https://forward.com/opinion/417179/...-on-bernie-sanders-campaign-and-no-one-cared/
The morning of the 2016 New York Democratic primary, a local voter named Ray came by Bernie Sanders' South Bronx campaign headquarters where I was volunteering. He asked for a few T-shirts from the campaign.
A few minutes later, in a back corner of the office where I had gone to fetch him the T-shirts, he stepped toward me, grabbed me by the back of the neck and began stroking me up then down from the back of my head to just under my shirt collar.
I froze, dumbfounded. Two or three long seconds later, I heard my own voice spit out one word: "Stop."
"Why?" he asked. "Because it feels good?"
He continued groping me until I pulled away, and sprinted back to my desk in the front of the office.
Ray took his time, though, leisurely ambling to the snack table to pick up, then unwrap, a lollipop. He sucked on the candy while he walked across the office toward the door. He whispered sexually explicit language in my direction as he passed me. Then he chuckled to himself until and left.
When he heard the words "sexual harassment," his boyish smile fell slack and his eyes grew wide. The campaign, he told me, had a zero-tolerance harassment policy. He told me I could fill out an incident report, and thanked me for bringing the matter to his attention. Then he asked me who had done it.
When I told him it was Ray, the guy who had come in to get the shirts, he appeared flummoxed.
"If it was a voter who harassed you," he said, wrinkling his brow, "then there's really nothing we can do."
I was stunned. I told him I was sure that a national campaign like this one would certainly want — and was likely required by law — to make some kind of record of any harassment incident. I also warned him for his own benefit that telling someone reporting harassment that "there's nothing we can do" is a huge liability for his organization, and a recipe for getting fired from any job.
He seemed to listen, but he never gave me the incident report. Before I left for the day, as a consolation, he offered me his email address and told me to send him my account of the event so he could pass it on to his supervisors.
I sent the email and never heard back from him or his boss.
I scoured the internet to find the Sanders campaign's harassment policy, and found nothing. I searched in vain for a name and contact information for some type of human resources person; also nothing.
After a few hours of frustration, I decided to reach out to the supervisor of the staffer I had told, whom he had promised to forward my complaint to. But when I searched online, it was impossible to find out his name or title. So I decided to call or email someone over his head, but again my search met the same dead end.
Soon, I resorted to emailing random Sanders staffers—basically anyone whose email address I could find anywhere on the web. I tried a guy named Tony Anthony who was listed as Statewide Field Director on the website p2016.org, and another named Robert Becker, who, according to LinkedIn, was a Deputy National Field Director.
Each brief note I sent said the same thing: that I had been sexually harassed while volunteering for the campaign, and I wanted to report the incident to the proper person.
No one ever responded.
I wondered why I had never heard of this man. His name and title, let alone his role as harassment mediator, were nowhere to be found on the internet.
I called Robinson the next day and recounted my entire story—the harassment incident, the initial brush off in the Bronx and then the difficulty finding out any information about the campaign's harassment policy. He listened patiently and heartily apologized for my experience.
I asked him how often he deals with harassment cases within the campaign as the COO.
"All the time," he said.
He told me he considered himself a behind the scenes kind of manager. He liked it that way, and purposely kept a low profile.
I asked him about how he could adequately deal with harassment cases when no one could get in touch with him to report them.
He said the channels of communication must be working properly, because my complaint had gotten to the right person in the end: himself.
"You gave your complaint to someone, who passed it to someone, and it eventually got to Jeff Weaver who passed it to me," he said. "That's how it's supposed to work."
I went on to tell him that from my point of view, there appeared to be no process for reporting harassment, and that I intended to write a letter about my experience to the editor of my local paper.
Then things got a little tense. He interjected to assure me, once again, that there definitely was a harassment protocol, but he was sorry that, in my case, it looked like it had not been followed at the local, state, or national level of the campaign.
I asked Robinson to tell me what the policy was, and he declined. Then, I asked him if the harassment policy was publicly available, and he declined to answer yes or no.
