My name is Colleen, and my experiences are real.

The essay I’ve written this morning are thoughts that are mine and mine alone, have not been reviewed by anyone but me, and are not the views of my current or prior employers or any organization or cause I may espouse. I am just trying to express my truth. I hope a few of you will listen.

No one wants the allegations about Senator Daylin Leach to be wrong more than me. In fact, years of suffering are made less painful on the basis of an assumption that this isn’t a clear cut situation, despite the fact that I’m sobbing in my bed at this moment (6:30 AM) amid an intense hangover as I draft this statement for you all.

Daylin Leach was a hero to me. He was the person I watched on a sick day home from college, fighting tooth and nail against a harmful school voucher bill, making amazing, thoughtful arguments and winning me over as a supporter in the process. His oration skills are impressive, and his passion for the issues are immense. I wanted to help this person achieve change for people as soon as I possibly could. He was the person who fought voter ID, who sued the Pennsylvania Supreme Court about absurd gun legislation, who officiated same sex marriages well before it was cool, who helped to pass human trafficking legislation and medical marijuana legislation, and who I believe to this very moment cares deeply about this work and the people around him. Whether he still shares the feeling, I still consider him my friend, even as I write this essay this morning. I could imagine that he doesn’t share the sentiment, as this whole episode in our lives probably feels like a deeply painful betrayal. I just want to say I understand, and I’m really sorry if I have hurt you.

He has done things that have hurt other women I have cared about, has created an immense amount of emotional stress for me, and we need to have a conversation about it. It doesn’t, for me, mean he is unredeemable, but I don’t have any other option than to be publicly transparent about my experiences. I have tried everything else. I am sorry it has to be this way.

At one point I interned for Leach’s congressional campaign, back in 2013, after knowing his senior advisor for a little while. I earned no wages and no college credit, and despite that, I wouldn’t change a thing. I got the opportunity to spend time with an old friend from back in 2010, and I met one of my best friends, someone I would go to battle for if necessary and some would describe I have already done so for on many occasions in the past, on that campaign. I learned in practice about call time and other fundraising programmatic efforts that I had only learned about before in quick trainings. There’s no regret. I cannot change the past.

The allegations, the harassment culture, and most especially, the culture of shame and intimidation that silences women and makes them question what just happened to them, is so real I want to claw my skin off as I write about it. It is the same culture that turned my hero, the person I most believed in among politicians, if you check my social media history, asked me back then, or even asked my mom, a person who now stokes heart palpitations and anxiety upon an interaction.

The first time I became conscious of this issue, other than the numerous folks who told me not to intern for Leach, was when a close friend confided that he allegedly slept with one of the interns. To this day, I have no ability to investigate the veracity of such gossip, journalistically or otherwise. That’s not a thing I can prove to be true, and it could be untrue, for all I know. What frightens me though, is the reaction I received when I quietly brought these concerns to his senior adviser. It was not a reaction of concern; rather, it was one of outrage that I would bring such a concern to him, privately in an off the record g-chat. It was one that made clear that I had done wrong by even having the conversation, and it was one in which it was deemed untrue without any investigation of the matter. The friend who confided in me was encouraged to walk back her statement, and she was encouraged not to speak to me for more than a year, and that’s the truth. That is my experience. She later told me that she told me she lied because she had to, and I do not hold a grudge for that.

When I first heard that story, I cried. I screamed into a pillow in the attic of my aunt’s house, where I lived at the time, because some members of my family see my choice to work in politics as reckless risk-taking behavior, and at that specific moment, when I learned this information, they were right. I didn’t want them to hear my sobbing. This wasn’t the work for me. This wasn’t the environment I should subject myself to, and I had no idea at the time how much things would get worse for me, as I slowly transformed into the stick in the mud they so despise. It crushed me to think there was even a possibility that this hero of mine would have an affair, if he did have an affair. What I should have been angered about more was the swift system that silenced my concerns, because that was where the real ugliness and danger lied.

The problem with these experiences, these stories you hear, is that you re-evaluate all your own personal experiences.

It makes a graphically sexual anecdote, shared by Daylin to me, about our gay friend’s early sexual experience with a man on an employer’s desk, feel really predatory in hindsight. The glazed over look on his face, no irony missed by me as my ultimate boss, talking about the anal sex a colleague of ours had on his boss’s desk, will forever haunt me, especially in light of later experiences other women shared with me.

It makes a thank you letter I’ve received from him for a donation, in which he crossed out “gratitude” in “With Gratitude” to say “with love, DL” not feel like one from a mentor but rather, another grooming behavior from someone in need of constant sexual gratification. It makes my presence on that campaign not one indicating any of my intellectual talents or even just my passion for politics, but rather my blonde hair and curves. It makes me notice the lack of qualified people of color, women of color, on his campaign, whether the choice was theirs because they are much smarter than me than to support someone they deemed unworthy, or whether it was because he wasn’t interested in having them around, or both.

It makes any encouragement he gave me feel hollow, makes the late night Facebook likes of my well-filtered/posed profile pictures feel like they contained a subliminal message, and makes the random email threads I was added to with senior staff and former electeds and advisors not feel like a seat at the table I rightfully earned because I was smart or hardworking and deserved to be included, but rather, more erratic behavior.

There are things I am holding back here. Really inappropriate things that happened to women that are just trying to move on with their lives, women who deserve their talents and their talents alone to be their story. I am not going to betray that. But when a friend and rape survivor shared her experiences with me almost a year ago, weeks after I had gotten out of the hospital and seemingly gotten back up off the proverbial mat that has been 2017, the rage bubbled over.

I couldn’t be silent anymore, not in this new section of my life that now felt so short. Before then and especially since then, I have faced numerous threats from his senior advisor, who is a true enabler of this type of behavior, whose business model is predicated by our silence. I have had my job threatened, while I undergo ongoing cardiac care and desperately need my good health insurance, and I have been physically threatened with veiled threats, both via texts and through messages passed on to me by contacts. I have been approached by staffers asking where I live and where I work at public events, and I have been put on call lists I don’t belong on as a political operative over the campaign finance wall, just to send a message. This is the culture I originally alluded to, which creates silence, fear, and the perfect opportunity for an ass grab, a sexist joke, the constant gaslighting of experiences, and so much more.

I read the article, and I burst into tears, early this morning. I worried deeply that people wouldn’t believe the many women who have been so brave, for no economic benefit what-so-ever and as one can imagine, a world of heartbreak and professional retribution, and I was crestfallen, because even in this newfound era, where these issues are starting to be taken seriously, I knew it wasn’t “rapey” enough for enough people to care. Please prove me cynical and wrong.

If you need to put a face, other than the one incredible woman who went fully on the record who is far enough in her career to feel comfortable, to this story, please see my face. See my sacrifices, and see my honesty.

Please think about the years of intimidation I have endured. Please consider that I have never once, for those of you who have known me, pursued projects impulsively or to try to partisanly hurt others, but rather, in an effort to try to help others, both things that Senator Leach and his inner circle have definitely claimed about me over the past few months, among so many other things.

I want to go back to my initial statement: there is no one more than me who wanted these allegations to be wrong or overblown than me. Daylin Leach was a hero to me, and some day could still be a hero to me again, even though for whatever reason, he can’t seem to look me in the eye. These new developments mean I was a bad ally, silent for too long, naive and somewhat star-struck by the intellect and accomplishments of a man who has absolutely abused his power, whether he is willing to admit it or not.

Please think about how much this essay alone could probably risk my job, my health insurance that helps to track my progress with my heart condition, and the mounting medical debt I have yet to figure out. I hope that I am wrong about that, that my job isn’t at risk. The fear is there, and still I write.

Please consider that this is not a witch hunt, that if asked right now, in my t shirt in my bed with tears streaming down my face, if my hero should drop out of a congressional race or even resign from office, that I have no opinion at all. Couldn’t begin to tell you how I personally feel about that, to the frustrations of family, friends, and colleagues who are so angry about what I have been through.

I just know that for the four years that I privately pushed just for an admission of the issue or maybe even counseling or remedial consequences to curb the behavior, I have been hit by wall after wall after wall. It is the trap so many women all over the country and frankly, all over the world, have faced at some time or another when trying to swim upstream. It is why we do not swim upstream if we can avoid it.

I do know that as women came forward about their experiences with Senator Leach to reporters that it always came back to me singularly in their responses to the reporters, because of me speaking up early on: just allegation after allegation to the reporters of my mental instability (I have anxiety and PTSD from childhood traumas that are a daily struggle for me…something I’ve confided in Daylin about in the past and have been publicly open about), my preoccupation with lying (Daylin Leach once took to Facebook to share an article I wrote and to express my promise for a future in investigative journalism), and even a secret, sordid relationship I may or may not have been having (I wasn’t dating this person) with the campaign manager of one of his opponents. I would like to live in a world where women with anxiety issues can also be believed when they endure these situations, and live in a world where women fight for things not because of a secret romantic relationship that creates sordid, partisan ideals, but because they truly care about the world around them, as I do.

I have been through a lot, and still I am not angry. This is not about justice or retribution for me, and I do not speak for the others. I just want our concerns to be heard and addressed. I want to be able to go to sleep at night knowing that the next young woman who is an intern or a fellow or a staffer can feel safe without question. I don’t want her to confuse her talent with her body, her youth, or anything else.

I want the men who have known about this for years, men in a great deal of power, to know that we women know your complicity in this situation, the secrets you kept, and we are disappointed in you but that you still have time to be better.

I want to live in a society where this stops being the focus, where people of my privilege and stature can focus their efforts on the many women who are harassed in home care work or retail or food service, to help them to feel like they have a safety net.

Or dare I say, I want to live in a world where this is no longer an issue, where I can return to the issues I so passionately care about, things like equity for students in their public schools, real and unversal healthcare access, transparency and open government policies that so many journalists have fought to achieve. I want to go back to being me. I want this weight off of my shoulders, to stop having to look over my shoulder, to stop feeling so immensely disappointed in people I once considered real friends, who are gears in this machinery.

I’m putting down whatever rhetorical weapon people think I have, as someone they deem unpredictable. I just want women to feel safe and valued and heard. That’s what I want.

Please believe the women (and the men who have corroborated their stories.)

Thank you.