- Former classmates from Rep. Madison Cawthorn told BuzzFeed that he harassed women at his college.
- Two ARs said they warned women who resided in their dormitories not to go on walks with Cawthorn.
- Cawthorn said earlier that “I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life”.
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Former Madison Cawthorn’s former classmates said he would use his car to corner women with sexual advances on off-campus strolls, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed News.
Students said Cawthorn, a 25-year-old Republican from North Carolina, was known for this behavior while at Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school in Virginia that the legislator briefly attended in the fall of 2016.
Two resident assistants said they would warn the women in their dormitory not to go for a walk with Cawthorn in their white Dodge Challenger. Cawthorn referred to these tours as “fun rides”.
“I received information from other RAs to warn the female student body not to go on gay outings with them because bad things happened on those outings,” Giovanna Lastra, one of the former RAs, told BuzzFeed.
One woman, Caitlin Coulter, remembers going for a drive with Cawthorn, in which he asks invasive questions about the purity ring she wears. After 20 minutes of refusing to answer his questions, his behavior changed and he drove dangerously back to campus.
Others told BuzzFeed that Cawthorn was often aggressive or misogynistic and that he called a woman a “naughty little blonde American girl” in front of a table at her colleagues. He would also have asked other men about “which race of girls gives the best blowjobs”.
The BuzzFeed investigation comes after other allegations were made before the first-year representative was elected in November last year.
In August 2020, World Magazine reported that a woman, Katrina Krulikas, said that Cawthorn kissed her forcibly in 2014, when Cawthorn was 19 and she was 17.
On a walk, Cawthorn asked Krulikas questions about whether she had sex or not before pressing her to sit on his lap. He tried to kiss her, but she pulled away. Cawthorn then tried again, holding her face, making her struggle to jump off his lap.
During a campaign event in September 2020, Cawthorn denied the report, saying “I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life,” reported the Citizen Times.
However, Cawthorn apparently apologized to Krulikas in a February 2020 text after a friend of hers mentioned the incident in response to one of his campaign texts. “I can see in retrospect how it ended and I’m sorry,” he wrote.
Cawthorn was also investigated for questionable claims he made about his past, including that he was training for the Paralympic Games and that the accident that put him in a wheelchair was the reason he was unable to attend the Naval School.