As Sienna grew older, Winter would tell her bedtime stories about feminists, “to show me to shoot for the moon,” she told a crowd of mourners on the steps of the state Capitol on Friday.

“Her love stretched far and wide,” Sienna, 14, said. “When I was a kid, she told me she loved me to the moon and back. Now it’s just a little further.”

Winter, a 45-year-old mother to Sienna and Tobin whose decade-long career in public service helped reshape her home state and encouraged countless women to follow in her flipflop-shaped footsteps, was killed in a three-vehicle crash on Interstate 25 near Centennial on Nov. 26, the evening before Thanksgiving. The cause of the crash, which happened in close proximity to another collision, is still under investigation and likely will not be determined for weeks, officials said earlier this week.

Hundreds of loved ones, friends, former colleagues and elected officials crowded seats and, when those filled, the concrete surrounding them for Winter’s memorial Friday. Friends, including women whom Winter had trained and helped run for office, described the lawmaker’s warmth, her love of bright colors and the outdoors, and the optimistic tenacity that helped her endure personal challenges and become one of the most impactful Colorado lawmakers of her generation.

She was a “nerd for women’s leadership,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, who was quoting remarks from another friend. An organizer by profession and passion, Winter was elected to the Westminster City Council before first winning a seat in the state House in 2014. She mentored and trained other women to seek higher office throughout her career, and U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen said Friday that when she met Winter in 2009, she was the first person to tell Pettersen to run for office. She still has Winter’s name saved in her phone as “mentor!”

Her mantra, Rep. Jenny Willford remembered, was “lift as you rise.”

“She didn’t wait for the right moment or the perfect woman,” Willford said Friday. “She saw potential in people before they saw it in themselves, and she insisted that they rise, too.”

In her 11 years at the Capitol, Winter was the primary sponsor on more than 220 bills that passed the legislature. Between the 2022 and 2023 sessions alone, she shepherded more than 80 bills into law, a pace that’s likely matched only by the workhorse legislators who draft the state budget. (Her tally could have been even larger: She also was among the legislators whose bills were most frequently vetoed, itself a badge of honor and a marker of her willingness to dig in.)

The layered legacy that emerges from Winter’s time in office will be felt, even if they don’t know it, by millions of Colorado workers, tenants, eating disorder patients, transit riders, lawmakers, legislative aides, lobbyists, affordable housing developers, new mothers, students who use menstrual products, women wondering about a career in politics, and incalculable employees, transgender people and children at risk of harassment.

The shadow cast by the diminutive legislator from Broomfield is long, and there are few classrooms, buses and workplaces that haven’t felt it. In interviews and remarks Friday, several friends called her Wonder Woman.

“As a public servant, she cared so deeply for the Colorado we love, so deeply for Colorado’s most vulnerable,” said Gov. Jared Polis, the first speaker at Friday’s service. “She was kind, and also tough in fighting for her people, her district and our state.”

Her legislative work was remarkably focused. She championed issues because she’d lived them, Hazel Gibson, who was one of the women Winter trained and encouraged to run for office, said in an interview Thursday.

Winter studied environmental science in school, Gibson said. She often relied on her bike to get around. She’d been a worker and a tenant. In college, she’d helped unhoused women.

She championed anti-harassment legislation, including after she and others publicly accused a fellow Democrat of sexual harassment. The lawmaker, Steve Lebsock, was later expelled from the legislature. The allegations prompted broader investigations within the Capitol, and Winter later sponsored legislation to improve how harassment complaints are filed and investigated.

Winter became a fan of Kesha, the pop star who’d accused her producer of abuse, and she kept a cape in her office, “for anyone who wants to feel powerful,” she said in 2023. (She also loved Taylor Swift.)

Winter’s work was all the more remarkable given the battery of personal challenges she faced.

She became a face of Colorado’s political #MeToo movement after coming forward with allegations against Lebsock. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2022. The next year, she was hospitalized after crashing her bike to avoid a truck while riding to the Capitol.

In 2024, she was investigated by her colleagues and was found to have violated ethics rules after she appeared intoxicated at a community event. She entered treatment for substance use and returned to the Capitol, where she soon helped pass one of the in the state’s history.

“She wasn’t (perfect), but no one is, and she knew she wasn’t,” Sienna said of her mother. “That’s why, when I was little, she taught me an important lesson. I got into my first argument with my parents, and she sat me down and taught me how to apologize. She told me that apologies weren’t about me. They weren’t something that I should use to make me feel better. They were about the other person. You have to own up to your actions. Don’t make excuses. Show that you care, then you have to act. My mother was an action- and changemaker.”

Often, that change-making took years, a persistence that defined Winter’s career.

After repeated attempts to require businesses to provide paid family leave benefits failed in the Capitol, Winter took the issue to the ballot box, where voters passed it by more than 15 points in 2020. In its first 18 months, paid family leave has already been used by nearly 200,000 Coloradans who’ve received more than $1 billion in benefits, Pettersen said Friday.

“I know that was a little wonky,” she said. “But so is Faith Winter.”

Extending Title IX protections for women and girls to high school students took multiple swings. So, too, did legislation limiting harassment in the workplace. When that bill was finally passed, Winter donned the silver cape for the bill signing.

“That was her,” Gibson, who also spoke Friday, said. “She taught me: This is your goal. How are you going to get there? And to look at all the different ways you can get there. That����ap how I look at everything now, whether it����ap lobbying or planning her (funeral) service.

“She was never a person that backed down or (thought) the fights were too big. She might need to pause, take a breath. But she always came back.”

Her children were her joy, friends said. She “brought them along inside her world,” Pettersen said in an interview Thursday, and Winter declined calls to run for higher office because of the demands it would put on her time.

“She said, ‘These are the most important years for me to be there for my kids,’ ” Pettersen said.

A fifth-generation Coloradan, Winter was a hiker, a kayaker, a camper. Pettersen remembered Winter, Sienna and Tobin all sleeping in hammocks slung between tall trees. The family hiked together every Sunday, with Winter in flipflops. Her health later slowed her down, making the hikes more difficult and the kayaking trips less frequent.

But even still, “she never stopped seeking beauty,” Gibson said Friday. “She never stopped choosing color or flowers or dresses or joy. She never stopped finding reasons to laugh, especially at herself, especially when life was absurd. She lived big, yes, but more than that, she lived bright. And she made the people she loved brighter, too.”

Do I know for certain that Heather Booth, an elected school board member from Elizabeth, and Jacqueline Anderson, the former vice chair of the Mesa County Republican Party are telling the truth in their letter recounting Weinberg’s inappropriate remarks? No, but if #MeToo taught us anything, it����ap that the cost of speaking up in politics is high, and remaining silent is rewarded. These brave women appear to have no motive other than to do the right thing by coming forward. Also, others witnessed the remarks.

Weinberg has denied that he made sexual remarks to the women and has hired an attorney.

However, he also quickly stepped down from his bid for a leadership position for Colorado House Republicans. This is progress, even though House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese did not use her position of influence to pressure him to drop his bid.

The #MeToo movement hit Colorado’s state Capitol hard in 2017, culminating in the unprecedented ouster of one lawmaker – Rep. Steve Lebsock – who was accused of making unwanted sexual advances to interns and another lawmaker. However, few people remember that two other lawmakers faced a reckoning for their bad behavior and that one of them remained in office and served out his term as if nothing had happened. Rumors about the other lawmaker’s bad behavior swirled, but nothing else came to the surface.

At the time, I wrote a column describing working at the Capitol as a “gauntlet of sexual harassment:” unwanted advances, alcohol-fueled inappropriate remarks, and just plain old sexism. The worst part was the complete lack of accountability for elected officials. There was no human resources department to consider a complaint, and while accountable to the public, politicians seemed secure in their knowledge that no one would dare to speak out.

But that has changed.

The Colorado General Assembly now has a robust process for considering complaints. In the wake of the Lebsock saga, lawmakers created “workplace expectations” to give employers and employees at the Capitol standards. The House and Senate ethics committees have investigated everything from lawmakers driving drunk or appearing at events intoxicated to a senator’s mistreatment of her staff and subsequent creation of a fake letter of support.

There are holes in the safety net. The ethics committee doesn’t have purview over the complaints about Weinberg – the events happened before the man was elected to the Colorado House to represent District 51 in Larimer County.

Despite those holes, accountability continues to come for Colorado lawmakers who behave badly. Yes, voters always have elections to hold elected officials responsible for their choices, but voters can’t exercise that power if they aren’t informed. Formal investigations help empower people.

No one is circling the wagons to defend Weinberg, or sitting idly by hoping the allegations are forgotten.

The process is not perfect. Bad behavior will continue.

But women and men now know they don’t have to tolerate obscenity. The women who spoke up have their own power in this state, and I applaud them for using their positions to ensure other women don’t suffer the nonsense Weinberg spewed their way.

Megan Schrader is the opinion editor of The Denver Post.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Updated July 9, 2025 at 11:14 a.m. Due to an editor’s error, this column was updated to reflect the fact that the House ethics policy does apply to journalists and lobbyists. The column was also updated to show that Pugliese did not pressure Weinberg to drop his bid for a leadership role. 

“People who are harmed and suffering deserve our respect, and I have to apologize for the way that I caused harm to (the) community by not making that explicitly clear,” Rep. Tim Hernández, a Denver Democrat, said in a video posted to social media late Friday afternoon. “… My values have and always will remain as solidarity and appreciation for the fundamental value of human life and a collective fight against oppression.”

The video is Hernández’s second public statement since he attended the rally outside of the state Capitol on Oct. 7, the same day that Hamas killed hundreds of people in Israel and kidnapped scores more. The lawmaker got into a heated exchange with an opponent of the rally, and video shows Hernández condemning “colonial violence,” reiterating his support for Palestine and refusing to explicitly condemn the attacks or Hamas.

After the video spread online, Hernández’s social media engagement with posts about the attack also drew criticism, including a post about Israel being “humiliated.” Republicans and some Democrats, including Israeli-born Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, publicly criticized him.

Hernández, who did not respond to messages from The Denver Post this week, issued a first statement Monday, condemning war and opposing violence against civilians. The next day, the top House Democrats — Speaker Julie McCluskie and Majority Leader Monica Duran — said they were “deeply disappointed” that Hernández did not condemn Hamas.

On Friday, Hernández began his video with an explicit condemnation of the group “and their attack on innocent civilians.” He apologized for his social media use and said he hadn’t been “engaged with impacted community members.”

Michaelson Jenet said she spoke with Hernández on Monday, when she released a statement criticizing his attendance at the rally and his social media usage. That conversation, she said, “was rough.” Hernández called her Friday morning to talk again, and she said he had spoken with more people and had “a greater understanding of what is going on in Israel right now.”

“I hope that what comes out of this is he recognizes the megaphone he’s been given and uses it responsibly,” she said.

In a statement issued to Instagram on Thursday, the Colorado Palestine Coalition — which organized the Saturday rally — wrote that it held the event to draw attention to the blockade placed around Gaza and its people. The group said it condemned the “baseless attacks” against Hernández and that those criticisms were “a microcosm (of) how this issue is framed in American media and politics.”

Hernández’s second statement comes as Republicans intensify their criticism of him. In a letter released by the state Republican Party on Thursday night, 15 of the House’s 19 Republicans demanded that Democrats initiate Hernández’s expulsion. The letter, written by Rep. Brandi Bradley, sharply criticizes Hernández and said his actions warranted immediate removal.

“The events that are happening in Israel are heartbreaking, and we obviously feel for the people of Israel and stand united with them,” said Republican Rep. Rose Pugliese, the assistant minority leader in the House. “So to have remarks like he has made is really sad for the institution as a whole, especially in the House.”

Given Democratic control in the Capitol, expulsion — which requires a two-thirds vote — is unlikely. Only two House members have been expelled, mostly recently in 2018, when then-Rep. Steve Lebsock was removed after several women accused him of harassment. The legislature doesn’t reconvene until January. A spokesman for House Democrats declined to comment Friday.

Bradley said that she intended to follow through on the letter but said she needed to meet with all of her Republican colleagues to settle on next steps.

“I’m not going to sit back and watch someone attack a community of people,” she said.

Not all of the House Republicans signed on to the letter, and not all agree with its intent. Rep. Ron Weinberg, a Loveland Republican, decried the expulsion demand and said Hernández had the right to speak and protest.

“This is emotional for me. I have family in Israel, I’m Jewish, I lived in Israel for a little bit. I completely disagree with Hernández. But I’m not going to shut him up,” he said. “I’m not going to silence him or muzzle him. That����ap ridiculous. Let him state his piece. And we should encourage people to protest and give their opinion. And we should be able to get into a room and debate about it, sensibly.”

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Elsayad was fixated on the screen for updates on the presidential election, but there was one local race that was particularly important to her: Colorado House District 41. The legislative seat represents parts of southwestern Aurora and unincorporated Arapahoe County.

Her dad refreshed Democratic candidate Iman Jodeh’s Facebook page and read a post aloud to his daughter: “We did it! I ran to make the #AmericanDream a reality for Everyone. I am a proud #Muslim, #PalestinianAmerican, & #firstgeneration American. And I am proud to be able to represent my communities & the people of #hd41 in the #Colorado state legislature! Now, let’s get to work.”

The 18-year-old yelled in excitement, making sure her mom heard the news. The first Muslim and Arab woman had been elected to the Colorado General Assembly.

Colorado gained national recognition in the 2018 election for its record-breaking number of women elected to the General Assembly, with women holding more seats than men in the legislature. This year, Colorado House Democrats added three more women to their roster, but much of the focus has been on Democratic groups working to get more people of color elected to statewide offices to not only better reflect Colorado’s population but also give more of a voice to underrepresented communities.

Jodeh, who will replace term-limited Democratic Rep. Jovan Melton of Aurora, won more than 66% of the vote in her race against Republican opponent Robert Andrews. She’s part of a House Democratic caucus that is touted for its diversity. Also joining the caucus next year is Democratic candidate Naquetta Ricks, the first African immigrant elected to the statehouse, to represent District 40 in Aurora.

After President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Elsayad didn’t expect that just four years later, a Muslim Arab-American woman would be representing her even at the state level.

“It was something so relevant to me,” she said of Jodeh’s win. “I was so excited to see somebody who looks like me in office. … I was also very excited to see we’re making big changes, and I knew she was a big change to any district.”

Standing in the kitchen of her childhood home in Aurora on Thursday, Jodeh was helping her mom prepare a traditional Palestinian lunch for her family. She values the multiple facets of her identity.

Jodeh is a community activist and started her own nonprofit called Meet the Middle East. She’s taught classes about Palestine and has worked as a spokesperson for the Colorado Muslim Society, which her late father co-founded after immigrating to the United States.

“When you have my identity markers — I am a practicing Muslim Palestinian-American woman of color — you don’t know anything other than activism,” Jodeh said.

That, combined with people’s misunderstanding of Muslims displayed through threatening phone calls her family used to receive and the feeling of being the “other” after 9/11, conditioned her to become an advocate, she said.

that there are more than 70,000 Muslims living in Colorado.

Jodeh said she hadn’t necessarily planned for a career in politics.

She remembers brushing her teeth the morning after the election in 2016, and as she looked in the mirror, thinking she would have to leave the U.S. with her mother who wears the hijab to protect her.

“(Trump) was already talking about Muslim identification cards and internment,” Jodeh said.

But after a “Stand with our Muslim neighbors” rally in Denver, Jodeh instead decided to take a different route.

“It was incredibly powerful to be able to speak truth to power about what it means to be Muslim in America,” she said.

She ran to fill the Senate District 26 vacancy seat in 2019 and lost. She expected it, she said, but it helped her get name recognition as she ran for the House seat this year.

Her mother, Siham, is proud. She said her husband had wanted to get involved in politics, but she used to say she didn’t want that kind of tension in the house. So, it was no surprise that Iman Jodeh followed in his footsteps.

“It����ap just an amazing, amazing feeling,” Siham Jodeh said of hearing the results. “It����ap indescribable. Thank God for everything.”

Outgoing Colorado House Speaker KC Becker, a Boulder Democrat, has seen the value of a more diverse legislature, including how the House dealt with the sexual harassment allegations against former Rep. Steve Lebsock amid the growing MeToo movement.

But she said it was also clear in the types of legislation passed such as equal pay and how the processes for legislation have played out.

“Largely, I think it����ap in the general approach that women bring, which tends to be really collaborative and inclusive,” she said.

Emerge Colorado works to get more Democratic women, particularly those from nontraditional backgrounds elected to state and local offices. Nine of the 25 women from the program who won offices this year are people of color, seven in the statehouse.

“Those experiences are going to make the policy that much better for communities that are often left out of the room,” said executive director Michal Rosenoer.

What the statehouse has seen in the past couple of years with more women in office is legislation for working class families around issues such as child care, health care costs and clean air, she said. That will be even more important during COVID and the economic crisis, she added.

Nationally, Republican women have made gains in elected offices including in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District with Lauren Boebert’s win, but the GOP didn’t do as well in its statehouse races this year.

State Rep. Janice Rich, a Grand Junction Republican, was elected by her caucus to serve as the House GOP caucus chair this week. Rich said she loves seeing women get elected and joked that she was breaking up the “boys’ club” getting a leadership role.

She credited the new GOP leadership for coming from various parts of the state, but she doesn’t see a need to focus on getting specific groups of people elected. Instead, she said the party should center its efforts on recruiting the most qualified candidates.

One thing Becker said she tried to stress as House speaker for her caucus is the real-life implications bills have. And that is even more clear, she said, when representatives share their own experiences. She noted how a speech by Rep. James Coleman, a Denver Democrat, about growing up as a Black man in America helped colleagues understand where he was coming from when he advocated for the police reform bill this year, Senate Bill 217.

“It just informs their own perspective and the priorities they set, but it also informs the rest of the body,” she said.

That����ap what Ricks plans to do for her district. She first ran for the Board of Regents in 2014 and for City Council before winning her statehouse seat.

Nearly a fifth of Aurora residents were born in another country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so Ricks hopes to use her immigrant experience as she crafts bills. The Liberian-American immigrated to Colorado in 1980 as a refugee at the age of 13 to escape a civil war.

“I don’t think I set out to be the first (African immigrant), but I definitely set out to be a voice at the table,” she said. But, “I’m hoping that by breaking the glass ceiling, more people will see that is possible,” she added.

Ricks also brings experience as a small business owner — she co-founded the African Chamber of Commerce of Colorado — and she wants to help those struggling during the pandemic among other issues.

Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, D-Denver, was elected assistant majority leader in the House last week. She noted that more representation in statewide offices and leadership roles brings to light issues affected by those communities, which can be backed by personal experience.

Beyond that, representation matters for young people, she said. Gonzales-Gutierrez is a Latina mother, and they’re often not seen as the typical candidates for the role.

“For me part of that is being that role model and hoping that young people are seeing not only the number of us that are doing this work, the variety (and) a lot of diversity within all of us,” she said.

But step onto the floor of the Colorado House, and you’ll see something entirely different. In the current legislative session, more than half of the state representatives — 34 out of 65 — are women. Seven of the 11 House committees are chaired by women.

Only once before and only briefly has any legislature in the country experienced a female majority in even one of its chambers. It happened in New Hampshire, where women held 13 out of 24 seats in the state Senate during the 2009-2010 session.

A decade later, there are two: Colorado and Nevada, where women not only constitute a majority in the assembly but also hold most of the seats in the legislature as a whole.

This is not just the aftereffect of the 2018 election, which saw record numbers of women running for office. Colorado’s groundswell for more female representation has been building for years, fueled by organizations such as the state chapter of Emerge America, which operates a sort of boot camp for women interested in running at the state and local level.

Kathleen Collins “KC” Becker, who got her start on the Boulder City Council, is the third woman in a row to serve as House speaker. “We very diligently recruit women, and train women to run, and hire women as campaign managers,” she said in an interview in her offices just off the chamber. “And so, all of this is intentional. It didn’t just happen that way.”

This year has also seen a record number of women in Colorado’s state Senate, 13 out of a membership of 35. Well over half the agency heads appointed by its new governor, Jared Polis (D), are female.

As in the U.S. Congress, all of this is almost exclusively a Democratic phenomenon. Where the number of Democratic women in the Colorado legislature has grown by nearly half since its last session, the number of female Republicans has remained the same.

So what difference does it make when women gain power? On the day I visited the Colorado capitol, a Senate committee passed legislation to create an insurance fund that would offer 12 weeks of paid leave to care for a newborn or deal with family emergencies — the latest version of a measure that has failed at least four times in the past.

That same afternoon, the House Education Committee, chaired by former teacher Barbara McLachlan,unanimously approved legislation requiring the state to fund full-day kindergarten. A Republican legislator on the panel, retired school superintendent James D. Wilson, has been trying without success since 2014 to pass such a bill, and this session, he thinks it will succeed.

Women are not just flexing their new muscle on family issues. All four of the prime sponsors of aggressive climate-change legislation, which passed a House committee earlier this month, are women.

Just a coincidence? Maybe. But polling has shown women in the United States are significantly more likely than men to say that climate change is a serious problem, that it will affect them personally and that major lifestyle changes are needed to combat it.

Some of the shift has been in the culture of the place. Nursing mothers used to have to retreat to a bathroom in the capitol basement; now there is a room set aside for them. When I ran into freshman state Sen. Jessie Danielson visiting her former House colleagues on the floor, she had her toddler, Isabelle, on her hip.

All of this follows a political earthquake last year. For the first time in more than a century, the legislature expelled one of its own. Democratic Rep. Steve Lebsock was ousted on a 52-to-9 vote after five women, led by fellow legislator Faith Winter, lodged complaints of sexual harassment against him. Winter was subsequently elected to the Senate, helping to flip it to Democratic control.

Then again, not everything has changed.

Becker says that when she and Majority Leader Alec Garnett enter a room, people who do not know them still sometimes assume that Garnett — who stands about 6-foot-4, while she is barely 5 feet tall — is the one in charge.

And a male legislator, thinking he was being helpful, suggested several times that she let him do the negotiating with the oil industry over recent legislation giving local governments more say over where drilling takes place, and prioritizing health and safety concerns.

“Being a white guy,” she recalls him telling her, “it may just be easier for them to work with me, because we have that in common and so we might just relate better.”

“No,” the speaker responded, “I’m doing just fine.”

She did it her way, pushing through a bill that outraged the state’s most powerful industry, but easily cleared the House on a 36-to-28 vote. Because power looks different these days in Colorado, even if not everyone has figured that out.

Karen Tumulty is a Washington Post columnist covering national politics. She joined The Post in 2010 from Time magazine and has also worked at the Los Angeles Times.

While the group of Republicans and Democrats agreed on several policy changes, they remained divided over how to police their own at the end of their final meeting.

“It was unfortunate that we were not able to get bipartisan support,” House Speaker Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, said.

Colorado’s lawmakers created the in April after a report by Investigations Law Group found that less than half of people who said they witnessed sexual harassment at the Capitol reported it. And almost half of the people surveyed said the legislature’s current policy wasn’t taken seriously. The report itself came about after six lawmakers were accused of misbehavior and one of them — Thornton lawmaker Steve Lebsock — was expelled from office.

The goal of the working group was to write a set of rules for the new human resources office, including whether it would accept anonymous complaints, how much information collected during investigations would be made public and what allegations rise to the level of always requiring a formal investigation.

“Our process was broken, and the work my colleagues and I did will take us a step in the right direction,” Sen. Dominick Moreno, D-Commerce City, said. “I hope the members of our Executive Committee will be able to present our full chamber with a policy that works.”

The committee agreed on an informal complaint process and a system to track allegations and identify patterns, but the six lawmakers couldn’t find consensus on what to redact from investigations and who should get to vote on recommendations of censure or expulsion when a lawmaker is at the center of an investigation.

Duran, Moreno and Rep. Faith Winter, D-Westminster, wanted a single committee that included members of both parties as well as a victims’ advocate, HR expert and someone with a background in employment law to be voting members of a committee hearing about accusations against elected officials and partisan staff.

“I think what we really tried to do with this process was work to take out the perception that politics could get in the way of a just outcome,” Duran said.

The three Republicans wanted two committees, one for each chamber, composed of members from each party. They were willing to have these committee consult with experts, but they didn’t want them to get a vote.

Another issue was what information should be shared and with whom.

Sen. Beth Martinez Humenik, R-Thornton, didn’t like how the reports on lawmakers accused of sexual harassment during the last legislative session were redacted.

“You’re asking the legislators to be a jury and judge when it����ap so convoluted no one can understand with everything crossed out,” Martinez Humenik said.

One suggestion was to let party leadership see an unredacted report. Another was to replace names with numbers like witness one and witness two. The committee did agree on making a non-identifying summary of facts public if a resolution to expel is drafted.

Another debate cropped up around how to prevent details from leaking.

“The way things played out this year, unfortunately, is everybody already knew everything because it played out in the media,” Martinez Humenik said.

The committee debated changing Colorado’s open records and public meetings laws to keep documents and deliberations on certain matters out of the public eye. Members agreed complaints should be discussed in executive session, but they debated whether they could vote on a recommendation for accountability in private.

“There’s a point when an employer has an obligation to ensure the safety of the environment, and sometimes that means taking steps that (go) beyond what the complainant wishes,” human resources administrator Ben FitzSimons said.

Duran agreed that certain allegations — like physical violence or sexual assault — would require a formal investigation, but she worried about protecting the identities of people who don’t want to make a formal complaint in those situations. She didn’t want a formal investigation revealing the identity of someone who thought they were talking informally to a human resources employee.

“I really worry about a situation like that,” Duran said, adding that the allegation itself could reveal the person’s identity.

The group decided to make it clear that retaliation of any kind — which includes revealing a complainant’s name — wouldn’t be tolerated.

The draft of the workplace harassment policy for the General Assembly, along with notes about where lawmakers disagreed, is headed to another committee called the Executive Committee. They’ll decide what legal changes and policy reforms should be sent to lawmakers for a vote during the 2019 legislative session.

Due to a reporter’s error, The Denver Post incorrectly identified where Rep. Beth Martinez Humenik lives. She is a resident of Thornton. 

Pounding at the podium, Bishop Acen Phillips, a leader in Denver’s black community, said the Democratic leadership’s request for Majority Deputy Whip Jovan Melton, D-Aurora, to step down is a “21st-century lynching of a black man.”

House and other state Democratic leaders have urged Melton to resign following a Denver Post article detailing Melton’s arrests. Now the calls for resignation are being reciprocated.

“The Democratic leadership needs to apologize to him and step down themselves,” former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb said.

Melton was first arrested 1999 and pleaded guilty to harassment after a witness told police they heard him yelling and hitting his then-girlfriend, according to a police report obtained by The Denver Post. He received a deferred sentence.

Melton was arrested a second time in 2008 for charges related to domestic violence that were later dropped. Melton has denied any wrongdoing, and the woman from 2008 told Colorado Politics that Melton didn’t hit her.

Melton wasn’t at the press conference and didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday but has denied striking either woman.

Both major-party candidates for Colorado governor weighed in on the situation Thursday.

“Violence against women is never acceptable and Jovan Melton needs to take responsibility for his actions and resign,” Republican candidate and state Treasurer Walker Stapleton .

Democrat Jared Polis, a congressman,  that Melton “really should take a serious look at resigning.”

“Frankly, I wish he was open about this when he first ran,” Polis added. “And I think … there are real issues about whether he’s come to terms with it in his own life and his own mind, given the comments that I’ve seen in the last few days.”

Thursday afternoon’s news conference took place at the Brother Jeff Cultural Center in Five Points and featured prominent leaders in Denver’s African-American community along with current and former lawmakers.

Webb asked why Democratic leadership didn’t ask former Thornton lawmaker Steve Lebsock to resign when they first learned of the sexual harassment allegations against him, and why Rep. Dan Pabon, D-Denver, wasn’t called on to resign after he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in 2016. Neither is African-American.

“This creates a Jim Crow double standard of justice by the house Democratic leadership,” Webb said.

Democratic House Leadership responded to that allegation in a statement saying race didn’t factor into their decision.

“It was a difficult decision to ask Rep. Melton to step down,” Speaker Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, Majority Leader KC Becker, D-Boulder, and Assistant Majority Leader Alec Garnett, D-Denver, wrote. “While we understand that the criminal justice system has not worked for far too many people of color and survivors, race didn’t play a role in the decision making.”

Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, an outspoken supporter of Melton, said it’s wrong to retry the 1999 case.

“He would not have gotten that deferred judgement unless the victim and the DA agreed to it,” Salazar said.

In interviews with The Post, the woman in that case said she did not feel justice was served.

“It is one of those things that way back when, when it was said and done, he got a slap on the wrist,” she said, describing the outcome as “a lot of effort put in to not get much justice.”

The Denver Post is withholding the victim’s name because of the nature of the charges.

The fallout from revelations of Melton’s arrests has divided many in the Democratic Party. For activists, the rhetoric in support of him has echoes of the same things many Republicans said about Brett Kavanaugh, the recently confirmed Supreme Court justice accused of sexual assault in high school.

“If we are going to yell and scream about believing women, we have to believe all women,” said Hazel Gibson, a Democrat who ran for Senate District 32 but lost in the primary. “What is really upsetting for me as a woman, I have seen a lot of Democrats I love and respect make excuses very similar to what I have seen Republicans do.”

At the news conference, Webb and others said Melton’s case is not the same as that of Lebsock or Kavanaugh because he pleaded guilty and received a deferred sentence for the 1999 case. Webb also questioned the accuracy of police reports.

Staff writer Jon Murray contributed to this story.

The 21-page report was finished in June, but its details and determinations remained a secret until Thursday, when Kagan’s accuser, Sen. Beth Martinez Humenik, R-Thornton, released it to CBS4.

“My hope has been that Senator Kagan would eventually admit that this was not a one-time incident, but he’s unwilling to do so, even in light of what����ap in this report …,” Martinez Humenik said in a statement. “After having my honesty and the honesty of other witnesses questioned, I’m sharing this report in an effort to bring this matter to closure and put facts on the table.”

The facts, according to the investigator’s conclusions in the report, were that Kagan first used a bathroom on the second floor meant for female senators in January 2017.

“Both Witness 4 and Witness 6 stated that because Senator Kagan was new to the Senate in January 2017, they perceived that he mistakenly used the restroom in question due to the lack of gender-signage at the time,” according to the report.

The second incident happened in March 2017. Martinez Humenik told the investigator from Employer’s Council, a private human resources firm, that she looked down while using the restroom and saw “a pair of men’s brown dress shoes and cuffed pants.”

She waited at the sinks after washing her hands to see who it was and saw Kagan emerge from the stall.

“I asked him, ‘What are you doing in here?’ He mumbled something about not feeling well. I told him that he couldn’t be in the women’s restroom,” Martinez Humenik said.

The third incident the investigator found credible was came from a woman who said she was working late at the Capitol one night when Kagan came “stumbling” into the women’s restroom as she was leaving.

“He just said, ‘Oh sorry,’ and walked past me to use the women’s restroom,” said the woman, whom the report identifies as Witness 5. “He appeared intoxicated at that time.”

Kagan did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he told The Denver Post in March, when the allegations first became public, that it was an innocent mistake he made once. That’s also what he told the investigator.

“It is not accurate that a female has seen me entering or exiting the women’s restroom more than once, that did not happen,” Kagan said. “I cannot explain why this person would believe that or have that impression.”

Kagan’s not the only state lawmaker to face workplace harassment allegations. Outside investigators found allegations against four other lawmakers to be credible in during the 2018 session. Rep. Steve Lebsock, D-Thornton, was expelled by his colleagues in the House while senators fell short of the 24 votes needed to expel Sen. Randy Baumgardner, R-Hot Sulphur Springs, for sexual harassment.

Martinez Humenik said in her statement that she doesn’t want Kagan to resign or be expelled or even give up his committee assignments.

“All that is being asked for is a public apology for the benefit of all involved and his word not to repeat this behavior in the future,” Martinez Humenik said. “He has stated that he is unwilling to do that, even in light of the facts in this report, so there was no other choice than to make these facts public and hold him accountable for his actions.”

This year, the Colorado Capitol didn’t feel like a party.

The lawmakers managed to strike bipartisan deals on major issues — securing the state’s pension system, pumping millions into roads and boosting rural development — but the 120-day term did little to address a culture that some believe tolerates sexual harassment.

“It was miserable — I felt like this place was haunted by complaints and no one was listening,” said Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora.

The #MeToo discussion dominated the 2018 session, consuming as much attention and energy as any single policy issue. But many of the men and women who came forward to put it at the forefront left unsatisfied and now wonder where the movement at the Capitol goes from here.

“When I look back at it, I feel unsupported,” Fields continued. “I feel a lack of protection and a lack of understanding.”

Rep. Faith Winter’s allegations against a male colleague in November started the conversation, a cascade effect that led to the expulsion of a Colorado lawmaker for the first time in more than a century.

The Westminster Democrat said the attention to the issue made a difference this session. “The culture has changed. I think there is so much awareness now,” she said. “I think a lot of people didn’t even know this was happening. And now it����ap very clear it is.”

But she’s the first to acknowledge more is needed.

“We took steps forward in accountability, but not enough,” she added. “It����ap still confusing if you are thinking about filing a complaint … and if it����ap going to be worth it and there’s going to be accountability at the end.”

In the months before the next session begins, a special legislative committee will look at how to rewrite the workplace harassment policy and overhaul the complaint reporting process.

But it����ap not clear whether lawmakers can answer the deeper question about how to improve the culture in a building built on power dynamics, high stakes and partisan pressure.

To keep the #MeToo effort alive at the Capitol, Winter and other women say a political shift is needed at the ballot this November.

“This is just another reason that shows why it����ap important to have women running for office and in positions of power,” Winter said. “So I think it����ap another motivation for women to get involved.”

The timeline of a scandal

The lingering frustration is embedded in how the scandal played out this session.

All told, five lawmakers — two Democrats in the House and three Republicans in the Senate — faced allegations of sexual harassment. Also, a Senate Democrat faced a complaint for using the women’s bathroom.

 against Rep. Steve Lebsock stemmed from the 2016 end-of-session party at Stoney’s Bar and Grill near the Capitol, where she said he discussed sexual acts and tried to grab her by the elbow to get her to leave with him. Lebsock denied the allegations.

An independent investigation into the complaint later led to 10 credible accusations of harassment by five women against Lebsock — prompting House Democratic leadership to call for his ouster.

The expulsion resolution passed March 2 by a 52-9 vote after a debate filled with dramatic revelations. Two Democratic lawmakers admitted that they were wearing bulletproof vests for protection. And Lebsock switched his affiliation from Democrat to Republican moments before the vote, giving his new party the power to replace him.

Down the hall in the Senate, Democrats pushed repeatedly for the resignation, and later the expulsion, of Sen. Randy Baumgardner, R-Hot Sulphur Springs, after validated allegations of sexual harassment emerged.

Senate President Kevin Grantham, R-Cañon City, rebuffed the calls and discredited the investigation into Baumgardner’s actions. Weeks later, on April 2, when the Democratic resolution for expulsion came to the floor, the Republican majority blocked the effort, with one lawmaker calling it “a public lynching.”

Meanwhile, an outside investigation of legislative workplace culture confirmed prior reports about a problematic atmosphere, where sexual harassment and misconduct were widespread and rarely reported.

Even if most felt comfortable at the Capitol, about one-third in the survey acknowledged seeing or experiencing harassment, with half saying they observed sexist or disrespectful behavior.

Days later, Democratic Rep. Paul Rosenthal, D-Denver, lost his re-election bid in a Democratic caucus vote in which some people cited the allegations of sexual harassment against him, which he denied.

Legislative leaders face criticism for handling of the issue

The disparities in how the two chambers handled the sexual harassment complaints and delivered punishments drew outcries from the accusers, women’s rights organizations and other advocates.

“There are conflicting messages happening right now,” said Gena Ozols, the political director for NARAL Pro Choice Colorado, a women’s reproductive rights group. “The House is saying, ‘We believe you, come forward.’ The Senate is saying, ‘We don’t, keep your mouth shut.’”

Much of the criticism of the Senate was directed at Grantham — and the credible findings of new allegations against Baumgardner late in the session only heightened the pressure for him to act before adjournment.

Baumgardner voluntarily stepped down as transportation committee chairman after credible allegations earlier in the session, and the new complaints prompted Grantham to remove him from four other committees.

On the final day of the session, a Democratic lawmaker and two advocacy groups, including NARAL, delivered 1,000 petitions to Grantham demanding tougher action on the complaints.

In an interview, Grantham dismissed the criticism. “People are going to criticize no matter what I decided to do on that,” he said.

He declined to grade how he handled the complaints against Baumgardner and Sens. Jack Tate and Larry Crowder this session, saying he’s heard positive and negative feedback.

When he talks about the issue of sexual harassment, he casts it as a larger, societal problem, rather than an issue particular to the legislature. The discussion this session, he said, brought “an awareness to a situation that is nationwide, and honestly, that is a real problem, as we’ve seen evidenced across the country.”

The Senate leader joined with the House speaker to demand a review of the legislature’s policies weeks before the session began.

And the outside report identified more than two dozen recommendations for lawmakers. The legislature’s new human resources director — hired in response to the controversies — also proposed a new workplace harassment policy. But the leaders in both chambers delayed action.

“I’m looking forward to having a new and better policy in place next session,” said Sen. Beth Martinez Humenik, R-Thornton. “There’s room from improvement.”

Brie Franklin, the executive director at the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said both parties need to do a better job on the issue in the months ahead.

“Since #MeToo,” she said, “there has been pretty much an unwillingness to address sexual misconduct in any form by our elected officials — whether dealing with credible accusations of sexual harassment in their own midst or on particular bills that have addressed aspects of sexual violence.”

The presented Thursday by Investigations Law Group found that about one-third of roughly 500 people who were surveyed acknowledged having seen or experienced harassment but that only a fraction felt comfortable speaking out. Half said they observed sexist or disrespectful behavior.

“You have a significant proportion of your workplace who’s seen and experiencing inappropriate behavior,” said Liz Rita, the firm’s founder and lead investigator, in explaining the results to lawmakers. “Obviously there are concerns and there are behavior problems that are occurring here. The findings suggest that power dynamics have something to do with it.”

The 235-page report makes 25 recommendations for how to improve the culture and policies surrounding workplace harassment, suggesting a complete overhaul of the current system, but top lawmakers from both parties said immediate action may prove difficult before the legislative sessions ends May 9.

“This is a top priority and we have to continue to move quickly,” House Speaker Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, told reporters after the presentation. “… But it����ap also important that the end result — that we do this right.”

Colorado legislative leaders requested the independent report this year after sexual harassment complaints against lawmakers came to the forefront as part of the #MeToo movement, and following a Denver Post investigation that revealed what some called a toxic workplace climate at the Capitol.

Five state lawmakers have faced allegations of sexual harassment, but so far the complaints against all but one were dismissed by legislative leaders. The exception is Rep. Steve Lebsock, a former Thornton Democrat, who became the first Colorado lawmaker expelled in more than 100 years after an extraordinary, daylong hearing March 2.

State Sen. Randy Baumgardner, a Republican who represents northwestern Colorado, survived a Democratic effort to expel him from that chamber Monday after facing three complaints for harassment.

The legislative culture report — which cost taxpayers $120,000 so far — determined through surveys and interviews that the majority of people at the Capitol feel safe and respected but that problems were pervasive.

“It����ap safe to say no workplace in America would consider these numbers as an indicator that its culture around harassment is healthy, or that its system is working to detect, to deter and to deal with harassment,” Rita told lawmakers.

Here’s what the workplace harassment report found

One factor driving the culture is the high-stakes atmosphere in the lawmaking process, in which a power imbalance, abuse and lack of leadership and accountability are the biggest problems, investigators found. A major concern is retaliation, which deters reporting to the proper supervisors.

The harassment disproportionately affects women and extends to female lawmakers and legislative interns, who are considered the most frequent targets, the report stated.

“While the data do not indicate that harassment is encouraged or normalized in the culture, the information collected shows that harassing behavior is not deterred in the environment,” the report stated. “The current policy and practices are not effective in creating an environment where harassment is not tolerated.”

The condemnation of the culture prompted the investigators to propose significant changes that include the creation of an independent advisory panel to handle complaints against lawmakers, which is part of an effort to take politics out of the equation. In other areas, the report recommends a new process for reporting and resolving complaints.

“A higher standard of behavior than simply avoiding unlawful conduct is already the standard for many whom we interviewed,” the report stated. “This is not, however, codified in the current system, and this is a missed opportunity.”

Craig Morgan, an attorney who investigated harassment in the Arizona state House of Representatives, said the report should serve as a wake-up call to lawmakers.

“We should all be troubled if there is an environment of pervasive harassment that makes people feel unreasonably uncomfortable at work,” he said after reviewing the report at the request of The Post.

Cassie Tanner, a former legislative aide who filed a complaint against Lebsock, said she’s encouraged to see an effort to define a range of potential punishments against lawmakers for credible complaints — something missing from the current policy.

“This is something that needs to be addressed quickly, so victims of harassment with credible findings on their complaints can have assurance that their complaint was taken seriously and appropriate consequences were levied based on the behavior that occurred,” she said. “Not everything may rise to the level of expulsion, but it appears that the legislative leaders are taking an all-or-none — dismissing complaints and closing the matter — approach to dealing with the complaints on the table.”

Others expressed concerns about whether the recommendations are viable. House Majority Leader KC Becker, D-Boulder, raised issues with proposals to distance legislative leadership from the disciplinary process.

“I think if leadership is removed too much, we are held accountable for behavior and may not even be aware of it,” she said.

Here’s what lawmakers will do next

The extent of the problem and the large number of recommendations appeared to overwhelm members of the Executive Committee, a bipartisan panel of the top Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate that will decide what steps to take next.

“It����ap been enlightening and empowering to see the results — what does our culture actually look like?” said Senate Majority Leader Chris Holbert, R-Parker, adding “thank you for this dilemma.”

The committee expressed interest in pushing the issue to a working group that would meet in the summer months to devise a new policy and implement changes next year — rather than try to makes changes before the legislative session ends May 9. But no final decisions were made.

Senate President Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, said he is not concerned that delays will create a perception of inaction, as long as Republicans and Democrats work together.

“Maybe it����ap not completely necessary that we rush to institute a policy change before the end of session,” he said. “All six of us (on the committee) appear to want to be contemplative about it. That was encouraging, actually.”