Lila had been working late again. Her ballet flats pattered on the
terrazzo floors of the Texas Capitol as she walked through the bowels of
the building, up the stairs, and out its heavy, carved oak doors.
Across the expansive south lawn, a few blocks away, she joined some
fellow Senate interns who were enjoying the evening at a bustling
rooftop bar. She looked forward to relaxing with Moscow mules and tacos
under the glow of the string lights overhead. It was a beautiful March
evening—until it wasn’t.
A 21-year-old college senior, Lila worked for state senator José
Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat. Soon after sitting down with her
friends, she started venting about the months of touching, after-hours
texts, and questions about her dating life that she had been facing from
the lawmaker’s 52-year-old chief of staff, Thomas “Tomas” Larralde. As
she talked, her phone buzzed on the sticky high-top table. Larralde had
sent an incoherent message to the office group chat—which included the
district director and the senator. It appeared that Larralde, a brash
and divisive figure, was drunk. If he’d spoken the jumbled words, Lila
imagined they would’ve been slurred.
Someone else in the chat
responded to ask if he was okay. Larralde didn’t reply, but five minutes
later he sent a private message to Lila (who asked that we not use her
real name, out of fear of retaliation). “How’s your night,” he texted.
“Pretty good! Nothing too crazy, yours?” Lila responded.
“I’ve been drinking,” he said. “So on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a 5.”
As
her phone lit up, the other interns looked on in horror at the behavior
they were witnessing in real time. “I remember showing my friends,”
Lila told Texas Monthly. “I was like, ‘This is exactly what I was talking about!’ ”
………
Menéndez decided to fire his chief of staff. “I was like, ‘Okay, this
guy’s gone,’ ” he said. “It took less than twenty-four hours to get rid
of him.”
Others in the Capitol, however, told Texas Monthly
that he had known of Larralde’s misconduct for more than five years. By
the time Lila came forward, three current and former statehouse
employees had reported to Menéndez what they described as Larralde’s
demeaning and sexist behavior, during incidents starting in 2015, Texas Monthly
found. One former staffer said she repeatedly told the senator that she
saw Larralde touch female colleagues inappropriately and also
complained to Menéndez about the chief of staff’s lewd jokes. Another
former staffer said she described Larralde’s conduct to Menéndez as
flirtatious, creepy, and belittling. One former lawmaker told reporters
she’d called out Larralde’s use of sexist language, and Menéndez had
apologized for it.
………
The complaints Menéndez received were about behavior consistent with the
examples of sexual harassment detailed in the Senate’s policy,
including “sexually oriented comments, jokes, or gestures,” “messages
that are sexually suggestive, or in any manner demeaning, intimidating,
or insulting,” “unwelcome physical contact,” and “repeatedly asking a
person to socialize during off-duty hours when the person has said no or
has indicated that he or she is not interested.” Other staffers said
they left Menéndez’s office in part because they didn’t feel comfortable
working with a man they described as misogynistic.
………
Menéndez’s failure to view these complaints as
reports of sexual harassment is emblematic of breakdowns in the
enforcement of the Senate’s sexual harassment policy, which was updated in 2018
and trumpeted as a deterrent to misconduct in the Capitol. In practice,
the new policy has functioned to protect individual senators accused of
misbehavior and the reputation of the institution rather than the women
who work there.
Lila had made a verbal complaint to a supervisor,
as instructed in the policy, but there are no public records of her
complaint or of any investigation into allegations of sexual harassment
by Larralde, according to Spaw, who serves as the custodian of all
Senate records. Menéndez confirmed to Texas Monthly that at his
direction Larralde signed a nondisclosure agreement barring him from
discussing the circumstances of his termination. Then, days after
Larralde was fired, Lila’s internship coordinator called her and asked
her to sign a document that Lila understood would have given the
internship program “cover” by outlining steps it had taken to handle the
situation. Lila never signed anything. “I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t
want to sign it, I don’t feel comfortable signing it,’ ” Lila told Texas Monthly. “I felt very alone and taken advantage of. I don’t have an attorney.”
………
It would be easy to see Larralde’s case as an isolated incident—and one
that was eventually solved with his firing. Most Texas lawmakers and
their staffers have never been publicly accused of sexual harassment.
But in the macho culture of the Capitol, where some legislators have
famously watched porn on iPads
on the Senate floor and forcibly kissed journalists, Lila’s experience
is hardly unique, and harassment remains widespread. During nearly
twelve months of reporting and more than a hundred hours of interviews
with current and former elected officials, legislative staffers,
interns, and lobbyists, Texas Monthly reporters learned about
new sexual-misconduct allegations against Senator Borris Miles, a
Democrat from Houston; Senator Charles Schwertner, a Republican from
Georgetown; and former senator Carlos Uresti, a Democrat from San
Antonio. (None of the three responded to multiple interview requests or
to specific questions we sent them about the allegations.) We also spoke
with the woman at the center of a headline-grabbing 2018 Title IX complaint
against Schwertner. She agreed to her first-ever interview about a lewd
photo and text messages she says she received from the senator (which
he has denied sending), in part because of lingering frustrations she
felt over the investigation he thwarted by refusing to cooperate.
………
The Senate’s revised policy
removed a clear instruction that anyone with knowledge of sexual
harassment should report it directly to human resources and the
secretary of the Senate. It now says employees may report misconduct to
their supervisor or chief of staff or submit an internal complaint to
the HR director or the Senate secretary. In practice, Texas Monthly
has found, only reports made to the latter two individuals are treated
as “official complaints” that trigger an immediate investigation, with
the probe to be handled by the director of human resources and impartial
attorneys. The 31 senators are given leeway to handle sexual harassment
complaints reported to supervisors within their offices as they see
fit. The policy does not require that senators keep any record of
complaints, investigate those complaints, report those complaints to any
central office in the Senate, or hold anyone accountable for
misconduct.
………
When asked why his office didn’t turn over records of complaints,
Patrick’s press secretary, Steven Aranyi, wrote, “Our office released no
records because there are no records to release, as no complaints of
sexual harassment have been filed with Lt. Gov. Patrick’s office.” In a
statement to Texas Monthly, Spaw, who did not respond to multiple interview requests but
answered some written questions, acknowledged that she knew about
Lila’s case. She wrote that she never “received and neither has Senate
Human Resources received an official complaint regarding Senator
Menendez’s office. It is my understanding that, as provided in the
Senate policy, a matter was reported to and handled and resolved by the
Senator, both expeditiously and appropriately.”
Spaw added that “no official sexual harassment complaints have been
filed in the Senate since 2001,” an idea that Lisa Banks, an employment
attorney and founding partner at D.C.-based law firm Katz Banks Kumin,
called “utterly preposterous.” Banks represented Christine Blasey Ford
when she testified to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee that Supreme
Court justice Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were
high school students.
“The fact that they say that shows they have
a problem,” she said. “The clear inference is they’re making an effort
to not have anything in writing, to cover themselves.”
In the case of the Texas state senate, the answer would be no one at all.
