Liz Hart studied city planning with an eye on helping her hometown, and a foot in the door working for the former Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero. But his persistent sexual harassment led her to abandon that dream.
Virg Bernero is a charismatic leader who built a national brand as “America’s Angriest Mayor” by going to bat for the city of Lansing. He has connections all over the city, and some statewide pull, too; he was the Democratic candidate for governor in 2010.
He had mounted another mayoral run, which he abruptly ended on Sunday after women including Hart told MLive he had sexually harassed them.
Hart started working for Bernero as an intern in his mayoral office in 2013. She agreed to join his campaign leading fundraising efforts later that year, and it was then – mostly in conversations at the campaign office – that she started feeling uncomfortable around him.
“When you work with people you get to know them. And that’s kind of what it was at first. And then he would slip in like sexual comments, like things that he liked. Or he would ask me questions of things that I would like. I would never answer, I never felt comfortable with it. But that was how it started,” Hart said.
But that’s not how it ended. His conversations with her grew more explicit. She started ignoring phone calls from him late at night, and fending off sexual conversations, advances and requests.
At a lunch with other campaign workers and mayoral staff one day, Hart was wearing sandals and had one foot crossed over her leg when Bernero picked the spot next to her.
“He sat down, put his stuff down, and somehow he decided to just take his finger and run it along my foot. I just... I moved legs, I switched them, and didn’t say anything,” she said.
Later, she said, he told her he had a foot fetish.
Emily Heverly, a friend of Hart’s, volunteered on the Bernero campaign. She remembers Hart describing uncomfortable incidents with Bernero, including having touched her foot, and an uncomfortable situation in his mayoral office.
Hart said at one point, Bernero called her into his mayoral office, but hid her from other staff members. He asked her to drink vodka he kept in his desk.
“He was like really, really persistent about it, and finally I just said ‘sure,’ so I took a sip and that was it,” Hart said.
He was ranting about the city council and getting physically close to her, she said. Then, “he asked me to show him one of my breasts and I was just like ‘absolutely not.’” She texted Heverly to call her and used the call as an excuse to leave.
Hearing about the sexual harassment Hart was experiencing at the time, “I remember feeling so powerless to not be able to help her. Because I can’t tell my friend to like quit her job. She’s a few months out of undergrad,” Heverly said.
And Bernero’s sexual harassment ended up impacting Heverly, too.
Hart and Heverly both remember an incident when, while they were working at the campaign office and he dropped by, he propositioned them for a threesome.
He steered the conversation in the direction of threesomes, and “then he roundaboutly suggested that Liz and I should have sex together in front of him and that he should participate. It was very bizarre. It was very uncomfortable,” Heverly said.
She thinks one of them said no, and Bernero moved on.
But Heverly saw it as a numbers game – Bernero was just constantly throwing out sexual innuendo and propositions, seeing if anything would stick. And a lot of that targeted Hart.
“She was being sexually harassed every single day, and I happened to be there for that one,” Heverly said.
In an initial April 16 statement to MLive when asked about these incidents, Bernero said after he left the mayor’s office he worked on himself and his marriage.
“But I realize my past actions and words impacted people outside my family, and I sincerely apologize to anyone whom I have caused pain, especially the women who have come forward. It was never my intention to hurt anyone, and I apologize to each of them,” he said.
He was running, he said, not as a perfect man but as a better man.
In a Sunday update, he took himself out of the running, saying in a Facebook post, “My wife and family have forgiven me for the mistakes of the past, but politics is less forgiving.”
Hart and Heverly’s accounts come on top of allegations about other sexual harassment from Bernero printed in a weekly Lansing newspaper, The City Pulse. Two women spoke to the paper anonymously.
One, a former House staffer who confirmed details of the encounter to MLive, described a 2010 incident where Bernero met her on the street and touched her, running his hand along her thigh over her clothes and laying his whole hand flat on her thigh as he moved to grab and examine her House employee badge hanging from her belt loop.
“I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. What do you do in that situation?” said the woman, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
She was shaken by the incident, and when she got back to the office there was an email from him waiting for her with his phone number in it. She deleted it.
Her account was corroborated in the City Pulse’s account by a male intern who was with her at the time and witnessed the incident.
Bernero initially issued a generic apology to the City Pulse, but later denied the incident had occurred and called it “character assassination” he implied was linked to an opponent’s campaign. In a statement to MLive, he said the incident “did not happen, period, not on a public street or anywhere.”
The woman found his response insulting, and said she had no involvement in any mayoral campaign.
“The fact that he made himself into the victim just made me sick. He’s not the victim. And no, it’s not like a political smear campaign,” she said, adding,”...if he un-apologized he clearly is not a changed man.”
Another woman, who worked in television, told City Pulse that when Bernero was a lawmaker, he called her from the floor to tell her how great her legs looked on a recent report. She recalled at least three calls from him, all sexual in nature.
Bernero said he did not recall the reported phone calls, “but I apologize if I offended someone with crude or inappropriate language. It was not a regular practice then and does not happen now.”
Lansing-based political consultant Emily Dievendorf also experienced crude comments from Bernero. When she ran for political office in 2015 he gave her unsolicited advice on her appearance and said that if she wore her hair a particular way, he wouldn’t be able to control himself around her.
She knows she isn’t the only woman he’s made inappropriate comments to and said some are not able to speak up because of the influence he still has in the city.
“I think especially with Virg, there’s a charisma that people will latch on to. And they will excuse other behavior,” Dievendorf said.
Hart said back when she was working on the Bernero campaign she was learning, in-between all the sexual harassment. Bernero went into meetings engaged and enthusiastic. He sold people on the city, which interested her from an economic development and planning perspective.
“I mean, he was a total pervert, but he was really good at being a politician,” Hart said.
After working on the mayoral campaign, Hart went to work for a political consultancy, and then with the Board of Water and Light, Lansing’s municipal utility.
But she still saw Bernero regularly through work, and his influence in the city loomed large. People thought Hart was Bernero’s mistress. A professional contact asked her directly about it. Bernero’s wife was mean to her, she said. And she got the feeling he was encouraging those false rumors.
“I know he liked it. And then, you know, for some reason that turned against me,” Hart said.
The experience led her to leave the state. She’s since found success and used her city planning expertise to help grow other communities. And she’s never coming back to Lansing.
For Hart, who started out wanting to help her hometown, having to leave was a big blow.
“It started off as sexual harassment, and it really did ruin my life and my hometown for me. And he got away with it,” Hart said.
Years later, she’s done with Lansing and done staying silent.
“I know women don’t speak up because they think it could ruin their career. And I didn’t speak up and it still ruined mine.”
"really" - Google News
April 19, 2021 at 07:02PM
https://ift.tt/3swFybd
Ex-mayor’s sexual harassment ‘really did ruin my life.’ Virg Bernero ends election bid as women speak up - mlive.com
"really" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b3YJ3H
https://ift.tt/35qAk7d
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Ex-mayor’s sexual harassment ‘really did ruin my life.’ Virg Bernero ends election bid as women speak up - mlive.com"
Post a Comment