Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, September 1995, Oregon Senator Bob Packwood resigns before he could be expelled

for sexual misconduct with staffers, the results of a year-long scandal.

A Senate committee had voted unanimously that the Republican

senator be expelled from the Senate. But the very long way too long path to

that vote is the real story here. There was a bombshell report in the

Washington Post in the fall of 1992, three years earlier, and there were delayed

Senate committee hearings for years and years. And finally, then in 1995 the Senate gets its act together and the ethics committee dropped an indictment

It was ten volumes of documentation some ten thousand pages much of it from Packard's own writings and his diary which we will get into.

But the report from the ethics committee said in part, Senator Packard engaged in a pattern of abuse

of his position of power and authority by repeatedly committing sexual misconduct, 18 separate

unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances between 1969 and 1990.

In most of these instances, the victims were members of Senator

Packwood staff or individuals whose livelihood were dependent upon or

connected to the power and authority that he held.

So let's talk about Packwood's misconduct,

his expulsion, and really that story

about the intersection of abuse and power

and sexual misconduct, one that is as old as time,

but certainly presaged many of the conversations that happened in the Me Too movement many decades later.

So here, as always, Nicole Hema of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wesley.

...