Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (https://kycir.org/author/rdunlop/)
R.G. Dunlop is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has exposed government corruption and resulted in numerous reforms. In a 35-year career at the Courier-Journal, he served as Eastern Kentucky bureau chief, Legal Affairs reporter, City Editor, and State Enterprise Reporter. Dunlop is a winner of a Peabody Award, a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was twice a member of teams that won George Polk Awards.
Industrial parks sit nearly empty in counties spanning eastern Kentucky, the multi-million-dollar consequences of hollow promises to revive the region’s economy.
A proposed wildlife center got a $12 million federal grant after promising to bring millions of dollars and thousands of tourists to eastern Kentucky. Four years later, residents are still waiting for the jobs they were promised.
At first glance, Montgomery County Jailer Eric Jones’ side gig as a partner in Kellwell Commissary LLC doesn’t look like a conflict.
The jail Jones was elected to manage, about 35 miles east of Lexington, runs its own canteen. It doesn’t do business with Kellwell Commissary. But a closer look reveals that his business partners are the same people who operate Kellwell Food Management, which has provided food services for the jail since Jones first became jailer in 2011. Jones executed that contract with Kellwell Food Management without getting the county fiscal court approval required by law. In 2016, the food company’s owners launched their new commissary business.
Elected Kentucky jailers have capitalized on the e-cigarette boom by forming companies that sell vaping products to inmates in other jails or by handing lucrative business in their own facilities to friends and family, KyCIR and ProPublica have found.
In a demand letter, a former House staffer said another legislator witnessed Rep. Jeff Hoover and the woman interact and complained about it. The legislator told KyCIR that wasn’t true.
Our investigation found that the legislative commission that looked into Rep. Jeff Hoover’s alleged ethics violations knew about the woman’s claims of unwanted touching, but didn’t publicly discuss them or seriously investigate the veracity of the claim.
A lawyer representing the accuser says she will appeal to a higher court to stop the deposition from taking place.
House Speaker David Osborne said in a statement that he “takes all allegations of a hostile work environment seriously.”
Former Rep. Brad Montell’s name was not associated with the sexual harassment scandal until KyCIR reported on the contents of the deposition. The woman said Montell made a sexually suggestive remark when she asked him to donate to a candidate she was working for.
The Kentucky Democratic Party is calling for Republican state Reps. Jeff Hoover and Michael Meredith to resign in the wake of an investigation published Tuesday detailing testimony by a former staffer alleging sexual harassment by the lawmakers. The woman alleged that Hoover sexually assaulted her more than 50 times, and that Meredith screamed vulgar comments at her. The woman, identified in some court records as Jane Doe, made the allegations in a sealed deposition obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Kentucky Public Radio. In the 270-page document, the woman alleged that Hoover repeatedly groped her without her consent throughout her employment with the House Republican Caucus between 2015 and 2017.