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The leadership of the state House of Representatives will await the outcome of an investigation into a sexual harassment complaint against state Rep. Joseph Souki before deciding whether to take any action against the 84-year-old lawmaker, according to House Speaker Scott Saiki.
“The House of Representatives takes matters of workplace harassment very seriously,” Saiki said in a statement released Thursday. “It is my understanding that the Ethics Commission is currently investigating this matter. We will await the Ethics Commission’s findings and recommendations before deciding any course of action.”
Former state Department of Human Services Director Rachael Wong filed a sexual harassment complaint last year against Souki, who is a former House speaker and has long been a powerful figure in Hawaii politics.
Wong has declined to discuss specifics because the details of her complaint are under investigation by the Hawaii State Ethics Commission.
In an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she said that after the incident “I was unable to do my job. There were constraints after that experience where I could no longer do my job, which means paying visits to, speaking with, the key people involved in government.”
As director of the Department of Human Services in 2015 and 2016, Wong oversaw a state department with more than 2,000 employees, and department heads are often required to meet with state lawmakers to press for bills in support of administration initiatives, or for funding.
Wong said she filed the complaint last fall, but Ethics Commission investigations are confidential and commission staff will not confirm or deny whether an investigation is underway.
Souki’s lawyer Michael Green has described the complaint as “crazy,” and said it is based on an incident that occurred three years ago.
“She went to shake his hand, and he kissed her goodbye,” Green said Wednesday. “What she said was, they spoke, and he made some comment about being ‘perky,’ and I don’t know what that means, and it was three years ago, but when she went to shake his hand goodbye, I think he kissed her on the cheek.”
Green added that “I don’t see anything he did that she’s complaining about that would make me think it’s sexual harassment.”
Wong said the national #MeToo movement that exposed sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry and other spheres influenced her decision to file her complaint. The #MeToo phenomenon thus far has largely bypassed Hawaii, but Wong said she has spoken to a number of women who worked in state government and had their own stories to tell.
“Over the last year I’ve spoken with and learned from many local women who have had similar and worse experiences, and not one of them is in a place where she can publicly share her story, and that’s what’s really significant,” Wong said.
Meda Chesney Lind, chairwoman of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said there is every reason to believe the kinds of cases that have been revealed on the mainland in recent months happen in Hawaii, too.
Research has established that the UH system has big problems with sexual harassment, “and I’ve always expected that we would have had big problems with it in other domains as well,” she said.
One in 3 women have been “the victims of this kind of workplace phenomenon, and 1 in 4 workers have seen the behavior, so we know it’s a widespread problem,” she said.
“Often what the absence of these cases simply means is that the people who are the victims of this behavior either don’t see any way to credibly complain about the problem, or they don’t trust the avenues of complaint that do exist,” Chesney Lind said.
Souki (D, Waihee-Waiehu-Wailuku) has been a member of the House since 1982 and was the speaker from 1993 to 1999, when he was ousted in a House reorganization. He regained the speaker’s job in 2013 in another reorganization and held it until he was replaced last year
by Saiki (D, Downtown-Kakaako-McCully).
The House of Representatives rules include provisions for a Standards of Conduct Committee that can consider complaints against House members for improper conduct. When the committee finds there has been wrongdoing, it can issue a “letter of admonition” or propose more serious sanctions to the House, according to a written statement from Saiki.
The possible punishments for an infraction could range from a reprimand to expulsion, according to the statement.
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