Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s (D) former chief of staff and deputy mayor, John Falcicchio, sent a staffer unwanted explicit messages, including a video of him masturbating, over a period of five months according to his anonymous accuser, who is speaking out for the first time since Falcicchio’s sudden resignation in March.
According to the aide, following a meeting with him in September 2022, Falcicchio offered to walk her to the Metro before suggesting they grab a bite at the downtown Crimson Whiskey Bar.
As a new hire still on probation, the aide, “eager to have one-on-one time with a man whose two high-powered titles… made him a towering figure in D.C. government,” accepted, according to The Washington Post.
“You can’t tell your bosses we did this,” Falcicchio allegedly told her after ordering them both whiskeys.
“By midnight, after more whiskey and tequila, she was drunk and Falcicchio was taking her to his apartment, where she said he suddenly tried to kiss her,” The Post reports.
It was one of two times that Falchicchio allegedly tried to have sex with her in his apartment.
What followed were “hundreds of electronic messages” exchanged between the two mainly via Snapchat, including “sexually charged and flirtatious messages she sent in return to Falcicchio.”
According to the aide, who is in her 20s, she and the deputy mayor never had sex, but she did feign interest “to keep her job and to document his misconduct,” The Post explains.
“I thought initially, like, I can’t reject his advances,” the aide said. “I knew that I had to play the game with him to keep my job without giving him what he wanted, which was probably just to sleep with me and then discard me.”
Reports WaPo [WARNING: GRAPHIC]:
In late October, Falcicchio wrote that he wanted her to perform oral sex on him. The woman responded, “Honestly I’d love to.” He replied that he liked the idea of “dominating” her. She then wrote: “You’re even better with words than I thought.”
Minutes later, he wrote: “Imagine this: you come over to my place in sweats. I strip you down. Throw you on the bed. Shove my hard d**k in your mouth. Squeeze your nipples. Pull your hair. Dominate you. C– in your mouth. Send you home.”
The staffer, who still works for Falcicchio’s former unit, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, claims she only engaged in the sexting to gather evidence against her boss, fearing that no one would believe her account of what went on in his apartment.
“I had to get him to say these things so it was documented,” she said.
If that sounds like a weak explanation for what sounds a lot like encouraging “unwanted” advances, the aide isn’t the only woman accusing Falcicchio of misconduct.
A second complaint was lodged against him by another woman who works for the D.C. government, The Post reports.
The allegations prompted investigations by the Mayor’s Office of Legal Counsel (MOLC) at Mayor Bowser’s behest.
“On June 17, a Saturday in the middle of a holiday weekend, the Bowser administration posted a summary of the probe’s results on an obscure city website without any announcement,” according to The Post. The move left the first accuser feeling “blindsided.”
The summary, she claimed, included potentially identifying details about her employment.
“She did not handle it with care,” the woman said of Bowser’s move. “She did not take into account how I could have felt.”
At a Wednesday news conference, Bowser said she was “completely devastated” by the allegations and was releasing the findings of the investigation because “the public should have access to that information as soon as possible.”
(Video: YouTube)
In the end, the MOLC found that Falcicchio had “more likely than not” sexually harassed the woman, who has declined to take legal action against the city.
Her complaint against Falcicchio was not motivated by a financial settlement, she said, but rather a desire to keep her job and hold her former boss and anyone who may have enabled him accountable for his actions.
“To me, what it came down to was does this man deserve his job and the power he has? The answer for me was no,” she said. “People should be getting ahead based on their merit, not based on whether they give the chief of staff what he wants sexually.”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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