McMorrow, 33, said she and Lucido were attending the orientation — a daylong session that included sexual harassment training — in a committee hearing room in the Senate's office building in Lansing.

During a break, McMorrow said she approached Lucido to introduce herself to the Shelby Township Republican, who was a sitting House member at the time.

"He shook my hand and with his other hand held my low back with his fingers on my hips, effectively upper rear, and we had a back-and-forth conversation," said McMorrow, a Royal Oak Democrat.

"And he asked where I was from," McMorrow said. "I said, 'Royal Oak.' He asked who I ran against. And I said, 'I beat Marty Knollenberg.' At which point he looked me up and down, raised his eyebrows and said, 'I can see why.'"

McMorrow said Lucido's scanning of her body and remark "felt really degrading and deflating."

"It was shocking," she said. "It just knocked me off my feet that that was the first interaction. But you deal with it. You try to do your job."

Lucido, 59, denied McMorrow's sexual harassment allegation, calling it "completely untrue."

"I categorically deny this allegation, which I believe is completely untrue and politically motivated," Lucido said early Tuesday in a text message to Crain's.

The interaction between Lucido and McMorrow on Nov. 8, 2018, came two days after McMorrow defeated Knollenberg by 4 percentage points — or 5,348 votes — to represent Oakland County's 13th District, which includes Berkley, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Clawson, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Royal Oak and Troy.

"In that moment, I was exhausted from running a campaign for a year and a half, but I remember thinking, it doesn't matter to this person that I ran a campaign for a year and a half, that I quit my job to do that," said McMorrow, who had a career in automotive design, media and branding. "It doesn't matter what my background is or if I'm suited to do this job. It was: You're a piece of meat and of course you won this election."

Throughout the exchange, McMorrow said, Lucido's hand remained holding her lower back.

"I remember it being a very close-talk conversation because I couldn't back up," she said.

Sen. Rosemary Bayer, a Democrat from Beverly Hills who also had just won a Republican seat, said she witnessed Lucido holding McMorrow for an extended period while the newly elected senators were making small talk and introductions.

"They were standing there talking together and his arm was … reaching around her back," Bayer told Crain's. "This is the age of consent, right? You have to have permission. You can't be touching people."

McMorrow told Crain's she decided to make her allegation public after reading 22-year-old Michigan Advance reporter Allison Donahue's first-person account of Lucido telling her in front of a group of Catholic schoolboys, "You could have a lot of fun with these boys, or they could have a lot of fun with you."

Donahue's allegations — and taped confrontation with the senator — of the Jan. 14 encounter caused the Senate's Republican and Democratic leaders to call for a Senate Business Office investigation of Lucido's interaction with the reporter from the online news organization.

"Once I saw (Allison Donahue) give an interview and she said 'it made me feel small,' I felt guilty," McMorrow said. "I felt like had I said something sooner maybe this wouldn't have happened to her."

At the Capitol on Tuesday morning, Lucido declined further comment when asked if he had any reaction to Crain's article about McMorrow's allegations or whether he normally greets women with one arm around their back.

"It is what it is," Lucido told a Crain's reporter. "My statement is my statement."

Amber McCann, spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, said Tuesday that the Senate's business office has received McMorrow's complaint and will investigate it concurrently with Donahue's allegations.