Several women who are former classmates of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) have filed allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against the rep, since their days together at Patrick Henry College, according to a report by BuzzFeed News.
The report describes incidents of Cawthorn inappropriately touching and kissing women at Virginia’s small school, and driving them to “terrifying” rides alone in his car on the back roads around campus. The report also reports Cawthorn verbally harassing many of his classmates, calling them derogatory slanders and asking sexual questions that embarrassed conservative Christian women.
Caitlin Coulter, a former classmate of Cawthorn’s, described to BuzzFeed an agonizing journey on Cawthorn’s Dodge Challenger, saying that he made “innuendos” and asked her about his purity ring, which Coulter interpreted as an attempt to talk about sex. Coulter told BuzzFeed that she avoided his questioning until he broke out and ran back to campus recklessly, with Coulter clinging to her seat for safety.
“It was really scary,” she told BuzzFeed. “And I just remember being very happy to be coming home safely.”
The experience was so common on campus that resident school assistants began to warn campus girls not to be alone with Cawthorn in his car, reports BuzzFeed, even though he spent just over an entire semester at school.
Cawthorn was elected to Congress in the 14th District of North Carolina at the age of 25 last November, becoming the youngest member of Congress, which puts his story on Patrick Henry just four years ago. Cawthorn quickly made his name, as so many modern conservatives did, through trolling; tweeting, for example, “Chora mais, lib”, when the winner of his race is projected. He thwarted then-President Donald Trump’s favorite candidate in the primaries and won a seat in Congress.
Throughout his political career, the veracity of Cawthorn’s statements has been questioned. During the campaign, he always told how he was accepted into the United States Naval Academy before a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, a claim that turned out to be false. Cawthorn also used to talk about Paralympic training on his Instagram page, which Sara Luterman of the Nation reported last month was also fake.
Cawthorn said the allegations brought to light in the BuzzFeed report are false, referring to previous denials made during his campaign that he had ever done “anything sexually inappropriate”.
“These questions were asked and answered repeatedly during the course of the campaign. Voters in western North Carolina responded to these allegations by giving Madison Cawthorn a 12-point victory over her opponent, ”Cawthorn’s communications director and college friend, Micah Bock, told BuzzFeed.
Despite Cawthorn’s denial, BuzzFeed corroborated the stories from its sources through interviews with more than 20 former congressman’s classmates with knowledge of the allegations.
Despite these claims – which, as Bock noted, have been around for some time – the representative is one of the Republican Party’s rising stars in the post-Trump era. And it seems unlikely that credible reports of sexual harassment will alter his position within the party.
The post-Trump republican identity crisis
A few minutes after the BuzzFeed report hit the Internet, Cawthorn appeared on Fox News claiming that the Republican Party has a “great moral base to support itself”.
Cawthorn also said he hoped his presence in Congress could help the party reach a younger generation of voters who view the Republican Party as racist and fanatical. “We are the big party in the tent,” he said in an interview with the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) plenary conservative news network.
But several recent incidents reveal how big a task it can be to change the minds of people with negative perceptions of Republicans.
Two Republicans – Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Rand Paul – were criticized this week for making hateful and anti-trans statements, with Paul’s comments coming during a cabinet nomination hearing.
On Saturday, deputy Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke at CPAC, criticizing “white racism”, saying, “I want to tell you, I denounce … white racism,” during a panel. “This is not appropriate.” Gosar made the comments in an attempt to distance himself from an appearance on Friday at a different event organized by the white supremacist and Capitol insurrectionist Nick Fuentes.
Cawthorn himself spoke at the Trump rally on January 6 that started the insurrection, telling the crowd that it looked like there was “some struggle”. He later said that the demonstrators’ actions were “negligible” but defended his statements at the rally.
Some Democrats have accused Republicans of inviting support from white supremacists, and others have said they believe that some of their Republican colleagues are also white supremacists. Several Republican leaders have warned of the danger of embracing white supremacy, and other Republican lawmakers have talked about allowing marginal views to become central to the party. But despite these warnings, others have allied themselves with figures like white supremacists – and in doing so, make it difficult for the Republican Party to become the big party that Cawthorn described.
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