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.
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.
Hoover, the former Speaker of the House, has said he exchanged inappropriate texts but denied any sexual contact. The staffer said under oath that Hoover sexually assaulted her.
Archdiocese of Louisville and parish school officials denied to KyCIR that they had any knowledge of the accusations against Drew Conliffe. They even denied knowing whether he coached at any parish school.
Eric Flynn told police that a trusted coach was molesting him. The coach denied it, and continued to run a junior golf league. And he and his father, a former elected official, began writing checks.
A case file released by LMPD last week shows that, even after the case was reopened, detectives did little investigating until the day before KyCIR published a sweeping investigation of Dan Johnson.