The Democrat party is the party for feminists. The betrayal is bigger for Democrats because it is in direct conflict with the party’s soul. A Democratic campaign should be the safest place in the world for a woman.
But it’s not.
I could share a novel’s worth of harassment stories about Republicans, but I won’t this week. I am confident that once the details of the Hogsett saga are known, they will be useful for American political campaigns that are ready to join the modern world of diverse workplace culture.
That would make it bigger than those swimming pools in Lucas Oil Stadium. And we will have Lauren and Caroline to thank for it.
Michael Leppert is an author, educator and a communication consultant in Indianapolis. He writes about government, politics and culture at MichaelLeppert.com. This commentary was previously published at indianacapitalchronicle.com. Send comments to [email protected].
