Ethics lacking on Hill
By all accounts, Bryon Hefner, estranged husband of former Massachusetts Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg, was a chaos machine. He was indicted last Thursday on felony charges of sexual assault, criminal lewdness and distributing nude photos without consent. He was also one of the loosest of loose cannons we’ve seen so close to power and influence on Beacon Hill in quite a while.
It is inconceivable that so few people in and around the State House knew of Hefner’s depravity, considering it was already legend in the rest of the city.
In 2015, Hefner, then Rosenberg’s fiance, decided that he would throw his hat into the political ring by running for an East Boston state Senate seat. No one saw it coming and it would have been a move thrusting him deep into the realm of conflicts of interest.
And so Stan Rosenberg had to clean up the mess — not for the first time.
He joined Jaclyn Cashman and Hillary Chabot in-studio on Boston Herald Radio, and went to work fixing Hefner’s blunder, putting to bed any talk of senate runs. “He got excited about the possibility and he did his due diligence, and he realized in fairly short order that he saw some other candidates in the race that he thought were very good, and in particular he decided he wanted to support Lydia Edwards, and so he said that’s where he’s going to put his energy.”
Judging by the indictment, that’s not where he put his energy.
But in that same interview, Rosenberg worked to polish up the public perception that his relationship was in trouble and put a shine on it: “I don’t see most of the conflicts of interest that people raise with regard to this. Everyone who’s in politics who has a spouse or a significant other has the same situation. You go home after work, you talk about your work.”
The problem for Stan was that not everybody was marrying Bryon Hefner. Only he was. Only he would be the firewall between Hefner’s wild antics and the public’s knowledge of them. It must have been a miserable task seeing as Hefner said or did something incendiary about every five minutes if you believe the accounts of people in his blast zone.
The problem with people like Hefner is that they make those around them into liars and fixers. Feigning outrage goes in the fixer category, as illustrated by Rosenberg: “For some reason there’s been this drumbeat which I think has been quite unfair,” and right on queue, when asked by Herald Radio host Chabot about scrutiny of his personal life, “I was totally taken aback by that whole experience.”
Indeed, Mr. Senate President. When Cashman asked the question, “Do you think that because you are the first openly gay Senate president that you are being criticized?” Rosenberg didn’t let her get through the sentence before he began peppering in with, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
With that, critics were put on notice that they’d entered dangerous territory.
“I just think it’s offensive to focus so much on an individual’s personal life when it has nothing to do with my performance every day on the job.” But if it is true that Hefner was using his husband’s powerful position to get away serious felonies like sexual assault, then he has once again turned his husband into a liar, because that has everything to do with Rosenberg’s political career.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that in one way or another, Stan’s marriage may have put him into positions that were not ethically prudent.
This is how Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg ended the interview: “I was at an event recently,” he began, “and a total stranger walked up to me and he said, ‘I just want to say I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing in the Senate and you’re rebuilding my faith in our government. My cynicism is melting away. Please keep it up.’ ”
There are a couple of ways to remove cynicism from the electorate in Massachusetts. The first is a perennial endeavor on Beacon Hill: Lawmakers can get better at hiding unethical behavior.
The second is more straightforward but not employed nearly enough: Lawmakers can stop behaving unethically.