Just a few years ago, the conversation around sexual abuse and harassment in New Jersey politics felt like a watershed moment.

Katie Brennan came forward to say that she'd been raped by a campaign staffer while working on Governor Murphy's campaign.

Allegations that were denied, but that launched a working group of women who developed a new plan to create oversight of campaigns in the state.

But fast forward five years later, and those plans have all but failed.

Brian ever knows He sat down with NJ Advance Media journalists Kelly Heyboer and Sue Livio who've been covering this topic and have some startling new allegations of sexual abuse that's continuing in state politics.

Even today so.

Livio Kelly Haber, thank you for joining me to talk about this.

What I'll say is a really important piece of reporting.

Kelly, let me start with you.

Here we are.

Years after the MeToo movement, there have been work groups, There have been reforms, legislation issued, introduced, and yet we are still seeing these stories of really disturbing behavior.

Why is that?

Yeah, we've heard from women across politics here in New Jersey that a lot really hasn't changed on political campaigns.

They're still experiencing sexual harassment.

Some report sexual assaults and misogyny and groping.

And a lot of women are saying it's because there's just nowhere that they feel comfortable reporting this or no system set up in New Jersey's political campaigns to handle these kind of allegations.

It's been it's been difficult and surprising for a lot of people who've been watching this since the MeToo movement that not really much has been reformed here.

And so can you share with us some of the personal anecdotes that these women came forward with?

And were they kept anonymous or did they want their names put out there?

So we gave them the opportunity to speak with us first, completely off the record, just to get a sense.

And what that what I should explain what that means is that, you know, we're just listening and everything that we would use for a story we would ask for at a later time.

But for the most part, most of these women wanted to remain anonymous because either they still work in New Jersey politics and government or just the shame of of what they went through.

And the stories are very heartbreaking.

And and we feel we we watch them relive them, you know, being groped, being having too much to drink and relying on someone to take you home or just trusting somebody, you know, hiring you, thinking, you know, you're doing a great job, and then all of a sudden you're getting kissed and groped against your will and and not even paid in some respects.

So this really runs the gamut from local to state races.

And it's happening across the board.

And as we speak, we should say, I guess as perhaps anyway, as the election season unfolds, at least it seems from the stories that were shared.

This has been ongoing.

Kelly, let me ask you, though, you mentioned about reporting these incidents.

Did any of these women go forward to the police?

There's no HRR, so to speak, when you're working on a campaign.

So did they document or report formally these incidents?

Yeah.

Most of them said no.

They were afraid not only of affecting their own careers, but they didn't want to affect elections or affect anything about how the race was going.

They didn't want to give ammunition to their opponents in the in the races that they were working on.

We did have one woman who went to police, though, reported her allegations of sexual assault against a council member in her town, but that in that case the police did not or the prosecutor did not go forward and prosecute the case.

And she thinks that it was mishandled.

So we didn't really find anyone who who experienced something, reported it and had a smooth process where they were able to make these allegations against someone on a campaign and get a get anyone really to listen to them.

So to Kelly's point there, I mean, there's been a lot of talk over the years about whether or not and how much this plays into the lack of women who are entering politics.

Where do things stand in terms of reforms that have been proposed and have actually been enacted, making a difference?

So we wrote a story in 2019 that first took a look at this, some graphic details there.

At the time, Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg introduced a bill that would create an investigative unit, a new unit with $2 million inside the Election Law Enforcement Commission, which manages campaigns and campaign financing.

The bill passed the Senate.

It never got any traction in the Assembly, and we went back to the Assembly speaker and asked what happened.

They declined to comment.

The bill is still pending, but there's been no hearings.

And it's hard to know because we're just on the eve of an election, no one is wants to talk about this issue right now.

So we'll have to revisit it post-election to see if that bill can be resurrected.

And that article, of course, stemming from the Katie Brennan incident with Al Alvarez.

Katie Brennan, of course, worked on Governor Phil Murphy's gubernatorial campaign.

Sue Livio, Kelly Heyboer, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Thank you.