Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens resigned Tuesday afternoon, facing so many accusations and investigations that it’s hard to pinpoint the immediate cause of his downfall.
But the most horrifying scandal began earlier this year, when a woman accused Greitens of coercing her to perform oral sex, undressing, kissing and touching her without her consent, and threatening to release a nude photo of her if she told anyone about their encounter, which took place in 2015.
The sexual misconduct accusation — disturbing, detailed, and backed up by testimony from witnesses the woman spoke to at the time — was the centerpiece of a report from an independent panel of state legislators released in April. The report also included accusations that Greitens had physically abused the woman, including nonconsensual spanking and slapping. When local CBS affiliate KMOV broke the story in January, it did not include the accusations that the encounter was not consensual, instead describing it as an extramarital affair — the framing Greitens then used in public statements but which the legislature’s report suggests is inaccurate.
The report followed Greitens’s February indictment on a felony charge of invasion of privacy carrying up to four years of prison time, which saw him led away by the St. Louis sheriff’s office. The prosecutor in that case, a Democrat, dropped the charges in May, saying the judge in the case left her in an impossible position by allowing the defense to call her as a witness in a case she was prosecuting (they allege the prosecution is politically motivated). But a new special prosecutor could refile the charges and perhaps add more.
In addition, the Missouri legislature is currently in special session considering impeachment, and on the day of his resignation a court ruled that Greitens’ nonprofit had to turn over documents to the state legislators investigating him. Greitens also faces felony data tampering charges related to the use of a donor list from his veterans’ nonprofit to raise money for his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. Another prosecutor declined to file charges against Greitens to file a false campaign finance report, despite the state’s Republican attorney general, Josh Hawley, saying there was probable cause for an indictment.
Greitens, a Navy SEAL and Rhodes Scholar with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a doctorate in refugee studies, was the country’s second-youngest governor at 43 and getting presidential buzz before the allegations first emerged. Previously a Democrat, Greitens switched parties and successfully ran for Missouri governor as a Republican in 2016. A profile during the gubernatorial campaign declared, “If the man has an Achilles’ heel, it’s perfection.”
His actual Achilles’ heel appears to be that he is accused of sexually and physically abusing a woman (and playing fast and loose with campaign finance law).
Initially, in a news conference in advance of the April report’s release, he declared that “this was a private mistake that has nothing to do with governing,” that the matter would be put to rest at his trial. But by the end of May, the pressure became too much to bear.
What Greitens allegedly did
The account the woman accusing Greitens gave to the legislative committee is considerably more detailed than the initial stories that broke in January, and thus is the most complete accounting of what occurred to date. The committee talked to corroborating witnesses and concluded that the woman is “credible.”
The woman details a number of nonconsensual incidents, including when, during a haircut appointment on March 7, 2015 (before the revenge porn incident described above), Greitens felt up her leg all the way to her crotch without consent. On March 21, the woman says, she met Greitens at his house, supposedly to talk, and Greitens attempted to initiate “some sort of, like, sexy workout.”
She says he had “prepared clothes for her to change into,” and once she had changed into them, he led her into his basement, where he “taped her hands to pull-up rings … and then put a blindfold on her.”
She says he then drank water and spit it into her mouth, saying, “Before we start a workout you have to be hydrated.” “I realized he’s trying to kiss me,” she recalled, “but I don’t even want to kiss him. So I just spit it out. He does it and he’s like ‘You’re not going to be a bad girl, are you? Tries to do it again, to which I just let it dribble out, because I didn’t even want to kiss him again.”
Then, she says, Greitens began kissing from her neck down to her chest and ripped open her shirt, once again without consent. He then remarked on a scar on her stomach before continuing to kiss her stomach and pulling down her pants (again, without consent). That’s when she saw the flash of a camera through the blindfold, she said, and she recalls he told her: “You’re not going to mention my name. Don’t even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I’m going to take these pictures, and I’m going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.”
When he asked if she was going to mention his name, she said no through gritted teeth, and he replied, “Now that’s a good girl.”
He then began to kiss her stomach and motion toward attempting oral sex on her when, she says, “I just started freaking out and I started ripping down my hands. I was like, Get me out of here. I’m not ready for this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.” “I was definitely fearful,” she said. She told him, “I don’t want this,” and, “I’m leaving,” and he “grab[bed] me and like — like, in a bear hug, and was like, Shh, shh, it’s okay, calm down, calm down, and like, lays me down on this ground in the basement.”
She says she started crying uncontrollably. “He starts undoing his pants, and he takes his penis out and puts it, like, near where my face is,” she recalls. At that point, convinced that he would not let her leave otherwise, she performed oral sex, she said. When investigators asked if it was consensual, she replied: “It felt like consent, but no, I didn’t want to do it. … Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave.”
After that, he did let her leave, she says, though she returned later that day for her keys.
She returned to his house at 4 pm after work, where he explained the picture he took of her the following way: “He said, I know ... but you have to understand, I’m running for office, and people will get me, and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself. And I thought about you, though, and I felt bad, so I erased it. To which – you know, I didn’t believe him, but at least, he, like, acknowledged that it was messed up and had a reason why.”
Later, at another salon appointment, the woman says she and Greitens kissed consensually, and that in May, they met up at his house and had consensual oral sex. Then in June, she went over to his house to make out. She says he asked her if she had slept with her husband since the previous incident. She said yes, and he slapped her in the face. She recalled, “I said, I think you’re screwed up from being in the Navy.”
The next week, she went over to his house for a “workout.” “At first it was fine,” she said, and then he began “fingering me and … out of nowhere, just, like, kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground. And I instantly just started bawling and was just like, What is wrong with you?”
The accusations in the report are considerably more serious and damning than the initial reporting that emerged in January. KMOV News 4 investigative reporters Lauren Trager and John O’Sullivan based their initial report (a video of which you can view here) on a recording of the woman provided to the station by the woman’s ex-husband.
The recording, taken in March 2015 without the woman’s knowledge, depicts her and her then-husband discussing her relationship with Greitens. The tape was made days after the alleged March 21 incident with revenge porn and attempted forcible oral sex, according to the ex-husband. It covered the revenge porn but didn’t go into detail about Greitens’s other nonconsensual acts.
Shortly after that story broke, TPM’s Allegra Kirkland spoke to the ex-husband’s lawyer and Missouri Democratic operative Roy Temple, who both reported that the ex-husband mentioned that Greitens slapped the woman before sex. The legislative report confirms this account.
Greitens also faced scrutiny for campaign finance offenses
The “invasion of privacy” statute under which Greitens has been charged applies to cases where a defendant “knowingly photographs or films another person, without the person’s knowledge and consent, while the person being photographed or filmed is in a state of full or partial nudity and is in a place where one would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the person subsequently distributes the photograph or film to another or transmits the image contained in the photograph or film in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer.”
It is a class D felony, carrying a prison sentence of up to four years.
And the other accusations in the woman’s account could open the door to much more serious charges, like sodomy and sexual abuse.
The case against Greitens hit a roadblock when a judge ruled that Kim Gardner, the St. Louis prosecuting attorney, could be called as a witness in the case. Gardner dropped charges to avoid appearing as a witness in her own case. But Jean Peters Baker, another county prosecutor, was appointed as a special prosecutor in the case, and has until the expiration of the statute of limitations on June 11 to refile charges, or file additional ones.
Whatever happens criminally, the scandal completely destroyed Greitens’s administration, which saw Republicans return to the office after eight years in opposition.
Greitens was fairly popular before the scandal — 20 percent more Missourians approved than disapproved of him in polling last October — but the indictment follows more than a few major clashes during his first year in office. Greitens pushed through a law making Missouri a right-to-work state; while today the state has relatively few union members, historically its brewing industry has been heavily unionized. Opponents have successfully forced a referendum on the issue onto the 2018 ballot, suspending the law’s enforcement in the process.
More damaging were revelations that his gubernatorial campaign relied heavily on massive amounts of dark money from wealthy donors. Missouri has historically had among the laxest campaign finance laws of any state; this upcoming election will be the first one in which state candidates face any contribution limits at all. Before, anyone — individuals, corporations, unions, PACs — could give an unlimited amount to campaigns. That changed with a 2016 ballot measure that finally enacted limits, which passed 70 percent to 30 but which Greitens opposed.
But even by the state’s lax standards, Greitens stood out. During the governor’s race, he received $1.975 million in one day, and no one knows where it came from. It went from a Super PAC called SEALS for Truth to Greitens’s campaign, and to SEALS for Truth from a nonprofit called American Policy Coalition. This is an easy way to use Super PACs and nonprofits to evade donor disclosure, but it’s rarely done as brazenly as in Greitens’s case.
There’s more, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kevin McDermott recaps in this helpful piece. Greitens was fined for not disclosing how his campaign got the donor list from his nonprofit, the Mission Continues; the Associated Press found that the campaign raised nearly $2 million from the Mission Continues donors, despite Greitens’s denials that he used the group’s list to fundraise. This lead to St. Louis prosecutor Gardner filing felony data tampering charges against him, and is a key part of the impeachment case against him.
Greitens has also refused to release his individual tax returns; the amounts that companies, wealthy individuals, and lobbyists donated to his inauguration parties; and the funders of A New Missouri, a nonprofit he founded as governor to promote his agenda.
The inauguration issue took on new prominence after his administration offered a no-bid contract to one of the inauguration donors. It’s hard to evaluate if there was a quid pro quo involved because no one knows how much the firm actually gave Greitens; he refuses to disclose the numbers. Members of the Missouri legislature introduced bills attempting to demand disclosure from secretive nonprofits like A New Missouri after it aired an attack ad against state Sen. Rob Schaaf, a Republican critic of Greitens, and displayed Schaaf’s personal cellphone number for viewers to call.
Greitens has defended his conduct by comparing dark money to the secret ballot: “The people who believe in voter intimidation believe that the minute you make a political donation, that you immediately need to turn all your information over to the government. … When people go in and they vote, nobody calls that dark voting.”
But a judge’s decision to order the disclosure of records from his nonprofit appeared to end his desire to fight back, as mere hours after that decision, he resigned his office.
CORRECTION: This article previously indicated that the invasion of privacy charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years; the correct number is four.