Hartford Courant: Elizabeth Esty Must Resign

Today, Connecticut’s largest newspaper called for the resignation of Elizabeth Esty after she was exposed for covering up physical abuse and death threats perpetrated by her former chief of staff.

Via the Hartford Courant:

Elizabeth Esty will likely spend the next several days defending her failure to take strong steps to protect a woman who’d been threatened and bullied — by a member of her own staff — by blaming the system and talking about the good she’s done in Congress.

She shouldn’t. She should resign.

After learning about the allegations against her chief of staff, Ms. Esty, the Democratic U.S. Representative for Connecticut’s 5th District, should have ensured that her former staffer was safe and that the man who’d threatened her was held accountable. Instead, she circled the wagons, called the lawyers and kept things quiet.

That’s appalling.

The story is deeply disturbing. The staff member, identified by The Washington Post as Anna Kain, had dated Tony Baker, Ms. Esty’s chief of staff. Ms. Kain sought a protective order, claiming that Mr. Baker had threatened to kill her, punched her and harassed her in Ms. Esty’s office.

“You better f—–g reply to me or I will f—–g kill you,” Tony Baker said in a recording left for Ms. Kain on May 5, 2016, according to The Post.

“The next day, I confronted him about this and said, ‘This is completely unacceptable,’” Ms. Esty told The Courant. “He did not deny that this happened. He was contrite. I told him he had to get anger management and basically stop drinking.”

What’s completely unacceptable is that Ms. Esty did not move to protect her former staffer. Instead, she tried to sweep it under the rug. She said she contacted a lawyer who recommended an internal investigation. She kept Tony Baker on the staff, and on the payroll, for three months.