This has been going on since 2015 but we just now hearing about it. Omar Ashmawy, the staff director and chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics, was involved in a late night brawl in Milford, Pennsylvania while out for dinner with his girlfriend.
He is in charge of oversees investigations into misconduct by lawmakers and was appointed by Barack Obama in 2011.
The lawsuit stems from Feb. 14, 2015 — Valentine’s Day. Ashmawy was enjoying a nearly $400 dinner with his girlfriend at an upscale restaurant in Milford, followed by late-night drinks at a local bar.
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It ended, however, with him bruised and bloody in the back of a police car.
Two months later, three men were arrested for assaulting Ashmawy. One of those men, Greg Martucci, is now suing Ashmawy in federal court in Pennsylvania in connection to the events of that night.
What exactly led to the physical altercation is in dispute, but in police statements reviewed by Foreign Policy Magazine, three women at the bar that night, including the bartender, accuse Ashmawy of harassing and physically assaulting them.
One of the complainants, Greg Martucci, claims in a federal lawsuit that before the alleged assault, Ashmawy was ‘clearly sexually harassing’ the Inn’s bartender, Joey Lynn Smith.
“You’ll give me drinks, but you won’t f*** me,” Martucci claims Ashmawy complained to his server.
According to the suit, Martucci witnessed “an extremely violent and belligerent” Ashmawy get verbally abusive toward Smith and Dawn Jorgenson, the wife of the owner.
Another woman who was there, Christina Floyd, also complained Ashmawy was abusive in a statement given to police reviewed by the Daily Mail.
“I am a 5 foot 3 woman who never knew this man. I was very scared of him and was afraid he’d come back around for weeks after,” Floyd wrote police a month after the incident.
“I have never had a man physically harm me or scare me in that matter. He was sexually harassing, abusing and I feared for my life.”
The lawsuit also alleges misbehavior in the two-and-a-half years later. Ashmawy is accused in the lawsuit of “threatening to use his position as staff director and chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics to induce a criminal proceeding to be brought against Plaintiff and/or others,” according to the federal lawsuit filed against him.
There you have it. A former Air Force officer, a rising star, the guy in charge of harassment cases, has been accused of harassing women, physically assaulting them in a federal lawsuit and he denies it.
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