GOP rising star Madison Cawthorn is facing another wave of harassment accusations.
Hours after Cawthorn made his debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, BuzzFeed News published an exposé that shed more light on the misconduct allegations leveled against the North Carolina representative. The outlet interviewed more than three dozen people who either described or corroborated instances of sexual, verbal, and physical harassment by the now-25-year-old. The majority of the sources were former students of Virginia’s Patrick Henry College, a private Christian school Cawthorn attended in 2016.
A handful of women claimed Cawthorn “was aggressive, misogynistic, or predatory toward them,” while he was a student. They described instances in which he allegedly called them derogatory names in public, asked inappropriate sexual questions, as well as touching, grabbing, and kissing them without their consent. Some also claimed he would entrap women classmates by taking them on “fun” car rides, during which he would dive recklessly while asking the women about their sexual experiences.
“I realized he was taking me out to the middle of nowhere, Virginia,” Cawthorn’s former classmate Caitlin Coulter said. “We were on these small, like, one- [or] two-lane back roads, and I just felt so uncomfortable and nervous and not even something I think at the time I could put a finger on, but just, like, danger warning.”
Cawthorn, who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a 2014 car crash, reportedly developed a bad reputation on campus, so much so that the RAs began advising women students to avoid him.
“I got info from other RAs to warn the female student body not to go on joy rides with him because bad things happened on those joy rides,” Giovanna Lastra, a former Patrick Henry College RA. “Our school was filled with girls from a Christian background, and there was a high level of naivety.”
During Cawthorn’s 2020 congressional bid, a number of women came forward to accuse the North Carolina native of harassment. Two of those instances allegedly took place years before he enrolled at PHC. Katrina Krulikas claimed Cawthorn tried to forcibly kiss her in 2014, when she was 17 and he was 19. Francesca McDaniel made a similar allegation against Cawthorn, claiming he had grabbed her head and kissed her without consent during a car ride in 2015.
After sending a list of the allegations to Cawthorn, BuzzFeed News received a response from his communications director, Micah Bock. Though the aide didn’t address the specific claims made against the representative, he referred the outlet to comments Cawthorn had made during a campaign debate last September.
“I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life,” Cawthorn said in response to the allegations. “If I have a daughter, I want her to grow up in a world where people know to explicitly ask before touching her. If I had a son, I want him to be able to grow up in a world where he would not be called a sexual predator for trying to kiss someone.”
