Call Loose Lips naive, but he expected the John Falcicchio sexual harassment scandal to generate some serious soul-searching within Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration, or at least some aggressive inquiries from her political rivals. But so far, the efforts to seriously investigate Falcicchio’s conduct and understand what kind of culture permitted it look pretty half-hearted.
Bowser ordered an internal review of the matter by her own lawyers, of course, but pretty much everyone concerned about the scandal agrees there needs to be an independent review of what happened, not to mention separate probes to determine whether any of Falcicchio’s actions affected government functions. Some concerning reporting from the Washington Post suggests there are even deeper questions to ask about how the District manages sexual harassment allegations within its ranks more broadly. Yet, to LL’s eye, local leaders inside and outside the administration have pretty uniformly dropped the ball and failed to meaningfully advance any oversight here.
Various councilmembers have pledged to hold hearings examining the agencies Falcicchio oversaw, but those have yet to materialize (and one scheduled for Oct. 30 was just postponed). The independent investigation that the Council set in motion has gotten held up over technical contracting concerns, according to several sources around the Wilson Building. The reforms the mayor promised to her sexual harassment policies in the wake of the Post’s reporting haven’t materialized, and a spokesperson tells LL there’s still no timeline for when they’ll be ready.
Falcicchio has yet to face any criminal charges for his actions either, even though the Mayor’s Office of Legal Counsel has already substantiated many of the allegations against him with its investigation. LL reported in August that both the FBI and Attorney General Brian Schwalb had begun investigating Falcicchio, but there’s been no public movement on the matter since then.
“Is anybody actually going to prosecute this guy?” wonders Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who has been one of the loudest voices on the Council pushing for action on Falcicchio. “Certainly, he deserves due process, but what’s happening? He just gets to roam free after all this?”
Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker also calls these delays in the various Falcicchio investigations “unacceptable” and adds that “I don’t think anybody is satisfied with the speed of things here.” Yet the lack of urgency with which some of his colleagues have pursued accountability suggests that some councilmembers are just fine with the leisurely pace of these probes.
Much of the responsibility falls on the lawmakers with oversight of the agencies Falcicchio ran in his capacity as Bowser’s chief of staff and deputy mayor for planning and economic development: At-Large Councilmembers Anita Bonds and Kenyan McDuffie. Both pledged to hold hearings to investigate broader culture issues within the Executive Office of the Mayor and DMPED over the summer, but failed to do so.
“Transparency, accountability, and justice are at the heart of the Committee on Business and Economic Development’s inquiry,” McDuffie wrote in a statement to LL. “We have significant overlap with the reviews that are underway by multiple entities on this matter. We have had numerous discussions with senior leadership at DMPED, the Mayor’s Office of Legal Counsel, other investigative agencies, and relevant interested parties since this process began. We are focused on preserving the anonymity of those involved and moving forward deliberately to ensure that our scope does not impede the active investigations.”
Bonds, famously a light touch in oversight settings, at least scheduled a hearing to consider harassment issues across the government for Oct. 30, arguing that she spent the intervening weeks surveying dozens of officials about their approach to managing harassment complaints. Her decision to cancel the hearing last week quickly raised the eyebrows of several D.C. politicos that contacted LL; Bonds’ spokesperson, Kevin B. Chavous, tells LL via email that Bonds chose to reschedule it because it happened to fall on the same day as a joint hearing evaluating the city’s violence prevention programs, which could be “rather lengthy.”
“We will reschedule the sexual harassment roundtable for a date in mid-November, pending the availability of the government witnesses,” Chavous added, though he did not answer questions about which witnesses she hopes to call. Bonds subsequently posted on social media that she is tentatively planning on Nov. 14 for the hearing, though it has yet to appear on the Council’s hearing calendar.
Nadeau says she also hopes to hold a hearing in early December on her bill to automatically mandate independent investigations of any mayoral appointee to face harassment allegations going forward, and she expects to address some of these issues during consideration of that legislation. No less than 10 councilmembers signed on to support it, but it has also faced delays—Chair Phil Mendelson initially chose to send it only to Nadeau’s public works and operations committee, then changed his mind in September and gave Bonds joint jurisdiction over it. Even if Nadeau’s committee advances the bill, it can’t go anywhere without Bonds’ asset, and Nadeau says she has yet to hear any interest from her colleague on that front.
At the end of the day, the Council’s oversight only goes so far, considering that very few lawmakers have shown much of a willingness to aggressively challenge government witnesses in hearings these days. Plus, these hearings are designed more to examine the agencies and their current leaders, not delve more deeply into Falcicchio’s actions, specifically. That’s a task the Council’s reserved for the Office of the Inspector General, the agency set to manage the body’s independent investigation.
That probe is designed to review not only the integrity of Bowser’s internal investigation, but also tackle questions outside of its scope, like the allegations that Falcicchio gave preferential treatment to employees he was involved with or that Falcicchio and his deputies retaliated against people who refused his advances. The OIG’s review will also include any allegations made by people outside of D.C. government, such as those detailed to LL by a woman seeking government contracts back in June. The problem is that the OIG still hasn’t been able to hire a law firm to lead this work.
The agency first put out a request for proposals in early August and it still hasn’t been able to award a contract since then over troubles with the city’s minority business contracting requirements, according to an OIG spokesperson. District law generally requires its private partners to set aside roughly a third of the work on any deal for “certified business enterprises,” typically small businesses based in the District, and the OIG had trouble finding law firms that could meet those requirements. The agency saw just two proposals from its first RFP and neither met those standards, according to an Oct. 4 memo prepared by its contracting officer. It reissued the RFP a few weeks later and got four responses, but none of those managed to hit the CBE marks either, the memo says.
This probably isn’t a terribly surprising development: Sexual harassment law is pretty specialized work, after all, and it generally involves large, white-shoe firms instead of the small outfits that tend to earn CBE certification. The OIG could only find three CBEs in the whole city “meeting part of the scope of services” required for the investigation, according to the memo.
So OIG went to the city agency regulating CBE requirements, the Department of Small and Local Business Development, to ask for a waiver from these strictures. DSLBD agreed to issue one on Oct. 19 and now OIG has put out yet another RFP, setting a deadline for responses on Nov. 14.
“There are plenty of white-shoes that want to do this, and I’ve even referred a few inquiries to OIG myself,” Nadeau says. “It’s just about getting all this right.”
As if all this wasn’t complicated enough, the Council also had to pass a bill amending its original legislation ordering the investigation to give OIG more time to report results to lawmakers and shift around some funding for it; it’s awaiting action from Bowser now. It’s entirely possible lawmakers will need to offer OIG another extension, depending on how cooperative D.C. officials are with the probe. Whatever firm takes this project on will likely have subpoena power, but, as Nadeau notes, the administration has “no incentive to speed this up” if the probe threatens to embarrass (or implicate) Bowser.
A mayor more concerned about taking sexual harassment within her government seriously would have plenty of motivation to act quickly, of course, but Bowser has shown little evidence that she cares about results in this arena.
When the Post revealed gaps in her sexual harassment reporting policy, she pledged to take action to update it “soon.” She suggested it would be a particularly easy change to update her order to align with a law passed last year, removing the requirement that an employee’s behavior be “severe and pervasive” to qualify as harassment. “Honestly I don’t know why we didn’t” do so earlier, Bowser told reporters in early October. She’d be able to make the change with a stroke of a pen, since the policy doesn’t involve the Council at all. Weeks later, nothing’s changed.
“I honestly don’t know what they’re doing right now,” Nadeau says. “If it were me, I’d be concerned about additional liability from other claims, in addition to making sure workers have the strongest policy in place for them.”
LL shares Nadeau’s confusion. It’s one thing for Bowser to stall on investigations that might raise messy questions about what she knew about the actions of one of her closest confidants. It’s another that a mayor who has so often styled herself as a champion for women is dragging her feet on taking actions to protect her own employees from harassment moving forward.
Wouldn’t the best defense to any charges of complicity in Falcicchio’s actions be for Bowser to take a proactive stance toward preventing harassment moving forward? Wouldn’t this double as a way to help her newly nominated replacement as DMPED, Nina Albert, lead the agency’s recovery from a very damaging year?
LL would surely think so. Instead, Bowser risks sending quite the message to her thousands of employees: If someone important enough harasses you, your boss will do her best to ignore it.
“We, as a government, need to be more urgent about this,” Parker says. “We need to treat this with the seriousness it deserves.”