Family group didn’t warn him, Speaker says
Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger said he is “extremely disappointed” that the evangelical Council for National Policy never informed him of allegations in 2015 that former Rep. Wes Goodman fondled an 18-year-old man in a Washington D.C. hotel room.
“I’m disappointed that they never came forward at all and let us have any knowledge of that issue,” said Rosenberger, R-Clarksville, who asked Goodman to resign two weeks ago after receiving a report that the lawmaker was caught months earlier having a sexual encounter with a man in his state office in the Riffe Center.
Rosenberger said he asked Goodman to resign shortly after he was told about the office incident.
But, Rosenberger insists that no one at the council, including former Ohio Congressman Bob McEwen, executive director of the Council for National Policy, informed him of the 2015 incident, in which a young man alleged he woke up and found Goodman had unzipped his pants and was fondling him.
The incident, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post, occurred after a fundraiser hosted by the group for Goodman, a Cardington Republican who was an Ohio House candidate at the time and was considered a potential rising star in the conservative, familyvalues movement.
According to the Post, the young man’s stepfather emailed council president Tony Perkins and McEwen about the incident. The former congressman and member of the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee promised that strong action would take place.
“I think there is some conversations they need to have with themselves about why did they not follow through with some of their commitments,” Rosenberger said Wednesday. “I’m extremely disappointed in that.”
Rosenberger said he was first informed of allegations of Goodman's gay lifestyle when a person called the House GOP campaign office after Goodman won his Republican primary. The man was upset because, he said, he personally knew that Goodman's talk of family values and promoting "natural marriage" was a lie.
“He said he didn’t know the guy,” Rosenberger said of Goodman’s reaction.
“Unless I have something credible to operate on, we are not working in an area of rumor and conjecture,” the speaker said. “And to my knowledge, in his official capacity — which he wasn’t even a representative — he hadn’t done anything wrong. There was nothing from just that telephone call that we could operate on, except to let him know that this is happening, what do you have to say about it? He denied every bit of it.”
A source outside the Statehouse later provided screenshots of racy conversations purportedly from Goodman, who was married, to another man. The House GOP legal counsel and chief of staff confronted Goodman in June, but he denied it was him sending the messages, calling them fake.
Rosenberger said he made it clear to Goodman that if anything happened with any House staff, “I would have a problem with that.”
“At the end of the day, I am not the morality police for every member of the House of Representatives,” he said. “It’s not the job of the speaker to get into everyone’s personal business and say, ‘I think you’re doing this wrong.’”