WASHINGTON — News that a top aide had sued Corpus Christi Rep. Blake Farenthold for sexual harassment in late 2014 was public almost as soon as the ink dried on the paperwork. So was the news a year later that she’d settled out of court.

It didn’t cost him re-election in 2016.

But this month, the Republican abruptly announced he’s withdrawing from the 2018 race, after news hit that taxpayers footed the bill for the $84,000 settlement, and more former staffers accused him of crude remarks and an unprofessional office culture.

Farenthold is one of numerous politicians, media moguls and business executives whose fortunes have been upended in recent months amid a national gut-check over sexual misconduct.

But the trigger is a bit of a mystery. The allegations weren’t new. The settlement wasn’t new. What changed? The size of the settlement? The fact that public funds were used? Or had something much bigger shifted, snaring him in a national reassessment of what behavior the public will tolerate?

Recent complaints against high-powered men run the gamut from rape, sexual assault and groping to harassment and lewd, inappropriate remarks. Some of the perpetrators resigned immediately or were terminated. Others have dug in. Some, including Farenthold, found a middle ground, keeping their jobs for another year.

The consequences haven’t always followed a predictable pattern, reflecting an evolving definition for what’s out of bounds, or at least politically survivable.

“We are in the middle of a debate that is determining where the boundaries are, and the actions of the individuals are helping determine where those boundaries are,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political rhetoric.

Each resignation or ouster defines new norms, but it’s a messy business.

Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, frames the national conversation academically. In any good policy process, the first step to addressing the problem is defining it.

She points to Anita Hill’s testimony during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Hill’s account of his boasts about his sexual prowess and repeated propositions of her divided the nation. Many people disbelieved and targeted her — a disheartening setback for anyone who’d hoped victims and accusers would no longer be vilified.

“At that point, it was just being willing to say that sexual harassment existed and that it was a problem,” Dittmar said. “Now we’re in, at least to me, the stage of trying to define what actually counts as sexual harassment and who gets to be the arbiter of that.”

Changing tolerance

Sexism and sex scandals in Washington are nothing new. But the flood of recent allegations reflects a growing intolerance of misconduct.

A recent CNN poll indicates Americans view the problem more seriously than two decades ago. Seven out of 10 say it's a "very" or "extremely serious problem," nearly double from a CNN/Time poll conducted in 1998. Sixty percent of respondents said a politician facing credible allegations should resign.

Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist, said the lens through which Americans view allegations has changed. The Bill Clinton intern sex scandal, and many previous ones, he said, were seen more from the viewpoint of marital infidelity and immorality.

“Now it’s viewed much more as harassment and abuse of power,” he said.

Another change, Jones noted, is that parties are generally quicker to abandon the accused as Americans move toward a zero-tolerance policy.

In August 1972, then-candidate Charlie Wilson held some of the replies from the 60,000 to 65,000 questionnaires he said he mailed to voters before the June-July special session. He would go on to serve 12 terms in Congress. (File/The Associated Press)

Charlie Wilson, the late East Texas congressman played by Tom Hanks in a movie about his secret crusade to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, was a notorious womanizer, though he wasn’t accused of harassment.

He surrounded himself with female aides of head-turning beauty — women who came to be known as "Charlie's angels" — and liked to explain his hiring standards by saying, "You can teach 'em to type, but you can't teach 'em to grow [breasts]."

He was re-elected 11 times before leaving Congress in the late 1990s.

“Someone like Charlie Wilson would no longer survive,” Jones said. “He’d be a dead man.”

Then there’s the late Texas Rep. John Young. In 1976, the Corpus Christi Democrat was accused by a former female staffer of requiring sexual favors as part of her job. He called the accusations “poppycock” and was re-elected that fall.

His wife committed suicide a year later, and he lost his 1978 primary.

Fast forward to 2017.

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat, resigned effective Jan. 2 over allegations he touched women inappropriately, though he’s denied the charges.

Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks left Congress in early December after a former staffer said he offered her $5 million to carry his child, one of two women he approached to act as a surrogate.

Ennis Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican elected in 1984, was never accused of harassment. But he dropped his plan to seek re-election after explicit images surfaced online that he had shared in an extramarital relationship.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat, resigned Dec. 5 after nearly 53 years in Congress. Several women accused him of sexual advances or inappropriate remarks, which he denied.

Freshman Rep. Ruben Kihuen, a Nevada Democrat, announced he won't seek a second term amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed two women. He, too, denies the claims.

In Alabama, the state’s controversial former chief justice, Roy Moore, lost a Senate bid after several women said he pursued them sexually when they were in their teens and he was a prosecutor in his 30s. One was 14.

Voters have to make judgments, and politics can be “brutal,” said Charlie Gonzalez, a San Antonio Democrat who served 14 years in Congress — following his legendary father, Henry B. Gonzalez, who served for 38 years.

Gonzalez, a former judge who practices employment law, said one problem is that Congress doesn’t have an efficient process for handling complaints.

The ethics committee process can take months or years, forcing lawmakers to campaign under a cloud of suspicion.

He’s hoping for a “more measured” response to misbehavior in Congress that falls short of overt harassment. But that, he said, will require Congress to learn from the private sector and make it easier for victims to come forward, and to sort through allegations and denials.

“If you had a process that was timely, efficient, thorough and fair, maybe it would temper what could happen politically,” he said. “Some of the allegations are terrible. But as everyone knows, is every allegation factual? ... Is anyone given the benefit of the doubt?”

'Timing matters'

The Farenthold case, Dittmar said, “demonstrates that timing matters, and context matters.”

It was no secret when Lauren Greene, his former communications director, sued in late 2014 alleging sexual harassment, gender discrimination and a hostile work environment. He denied the charges then, as he does now, and in 2015 the Office of Congressional Ethics investigated and recommended that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the matter.

By the time Politico revealed Dec. 1 that the $84,000 settlement came from taxpayer funds, the country was paying far closer attention to allegations of sexual misconduct.

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and newsmen Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer had been exposed for predatory behavior and disgraced. Donald Trump won the presidency despite serious allegations of inappropriate behavior, and boasts caught on an Access Hollywood tape of groping and kissing women uninvited.

Debate has raged for months over whether Trump is an exception to rules that are growing more strict — or whether other men who misbehaved are being punished partly for his sins.

Dittmar said that hyper focus has resulted in an “amplification of these stories, so as soon as they come out, not only do people in your district know, people across the country know.”

For politicians, that puts “pressure on donors and supporters to justify their support.”

That also risks ensnaring people who haven’t been accused of sexual harassment, like Barton.

Though many said he may be the victim of revenge porn, Barton paid the political price after people in his district pressured him to step aside, citing poor judgment and values out of step with his conservative base.

“I’m sure someone was saying to him, 'Your opponents will lump you in with all these people as a sex scandal, even if it wasn’t abuse,'” Dittmar said. “I’m sure we’ll see members suffer from that in the next cycle because, any whiff of that, voters will associate it with the dominant narrative.”

‘A purge’

Hall Jamieson, the political rhetoric expert, sees the current national debate as "a kind of surrogate for a debate about Donald Trump," she said. "What the Access Hollywood tape did is made the issue more salient and raised the question: What are the boundaries of appropriate behavior?"

Ron Bonjean, a top Republican strategist who spent 14 years in Congress as a top aide to a House speaker and a Senate majority leader, points to Weinstein’s fall as the kindling that sparked a cleansing fire.

“It woke a lot of people up to the fact that there was sexual harassment going on,” he said. “There is definitely a purge happening on Capitol Hill, and it’s going to continue.”

The abuse has always been there, he said, but the abusers can’t rely on power to keep their victims from coming forward anymore.

“There was a fear among those in the workplace that if you confronted the bosses that harassed you, that something might happen to you,” Bonjean said. “There might be a stigma. But more people are no longer afraid to do that. They’re fed up.”