Let’s be honest, the story of Mr. Sondland Goes to Washington has been a real roller coaster ride for a lot of Portlanders. On the one hand, who doesn’t feel a surge of hometown pride when a local gains national notoriety? Like I’ve said before, does it really hurt to remind America that despite the idealizing portraits in shows such as Portlandia season 1, Portlandia season 2, and really all the other seasons of Portlandia, and the great deal of truth in those glowing representations of our fundamental goodness, the city contains as they say multitudes, including the full range of human sins both mortal and venial?
On the other hand, the guy was a key player in the president’s corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election, so there’s that. Intriguingly or possibly just annoyingly, Sondland’s appearance before Congress has fed two contradictory takes on his present role in the impeachment inquiry. On the one hand, his repeated insistence that multiple White House officials, including the vice president and the secretary of state, were “in the loop” on the plan to pressure Ukraine to slime Joe Biden, has raised the possibility that he’s turning on the president he serves and breaking this whole impeachment thing wide open. On the other, various contradictions in his testimony suggest he’s still not being honest with his questioners. The latest story to support this take came out a couple days ago: apparently, the September 9 call on which the president supposedly told Sondland “no quid pro quo” . . . may not have actually happened? Instead, according to the testimony of other witnesses, the EU ambassador may have omitted discussing another call a few days earlier that was far more incriminating for the president, “in which the president made clear that he wanted his Ukrainian counterpart to personally announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents,” as the Washington Post summarizes.
For opponents of the president, of course, the problem with all these contradictions and omissions is that they are steadily chipping away at Sondland’s credibility as a witness, so that even if his testimony is harmful to Trump, it may not count for much (though this can be mitigated through corroborating evidence from others). Questions as to Sondland’s character and veracity have only been amplified in the last 48 hours with the release of an article jointly reported by Portland Monthly magazine and the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica. In it, three women allege that they experienced sexual misconduct by Sondland, including incidents of unwanted groping and kissing, during the 2003-2010 time frame. The three women also contend that Sondland retaliated against them afterward, such as by not going forward with business deals he had previously indicated interest in:
In one case, a potential business partner recalls that Sondland took her to tour a room in a hotel he owns, only to then grab her face and try to kiss her. After she rejected him, she says, Sondland backtracked on investing in her business.
Another woman, a work associate at the time, says Sondland exposed himself to her during a business interaction. She also recalls falling over the back of a couch trying to get away from him. After she made her lack of interest clear, she says Sondland called her, screaming about her job performance.
A third woman, 27 years Sondland’s junior, met him to discuss a potential job. She says he pushed himself against her and kissed her. She shoved him away. His job help stopped.
Significantly, all three women were willing to go on the record and have their identities made known to the public (the first of the women noted above is Nicole Vogel, who is actually the founder and publisher of Portland Monthly (though she had no input into the story’s writing or editing)). I note this because of the familiar denials and counter-allegations that have been issued by Sondland and his lawyers. The ambassador denies the women’s accounts, and claims that they are a coordinated political attack on him. As we have seen so many times before, including with the president himself, we are to believe that all women are simply liars and pawns, and spitefully make up stories of powerful men’s sexual misconduct to move forward sinister political agendas that seek to tear down the righteous.
Unfortunately for Team Sondland, this reasoning leads them to put forth counter-allegations that make no sense. In a letter, Sondland’s attorney writes to the Portland Monthly and ProPublica that, “[G]iven the timing of your intended story, a reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that you are attempting to affect Ambassador Sondland’s credibility as a fact witness in the pending impeachment inquiry.” The problem with this assertion, though, is that it is very much in the interest of opponents of Sondland and the president not to undermine his credibility, since they are relying on his incriminating remarks about Trump to move their case forward. Sondland’s attorney then proceeds to jump the shark by writing, “Given the politically charged climate in which current events are unfolding, some might consider this to be veiled witness tampering.” Yes, “some” people might consider this to be witness tampering — but those people would be idiots.
What Sondland and his attorney choose not to address is the actual stated purpose Nicole Vogel gives for being the first of the women to come forward with her story: to shed light on Gordon Sondland’s character. And all three women’s stories, in which Sondland appears to be a man who feels entitled to do as he pleases without regard to morality or good sense, flesh out the picture of a man who wouldn’t think twice about assisting the president of the United States in the biggest attempted ratfucking of his political opponents since Watergate, or maybe ever. Vogel notes how she related the “transactional” thinking described by Sondland regarding Ukraine to her own experience with the man, in which he clearly thought his interest in financially backing her launch of Portland Monthly entitled him to personal benefits beyond monetary ones.
Vogel also recounts how Sondland told her, when she was seeking his support for her magazine project, that “Portland needed people like her” and that “he was more interested in investing in me, because he felt as if Portland didn’t keep people of high ambition and talent.” In light of subsequent events, including Sondland’s alleged misconduct toward Vogel and his decision to help the president commit impeachable acts, the idea that Gordon Sondland saw himself as an arbiter of who might be good for Portland is laughable and grotesque. Vogel was only good for Portland while she was a potential conquest for Sondland; once that was no longer the case, she was no longer worth backing to run a business in the city.
It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that the president and the ambassador have found their bonds strengthened not only by shared experiences as hotel owners and profanity-spewing ostentatious rich dudes, but also through swapping tales of their shared contempt for women’s bodily autonomy, equality, and dignity.