Longtime congressman and civil rights icon John Conyers is under fire for a previously undisclosed settlement with a former staffer who claimed she was fired for rejecting Conyers’s sexual advances. Buzzfeed broke the story that after the woman was fired in 2014, she filed a complaint with Congress’s Office of Compliance. Her claims were backed up by affidavits from other Conyers’s staffers who allege similar behavior by the congressman, and Conyers eventually reached a settlement with the woman.
A draft of a settlement agreement between Conyers and the woman called for payments totaling $27,111.75 to be paid out over three months. As Buzzfeed reported, the funds came from Conyers’s congressional office account and not the Office of Compliance. The Office of Compliance is in the news because it has paid out $17 million to settle “workplace disputes” since 1997. Conyers’s settlement is not included in that.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has located expense reports filed by Conyers’s office as part of the House of Representatives Statement of Disbursements show two amounts paid in the second and third quarters of 2015 that total $27,111.74 to a staffer whose position is listed as “temporary employee.” (The staffer, whose name TWS has redacted, was last listed on a disbursement report for April 15, 2014, before the 2015 payments.)
The two disbursements are recorded as follows:
A composite of the documents from the House’s Statement of Disbursements is shown here:
After an initial denial that he knew anything about the accusations and settlement, Conyers released a statement denying any wrongdoing and characterizing the payments as a “reasonable severance payment.” House Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders have called for an ethics investigation into Conyers’s behavior.
