Rep. Katherine Clark said Thursday she had never heard a rumor about allegations involving former Reps. Tony Gonzales and Eric Swalwell until the accusations surfaced, as the two men remained at the center of separate misconduct probes and fresh questions about how Congress handles complaints.
“I personally did not even hear a rumor about Eric Swalwell or Tony Gonzales until the allegations came out,” Clark said on News Central. She added that Congress has “a duty to act, and we have a duty and a standard that should be of the highest because we represent people.”
Her comments came days after Gonzales and Swalwell resigned from the House on Tuesday amid allegations of sexual misconduct. The House Ethics Committee has opened separate investigations into both men, while the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly looking into allegations against Swalwell.
Clark said lawmakers also need to do more to make sure staff members know how to come forward. “We have to make sure we have a system that enables people, if these incidents happen to them to report it and know they will be taken seriously and that their jobs will be protected while an investigation goes forward,” she said.
The scrutiny around Gonzales and Swalwell has been building for months. Earlier this year, the San Antonio Express-News reported that Gonzales had an affair with his district director, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, who later died by suicide. Text messages extracted from Santos-Aviles’s phone and provided by her widower to media outlets showed Gonzales soliciting sexual material from her as she said he was going too far, and Gonzales admitted to the affair last month.
Swalwell, meanwhile, has denied wrongdoing while acknowledging past poor judgment. When announcing his resignation, he said he would fight the “false allegations” against him and admitted to prior “mistakes in judgment.”
Other California Democrats said Wednesday they too had not known about the allegations before the reports became public. Rep. Pete Aguilar said, “Personally, I found out when the … San Francisco Chronicle article was published on Friday, and then shortly thereafter, I think, the article.” Rep. Ted Lieu said, “I had no idea until I read the San Francisco Chronicle article when it was published.”
Those denials matter because they undercut any sense that leadership was sitting on known complaints, even as the allegations kept widening. The San Francisco Chronicle detailed accusations of sexual assault against Swalwell on Friday from a former aide, reported on three women accusing him of separate instances of sexual misconduct, including unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos, and later reported on a fifth accuser.
Clark’s call for a reporting system points to the part of the story that now matters most: whether Congress can prove it has a process that victims and staffers trust before the next case breaks in public. For now, the resignations, the ethics probes and the reported criminal review leave the institution answering the same question Clark put on the table — not whether misconduct allegations can arise, but whether the chamber is prepared when they do.
