One solution to harassment? Elect more women

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, May 6, 2026

When I was 28, I was the press secretary to a powerful U.S. senator.

After he developed an attachment to me, he kissed me one night. I was never identified in the huge national exposé that followed, which looked at more than 20 women Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood harassed. But it was my story that ultimately did in the senator, primarily because he foolishly edited all the entries in which he mentioned me in his diary and was caught by the Senate. Packwood ended up resigning after a two-year investigation.

Those years were a nightmare, as the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee investigated Packwood and he decided to destroy any woman involved in the story, including me.

This included wild lies and horrible stories made up by former friends, and calls from Packwood to my new boss, trying to dig up dirt on me.

It included a devastating grilling by the Ethics Committee, in which I had to stand up to justify the length of my skirt, and much more. It’s been more than 30 years, but sometimes it feels like I am still recovering.

The journalist Ronan Farrow calls this “catch and kill,” the normal campaign harassers — and their staff — launch to destroy women and discredit them after the original incident.

When I was 53, #MeToo was finally upon us. A dear friend of mine who works at KUOW asked me to come on his show to talk about my own experience, and how I viewed it decades later.

The experience was so healing that I joined the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau and spoke for several years on college campuses in a talk called “What I Learned From My #MeToo Story.”

Now, I am in my 60s and I am the president of the Washington state chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

We work to recruit, train, endorse and support women seeking elected office. I think of my own experiences with the Senate Ethics Committee, facing a room of old men.

I have often wondered how the experience would have been different with a woman at the table. I have wondered what my world would have been like if my boss in the Senate had been a woman.

And now it feels like we are right back where we started, with members of Congress victimizing their staffs.

We hear the behavior of U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell was the worst-kept secret in Washington. But no one did anything. This problem is broad and deep.

Former U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier has said that more than $15 million in taxpayer money was paid out over roughly two decades in 200 or more workplace-related claims in Congress, including sexual harassment and discrimination cases.

It should surprise no one that women in Congress and women who had been assaulted by Swalwell finally brought this issue to light. Women. It sure would be nice if we made up more than 28% of Congress.

Recently, I was a guest on KIRO Radio, my old station, where I began my career. I was there to respond to these recent stories and talk about the National Women’s Political Caucus and why we need more women in Congress.

As I was speaking, a listener submitted a comment. It went something like this: “More women leaders? What about Kristi Noem and Tulsi Gabbard? They’re both women.”

Yep. Because we have two women like them, I guess you can throw us all out.

Sometimes, it breaks my heart, the speed at which we are changing. Women are still being attacked, harassed and raped.

We still have a culture in which men make up the majority of Congress, and it is a system in which power corrupts. Young women like I was come into this system, where they just want a moment of the boss’s attention. They have precious little protection.

And when the stories come out? These men often try to destroy the women. Catch and kill.

I dream that in my lifetime, we don’t have to keep hearing echoes of #MeToo, when these stories come up and we all realize it is still happening.

I dream of a world in which we go beyond performative sexual harassment trainings and into real systems change in our nation’s capital, where a young woman can journey to the Hill to do her job, create change and fix problems. And be safe.

Lauri Hennessey is a former Beachcomber columnist, faculty member at the University of Washington and President of the National Women’s Political Caucus-Washington.