Peters Blames Press, GOP Leadership for Failing Wolfish Wollmann

While Senator Peters shifts blame for sexual harassment on victims, she’s making excuses for sexual predator Mathew Wollmann, the disgraced Madison Republican who resigned from the Legislature for serial intern-boinking last January:

Peters said Wollmann was “sent out to the wolves.”

“Should he have been in the Legislature and having a relationship with somebody of his own age? That’s a tough line when you’re that age,” Peters said. “I’m not making excuses for him, but I also don’t believe that the whole story was told. I believe that half the story was told, and I don’t think he got a chance to tell his entire story, because he was immediately persecuted in the press, and that was that” [Seth Tupper, “Peters: Sex Misconduct in Pierre Is ‘Anomaly’,” Rapid City Journal, 2017.12.26].

Senator Peters is mistaken on multiple points:

1. “sent out to the wolves”—Is Senator Peters saying District 8 voters erred in sending poor young Mathew into a situation he couldn’t handle? Is Senator Peters shifting blame again, saying the interns are wolves preying on innocent legislators? Seriously, the wolf is Wollmann, who spent his only full term in Pierre reducing interns to bedpost notches.
2. The question wasn’t whether Mathew should have been “having a relationship with somebody of his own age.” The question was whether a legislator ought to be having sex with interns. The answer, said the House Select Committee formed to investigate Wollmann’s predatory behavior, is no, such sex violates Joint Rule 1B-1. Rep. David Lust and Senator R. Blake Curd stated prior to the Wollmann scandal’s public eruption that such behavior is unethical.
3. Contrary to the story Senator Peters tells in her podcast interview with Tupper, the activity that led to Wollmann’s resignation was not one relationship with one consenting college intern. It was relationships with interns, plural, as attested by former House Speaker Dean Wink. Wollmann himself also spoke of plural relationships. The House leadership, in acknowledging his resignation, referred to “young ladies involved,” separate from “his fiancé” (which reminds us that we’re talking about a lot of sex outside marriage, which ought to have the good Family Heritage Alliance Christian Republicans in Senator Peters’s party up in arms, not in excuses).
4. Wollmann had many opportunities to tell his entire story. He lied about it first, then, disgustingly, tried to portray his trapped-by-facts confession as some great cinematic moment of character definition. In his self-serving resignation letter, he said he had told “the absolute truth of the matter,” which indicates he felt he’d said everything that needed to be said.

Eleven months later, Senator Peters is taking the Krebs/Trump route of trying to rewrite facts and blame the media for bad behavior by a member of her own party.

In her audio with Tupper, Senator Peters shifts blame to the past House Republican leadership:

You have an employer and an employee relationship, and you need to respect that. But then, you know, you gotta explain to these kids, and I think leadership let him down at that point in time. Now recall that the leadership team was made aware of the situation. They should have sat him down and had a conversation with him and said, “Hey, you need to knock this off, this is a professional environment. I understand that you go to college with these folks [even Peters uses the plural] but you need to have an employer-employee relationship.” I don’t think that was done. Remember that this was not the same legislative leaders that we have today [Sen. Deb Peters, transcribed from audio interview with Seth Tupper, Mount Podmore 5, Rapid City Journal, 2017.12.26, timestamp 9:00].

But when Tupper ties the themes of responsible journalistic watchdoggery and responsible political leadership, Peters gets all tangled up:

Tupper: In all fairness, though, if it hadn’t have come out in the press, would anybody know about it, and would he have suffered any consequences at all?

Peters: I would tell you that everybody already knew about it. Not everybody, but I would tell you the people who were in the House that a relationship was reported to knew at that time. The proper people and the proper channels were informed and were aware.

Tupper: And were there any consequences then or would there have been any consequences if not for the media attention?

Peters: You know what? You’re now crossing into two different leadership groups and two different elected bodies. I don’t know. That all happened in the House. I’m in the Senate, so I can’t tell you if the leadership did or didn’t do what they needed to do… [Peters/Tupper, 2017.12.26, timestamp 11:15].

Translation: Peters knows all she needs to know to make the excuses she wants, but she can’t know anything necessary to answer hard questions about the proper function of the press and the malfunction of her party cronies.

Senator Peters emphasizes that Wollmann was 24 at the time and at first tells Tupper that “it would be a completely different story… if it was a 50-year-old man and a 24 year-old.” Pressed by Tupper, Peters admits there are no situations in which it is o.k. for a legislator to have a relationship with an intern… so apparently it’s not really a completely different story.

Maybe it’s not just party loyalty but Madison connections that keep Senator Peters from letting the Wollmann issue die. Peters and Wollmann are both Madison HS alums. But her desire to revise the Wollmann scandal doesn’t stem from loyalty to the facts on the record. Wollmann admitted he behaved improperly. The Legislature acknowledged his wrongdoing. And it’s pretty clear to even partisan observers that the Republicans Party covered up for Wollmann until the press made the cover-up untenable.

There’s the big lesson Senator Peters needs to draw and to preach from the Wollmann scandal: not that the press are a bunch of meanies telling half-truths to hurt innocent young men, but that free and honest journalism is a necessary antidote to abuses of power.