There are three reasons Rep. Blake Farenthold needs to resign from Congress. The first is the details of the sexual harassment allegations against him: there is no question he engaged in crude behavior towards a member of his own staff, and for that alone he should not be representing Texas voters. The second is that Farenthold settled the allegations against him using $84,000 of taxpayer money from a House fund set up in such a way as to allow House members who engage in unethical activity to settle the claims against them secretly, out of the public eye. It’s a neat trick available to House members that only now has come under fire for its obvious role in covering up, perpetuating, and directly enabling such behaviors.
But the third is that even though Farenthold agreed to settle the claims against him by his own staffer, Blake Farenthold and the rest of Washington’s political apparatus then ran Farenthold’s victim out of town on a rail.
Her family has had to support her financially. And Greene, now 30, has left D.C., with no illusions that she will ever work in politics again.
“It’s definitely turned my life upside down,” Greene said in her first interview since she made the accusations against Farenthold. “It’s been a tough road. Emotionally, it was tough. Professionally, it’s been hard to figure out next steps. And it’s definitely had an impact on my career.”
She later added: “I was told right away that I would be, quote-unquote, ‘blackballed’ if I came forward. … That’s exactly what happened.”
And that was that. She has been unable to land a politics-related job since.
If the woman Blake Farenthold serially harassed with talk of "nipples" and "threesomes" and "wet dreams"—while drunk, apparently, because it seems our public representatives cannot so much as put on their socks in the morning without pounding down drinks beforehand—if that young staffer still cannot get a job in politics because of the complaint she filed against him, then Blake Farenthold should be barred from political office for at least as long.
And there are really no freaking caveats to be applied to that. The current system not only protects serial perverts like Farenthold, it successfully punishes the women who come forward to complain about the harassment. That cannot be tolerated, not even a little damn bit.