Illinois House Speaker Welch’s office knew of harassment claims against disgraced state Rep. Benton years ago

SPRINGFIELD — When he detailed the steps his office took that led state Rep. Harry Benton to resign his seat amid allegations of sexual harassment, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch praised those who “trusted our office to listen, support them and ensure their concerns were handled appropriately.”

“Allegations of misconduct are taken with the utmost seriousness,” Welch said, revealing that an investigation by state Legislative Inspector General Michael McCuskey found Benton displayed “clear patterns of conduct” that were “outrageous, unethical and unbecoming of a member” of the House.

“We have a process that’s in place that I believe is a good process,” Welch told reporters at an unrelated press conference in Chicago following the Plainfield Democrat’s resignation earlier this month. “They trusted us to have procedures in place that would protect them, protect their confidentiality and we had a process in place that guaranteed due process of the accused.”

But Welch’s account of his office’s swift response stands in sharp contrast to what happened three years ago. That’s when a young female Benton staffer — one of his first hires whose interactions with the lawmaker were part of the investigation — outlined a lengthy series of harassment allegations, many of a sexual nature, to Welch’s office.

Back then, the speaker’s office slow-walked the case after the woman reported the harassment allegations to the speaker’s then-chief of staff in April 2023, the Tribune found.

Benton wasn’t interviewed by the speaker’s top staff until three months later, in July 2023, according to calendar records obtained by the Tribune. That was after the woman had already quit her job, saying she feared for her mental health. According to the former staffer, Benton was not disciplined at the time.

In a pair of statements in response to questions from the Tribune, Welch’s office defended its handling of the case, saying it acted “promptly” and said “appropriate action was taken” — though the statements did not specify what, if any, disciplinary action occurred in 2023.

The former Benton staffer’s experience — and the years of inaction that followed — raise pointed questions about whether Welch’s office violated state and internal sexual harassment protocols it was legally required to follow, and whether a lawmaker whose conduct had been reported to leadership was allowed to continue for years without consequence until another woman had had enough.

The complaint that led Benton to heed Welch’s call to resign, as well as the legislative inspector general’s reported findings against him, may never be made public.

But a months-long Tribune investigation found the complaint was filed after an incident earlier this year in which a female lobbyist ran into Benton at a bar in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.

The lobbyist told the Tribune that Benton, who appeared under the influence, showed her pictures on his phone of women he claimed to have slept with and made a series of lewd comments — including, “I may look like a five but I f−−− like a 10,” “I’m not hitting on you unless you’re interested,” and “you’re too hot to be a lobbyist.”

The revelations from the lobbyist and the ex-Benton staffer not only shed new light on the scandal surrounding the former two-term lawmaker, they also echo one of the most turbulent chapters in Illinois political history — a #MeToo scandal in 2017 and 2018 that prompted a revolt by Democratic women in the Illinois House against longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan for failing to act promptly against a top aide accused of harassment. Madigan, the center of Illinois political power for more than four decades, left the legislature and was later imprisoned on unrelated federal corruption charges. Lawmakers elected Welch as Madigan’s successor.

The Tribune interviewed both women in the Benton case but is not identifying them because they requested anonymity and are victims of sexual harassment. Both the lobbyist’s allegations and the ex-staffer’s complaints were part of the legislative inspector general’s investigation, the Tribune has learned.

Separately, the Tribune investigation found documents showing that Welch himself responded to social media posts by the former Benton staffer — who had previously interned in the speaker’s office — in ways she told the Tribune made her “uncomfortable.”

“Other incidents definitely happened while I was working in politics and it doesn’t stop with Harry Benton and it didn’t stop after Madigan,” the former staffer told the Tribune.

Benton declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.

In the statements from Welch’s office in response to the Tribune’s questions, Welch spokeswoman Delores Walton said the former staffer was “offered support, counseled on their rights, and encouraged to file a complaint with the Legislative Inspector General.”

Rather than offering detailed responses, the speaker’s office used its statements to defend its handling of the staffer’s case by saying she was “adamant that they wanted to inform our office, but did not want to pursue further action.”

Asked by the Tribune what support she had received from the speaker’s office, the staffer said, “nothing.” She said options such as therapy “would have been nice” rather than “just feeling like I had to leave because I really did love that industry, and wish I had the opportunity to stay.”

And in response to being directed to go to the legislative inspector general, she said she thought reporting Benton’s behavior to the speaker’s office was appropriate according to protocols supplied to her by the office. She also said she was led to believe that her reports to the speaker’s office were not official, when those protocols show they were.

The statements from Welch’s office disputed any suggestions the speaker acted inappropriately on social media with the former Benton staffer, saying Welch knew her “through her previous professional work, predating Representative Benton’s tenure and they have maintained a cordial friendship.”

“Any attempt to tie the Speaker to Representative Benton’s misconduct is a deliberate effort to create a false narrative,” Walton contended in one of the statements. “It misrepresents and mischaracterizes the situation by presenting it in a false light.”

A ‘frat-like’ office

The former staffer was 22 when she joined Benton’s office in January 2023, fresh from a brief stint at another state agency and, before that, a legislative internship in the speaker’s office through a competitive college program. She told the Tribune she had hoped to build a career in government and politics.

She described her several months working in Benton’s office as a “very frat-like workplace environment” in which she was “walking on eggshells all the time” dealing with the lawmaker, who had just taken office in January 2023 and was married with kids.

The harassment began almost immediately, the former staffer said.

Around the time she agreed to work for Benton, she said, she joined him at Gov. JB Pritzker’s second inaugural ball on Jan. 9, 2023.

“I did feel like he wanted to have me by his side all the time,” she recalled of Benton. “He kept mentioning my looks. That was probably the first time he started mentioning … ‘You’re getting all this attention,’ and ‘I should just walk around with you. Like, all the eyes are gonna be on me.'”

A month later, she told the Tribune, she joined Benton at the First Look for Charity Gala at the Chicago Auto Show, a black-tie event. According to an email she wrote documenting incidents she had with Benton that was sent in April 2023 to Welch’s then-chief of staff, Benton told his staffer to “make sure you don’t forget to wear something underneath” her dress for the event, a comment she told the Tribune she interpreted to mean “wear panties underneath that.”

When she mentioned to him she planned to spend the night at a friend’s condominium in downtown Chicago for the event, Benton asked if he could stay there as well.

“I thought about it. A lot of this was like, ‘Hey, this is my boss,’ but also ‘This is my boss, and I want to be accommodating as much as I possibly can and do a good job,'” she said, before ultimately telling him he could not stay at the condo. “I called my friend. I was like, ‘Hey, my boss wants to stay at the condo,’ and my friend was like, ‘Um, that’s weird. No.'”

At some point while working for him, she said Benton sent her a picture of a bikini-clad model from OnlyFans, a social media platform known for sexual content, then asked her to send the picture back to him. She said she declined.

When she asked Benton for a webcam to join Zoom meetings, he replied, “why so you can double dip in the office,” according to the April 2023 email she wrote documenting the incidents, a comment she took as a suggestion that she produced content for cam websites like OnlyFans.

Benton also told his former staffer, “See I’m doing a good service, I’m keeping you off the pole with this job,” in an apparent reference to strip clubs, according to the email.

Two months into her job with Benton, he told her, “Everything pointed against me hiring you because of your looks. But I saw something in you,” she also noted in the email.

Benton also cast himself as a prize, she said. In one phone conversation she documented, he told her that legislators had taken a poll and “apparently I’m the most good looking new member.” He bragged, according to the email, that there are “some very important people down here that want me to be the next speaker,” only to declare about a week later that he was “only going to be a one-termer” and was “not going back next session.” He also acknowledged his own conduct, telling her, according to the email: “I’m scared about hiring another person because of my lack of professionalism at times.”

In other comments, she said Benton undermined her professionally, according to the email. At a dinner with a lobbyist, she said Benton described her hiring by saying, “She will do, she was the cheapest.” He often threatened her job, telling her at one point, “If I would be my typical detail oriented self, you would be fired by now.”

When she made what she described as an honest mistake on an expense report — unfamiliar with the process, she signed Benton’s name — he told her: “I’m really happy that you signed this because now I have this on you,” she told the Tribune.

When she told Benton she had a family emergency and might need time off, he showed little concern and instead asked which printers were connected to the district office computers.

“I don’t know the exact verbiage that he would use, but always, one way or another, it would just come across as, ‘I’m not a good worker’ and ‘I don’t know if it’s a good collaboration.’ So I was always pretty worried about my job there,” she said.

Kathryn Clancy, a University of Illinois professor of anthropology and expert in sexual harassment who has testified before Congress, said the dynamic the former staffer described is common in workplaces where power is sharply unequal.

“I think it’s important to recognize she made the best choices she could, that there are absolutely power dynamics at play here that have to be paid attention to, in terms of her gender and her age and her relative experience,” Clancy told the Tribune.

A complaint that stalled

By April 2023, the former Benton staffer said she had reached a breaking point. A friend in politics advised her to report what had been happening, and she eventually contacted Tiffany Moy, who was then Welch’s chief of staff.

That recommendation aligned with the protocols contained in the state’s mandated sexual harassment training, which all state officials, legislative members and staff must complete annually under a 2020 amendment to the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act.

The training — drawn from the Model Sexual Harassment Prevention Training program created by the Illinois Department of Human Rights — outlines the duties of employers to “immediately respond to a complaint of sexual harassment and initiate an inquiry or investigation,” conduct interviews with the victim, relevant witnesses and the alleged perpetrator, document the results and “take corrective action as appropriate.”

But when the former staffer went to Moy with her allegations, she said Moy encouraged her to instead contact the legislative inspector general’s office, rather than Moy initiating any such process herself.

The woman declined, fearing it would damage her career before it had started.

“I was concerned because … I was brand new to the political world, very young, didn’t want to be known as ‘the problematic staffer,’ and not get a job,” she told the Tribune.

Her reluctance to go to the legislative inspector general, however, did not relieve Moy or Welch’s office of their own obligations under state protocols.

State training procedures give employees three options to report sexual harassment — to a supervisor, to the legislative inspector general, or to the state Department of Human Rights — and specify that those options “are not mutually exclusive.” Crucially, the procedures also make clear that employers must independently act: “Supervisors and members of management are responsible for knowing the employer’s internal complaint investigation and resolution process. Supervisors can help effect immediate positive change.”

As chief of staff to the speaker, Moy was in a supervisory position. The training is explicit that employers must “take appropriate corrective disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment where organizational policy has been violated.” While the speaker’s office cannot fire a sitting lawmaker, it can pursue remedies — including a full House vote to expel a member.

Moy did not return several messages for comment.

Even though the staffer did not file a complaint with the legislative inspector general, Welch still had several disciplinary tools at his disposal as he has demonstrated in the past.

For instance, last year Welch removed Democratic state Rep. Fred Crespo of Hoffman Estates from his committee chairmanship and disinvited him from internal caucus meetings after Crespo worked on a budget plan outside of party channels. Welch also, in 2023, removed then-longtime state Rep. Mary Flowers of Chicago from her leadership post after she was accused of repeatedly engaging in inappropriate behavior that included saying a staffer looked like Adolf Hitler.

Even in the recent investigation of Benton, Welch in February relieved him of his committee assignments and caucus membership before the legislative inspector general had concluded his investigation.

After she had stopped working for Benton and following months of silence from the speaker’s office about any action regarding her complaint, Benton forwarded a calendar invite to the former staffer indicating he was scheduled to meet with Moy and the speaker’s then-chief legal counsel and House ethics officer, James Hartmann, on July 20, 2023.

Benton also was supposed to meet with Welch the following day, according to another calendar invite she received from the lawmaker. The former staffer said she told a friend that she wondered whether Benton purposely sent the invites to her in the hope that it would give her anxiety, “which he successfully did.”

The day before Moy and Hartmann were scheduled to meet with Benton, the ex-staffer emailed Moy to say that Benton had shared the calendar invite for the meeting and to add that she did not want to “pursue any further actions beyond this.”

But she emphasized, “The reason I reported this was for the protection of the other women in the office.”

After the meeting, Moy continued to encourage the former staffer to file a report with the legislative inspector general’s office, noting a one-year statute of limitations for consideration of alleged violations.

“There is still time if you do change your mind after further distance after leaving the office,” Moy emailed the woman. “Know that we reiterated the severity of retaliation and/or intimidation and will continue to do so. As promised to you, your name or identifying situations will never be used (unless you tell me otherwise).”

That was the last communication she received from the speaker’s office on the matter.

In his recent investigation of Benton’s conduct, McCuskey, the legislative inspector general, sought the assistance of both the former Benton staffer and the lobbyist, the Tribune has learned.

McCuskey left voicemails on the former Benton staffer’s phone referencing her April 2023 email to Moy and sought her assistance in the investigation, according to recordings the ex-staffer shared with the Tribune. She declined to participate, but McCuskey’s outreach indicates that the email she sent to Moy three years ago was included in the recent complaint submitted by Welch’s office to the legislative inspector general.

The lobbyist, meanwhile, met with McCuskey as part of his investigation into Benton’s conduct, the Tribune has learned. McCuskey declined to provide any details to the Tribune about the report, saying it was confidential.

After McCuskey shared his report with Welch, the speaker quickly called for Benton to resign, which he did two days later. Benton on Wednesday also dropped his bid for reelection in November. Benton hasn’t left his other elected position as the Wheatland Township highway commissioner in Will County, a post that pays $72,000 annually, even though the township board made a unanimous but advisory demand that he also resign from that job.

Though he didn’t return the Tribune’s requests for comment, Benton attended a Wheatland Township Board meeting earlier this month and made his first public comments since resigning his state legislative seat.

“There are a lot of people attacking me on a regular basis, and people coming after me,” Benton said at the July 9 meeting. “I also want people to respect my family. I’ve received a lot of attacks since I got into politics. A lot of attacks, a lot of people coming after me and being disrespectful to me, even in front of my family. I want to make sure that that does not happen going forward.”

An interaction after a fundraiser

The lobbyist told the Tribune she had a friendly but professional rapport with Benton until January of this year, when she ran into him at a River North bar following a political fundraiser.

She said she detected Benton might have been under the influence. At some point during the interaction, he showed her photos on his phone of women he claimed to have slept with, then made a series of explicit and demeaning comments, she said.

The lobbyist also said when Benton showed her the photos, she repeatedly told him, “Harry, this is none of my business.”

In the weeks that followed, the lobbyist relayed the incident to other Democratic members of the General Assembly. She said she did not report the comments directly to Welch or his inner circle, but believes one of the lawmakers she confided in may have done so.

Speaking for her case, the lobbyist said she was grateful Welch’s office “understood the gravity and took swift action” to address Benton’s conduct “in an effort to prevent future women in this space from similar treatment.”

In its statements to the Tribune, the speaker’s office said it “followed the guidance of legal counsel and respected the wishes of the individuals involved. In each instance, as soon as the Speaker learned of the complaints, appropriate action was taken.”

But experts suggested the speaker’s office could have done more for the former Benton staffer.

Clancy, the University of Illinois expert, said the failure to act after receiving a complaint compounds the harm to the person who came forward.

“A lot of times the victim is the one who gets moved,” she said. “So it’s like, ‘I have to change my situation, I have to move my life around because of this person causing harm to me.’ And again, just taking a (22-year-old) and moving them out of an office doesn’t actually stop the behavior; it doesn’t make a person aware that their behavior is bad, and it potentially just puts another person at risk of the exact same behavior.”

“What we found is that often when victims hit a point that the harassment they’re experiencing is intolerable,” Clancy added, “their only move is for themselves to leave — either a lateral move to a similar position somewhere else, or a downward move. They’ll take a pay cut, take a lower job, just to get out.”

Meg Bond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who has spent her career researching sexual harassment and served on federal advisory bodies, said the structural dynamics of legislative workplaces make accountability especially difficult to enforce.

“In many ways, a legislative body is a series of separate employers,” Bond said. “There’s often not any kind of central function that can hold people deeply accountable. I mean, they can do all sorts of wrong things, you can shake your finger at them, but ultimately they can get away with a lot because of the power dynamics and because the power of other bodies to really take decisive action is limited.”

The former Benton staffer said she was dissatisfied with how her complaint hadn’t been handled to protect other women.

“At a minimum, I think there should have been deeper check-ins with (future Benton) staffers to confirm that it wasn’t continuing and make sure that they felt comfortable and to stop it in its tracks if it was still going on,” she told the Tribune. “I don’t think this should have happened to anyone else after me, after they were made aware.”

In the years after she stopped working for Benton but before the scandal erupted in February, she said she watched from the outside as Benton’s political life continued uninterrupted.

“It was hard to see all those (social media) posts, like his life just continued on as normal. He was invited to all the events, you know. He stayed in office, got to do the whole Springfield representative thing and, you know, I was out of a job,” she said.

Bond said that outcome — the alleged perpetrator ascending while the person who alleged harassment is sidelined — is something she has documented repeatedly. And she said the harassment, inaction and spectacle of watching Benton’s career continue while his former staffer’s was cut short lands as a familiar story.

“You can set up this really detailed formal process,” Bond said, “but if it’s going to put them at risk of informal sanctions, or those kinds of consequences for their career, people aren’t going to use it. You’ve got to think about how do you create a general climate — and unfortunately, an electorate — that says this is completely unacceptable.”

The former staffer put it more simply.

“That culture,” she said, “is very much still alive.”

Former staffer was intern

Before working for Benton, the former staffer had previously interned for the speaker’s office and she kept in contact with Welch.

In speaking with the Tribune, the ex-staffer also provided screenshots from her mobile phone showing a series of communications with the speaker on social media and an encrypted messaging platform that raise questions of their own.

In the screenshots the former staffer provided from her Instagram account, several of her “stories,” which are photos or short videos that disappear after 24 hours, show her wearing different outfits. One image shows her walking down a sidewalk, another shows her looking into the camera while sitting in a car, and two show her posing. Welch responded to each of those stories with an emoji displaying a smiley face with heart-shaped eyes. He also responded to a couple of those same photos with a second emoji of a face with its eyes and mouth wide open.

The former staffer told the Tribune that Welch’s emoji responses made her feel “uncomfortable.”

“You know, he’s a person in power,” she said. “I don’t want to burn any bridges, and (I) wasn’t sure how to respond in a way that wouldn’t offend him.”

Still, the former staffer had kept in touch with Welch. And in a series of other messages with the speaker, when the former staffer asked him for help developing her professional network, he responded: “That’s probably too much to text. Let’s plan to connect in person when you’re in Chicago or I’m in Springfield. Should be a good chat.” He then indicated he wanted the conversation to continue on Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

Over Signal, Welch sent her the message: “Meet me at Gibson’s in Oakbrook. We can sit in the bar area.”

She told the Tribune she did not end up meeting Welch.

In the speaker’s office statements, Walton noted the former staffer wasn’t working for the speaker’s office at the time of the social media interactions.

“Their cordial friendship pre-dated Representative Benton, with dialogues spanning from advice, support, and even the complainant offering tips for the Speaker and his wife’s travel itinerary,” the statements said. “The record is clear about the actions the Speaker’s office took, why those actions were taken, and the legal and ethical considerations that guided those decisions. We will not lend credibility to baseless insinuations or political fiction.”