The hallways of Washington can feel like a place where everyone knows what’s happening but nobody wants to say it out loud.
On Monday and Tuesday, that tension was impossible to ignore as survivors came to Capitol Hill to push for tougher laws against online sexual abuse—then watched Congress reel from misconduct allegations involving its own members.
Capitol Hill lobby day, but the news hits first
As survivors gathered Monday evening at a hotel in downtown Washington for a panel discussion and to prepare for their advocacy day, news broke that two House members accused of sexual misconduct, Democratic Rep.
Eric Swalwell of California and Republican Rep.
Tony Gonzales of Texas, announced they would resign from Congress amid a bipartisan push to expel them.
It was a swift and stunning fall for both—and it underscored, again, the culture of silence that has surrounded sexual misconduct in Congress.
The next day, around 40 survivor advocates from over a dozen states and Tay Lautner, a registered nurse, mental health advocate and podcast host, arrived on Capitol Hill as lawmakers grappled with the fallout.
At a breakfast Tuesday, Rep.
Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania told the group, “What a day, what a week.” She didn’t mince words after that.
“Two congressmen are out,” she said, “I am furious.
Furious that it takes this long, furious we have a culture that silences those kinds of behaviors, and furious that these women have to come forward in shadow, sometimes for their own protection.”
One moment stuck with people in the room—not a policy memo or a formal statement, but the sound of coffee cups clinking while Dean was still talking. It was that kind of ordinary sound over something not ordinary at all.
Funding, technology and the push to change the culture
The Gonzales and Swalwell resignations came after years of claims and controversy.
Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in March after the San Antonio Express-News reported on his inappropriate relationships with staff members, one of whom is now deceased.
Swalwell dropped out of the California governor’s race Sunday and later resigned from Congress after the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN released reports days earlier on assault allegations against him.
He has apologized for what he said were errors in judgment but has denied all of the accusations of sexual assault, with his lawyer calling them “a calculated and transparent political hit job.”
Scott Berkowitz, RAINN’s president and founder, said in an interview that he was glad to see the resignations but that it shouldn’t have taken so long.
“This stuff has got to stop happening, and when it does happen, we’ve got to do something about it a lot quicker and not wait for victims to come forward to a reporter,” he said.
“We’ve just got to change the way things are done here.”
Some advocates said they learned about the resignations for the first time at the Tuesday breakfast.
“I heard about that for the first time when they announced it at the front, and I haven’t even had time to check my phone,” one advocate named Katie said.
Another, Anna, described the constant cycle: “I feel like the last several years have been just reckoning after reckoning… It never ends, and I don’t know that it ever will.”
Still, advocates pointed to bipartisan efforts they say can work.
Resolutions to expel Gonzales and Swalwell were prepared by a Democrat and a Republican, helping spur resignations.
Last year, three Republican women sided with Democrats to compel the release of files connected to the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
And advocates secured a major victory last spring with the passage of the Take It Down Act, which made distributing nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated explicit deepfakes and so-called revenge porn, a crime.
A major focus at the day’s events was the gap between passing laws and funding the services survivors rely on.
Brooke Nevils, a writer and author of “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe,” joined the advocacy day to lobby for federal funding for the national sexual assault hotline, which is operated by RAINN and has not received federal funding in years.
“RAINN is the difference between life and death for a lot of these victims,” she said.
“It is the only place they can go.”
Nevils argued that Congress has a chance to act faster and more deliberately—especially as tech-enabled sexual abuse keeps spreading.
RAINN was also advocating for bipartisan bills targeting tech and artificial intelligence-enabled sexual abuse, including the DEFIANCE Act, which would allow survivors to sue the creators and perpetrators of nonconsensual intimate imagery, and other bipartisan bills aimed at cracking down on child sex abuse material, protecting minors from the harms of AI chatbots, and safeguarding people’s likeness from being used for AI without their consent.
On Tuesday afternoon, advocates joined Sens.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, and New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez for a news conference on the STOP CSAM Act.
Durbin and Hawley criticized tech platforms for enabling child abuse and exploitation.
Hawley framed it as a matter of basic moral accounting—“no amount of profit” should justify destroying children’s lives.
There’s also a clock ticking inside this policy fight.
Tech platforms are nearing a May deadline set by the Take It Down Act, under which they must formalize a process for victims to request that images be taken down within 48 hours.
Berkowitz said RAINN met with the Federal Trade Commission, tasked with implementing the law, for an update last week and said he’s “hopeful” they’ll meet the deadline.
“One of the things we’re trying to work on with the platforms now is to take the burden off the victims,” he added.
Nevils said lawmakers can do more than respond after the damage is done.
“Usually, what happens is that victims suffer the consequences of sexual abuse for decades before lawmakers act,” she said.
“We saw that with the clergy abuse scandals.
We’re seeing that with the Epstein files.
And what we saw yesterday… is that victims are not going to allow that to happen this time, and there is a rare opportunity for lawmakers to stand up.”
Congress, she said, “can actually be leaders in preventing this stuff from happening instead of remedying a wrong that has been going on for years.” And for people who came to Capitol Hill to talk about online abuse, the broader message landed harder after the names in Congress had started disappearing from the calendar—quietly at first, then fast.
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