Report: Woman tells lawmakers that Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens slapped her during affair

Will Schmitt | Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader

Show Caption Hide Caption Missouri gov. decries 'political witch hunt' Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens said Wednesday that a state House committee's report on an investigation into his extramarital affair with his hairdresser is a "political witch hunt." (April 11)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The woman with whom Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens had an affair testified before a panel of state lawmakers that the Republican politician slapped her upon learning that she had continued to be intimate with her husband after her first sexual encounter with the novice politician.

The woman also told the bipartisan committee investigating Greitens that she performed oral sex on the governor while she was crying and unsure whether she could leave the encounter, according to a lengthy report by of Missouri lawmakers released Wednesday.

The first finding of the committee was that the woman — who has not been named by the USA TODAY NETWORK and whose identity was withheld from the committee's report — was "an overall credible witness."

Greitens, meanwhile, "declined the opportunity to testify and failed to respond to the Committee's request for production of documents and sworn answers to written interrogatories," the committee found.

The top Democrat in the state House called for the Republican governor to resign.

"If he doesn’t, it will be the duty of the House of Representatives to restore integrity to the executive branch of state government," House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty said in a statement. "This duty must be conducted with careful deliberation following a thorough review of the evidence gathered to date. Once House members have had the opportunity to digest the special committee’s report and accompanying documentation, it is our hope that leadership in both parties can agree on the appropriate next step.”

The top Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Gina Walsh, also called for Greitens to resign and urged the House to begin impeachment proceedings. Several Republicans have previously called for the governor to step down.

Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, issued a statement, though his office did not immediately clarify what his words were intended to mean.

"With the recent events that have distracted our great state, I want to say with all sincerity that it is time to unite and put aside our differences," said Parson, who would take over if Greitens left office. "Over the course of several months, it has been a trying time for many people. My heart goes out to the families involved. However, all Missourians must continue to stay focused on the task at hand — moving Missouri forward. We owe it to ourselves and generations to come."

Rep. Crystal Quade, D-Springfield, told the News-Leader that "women everywhere are going to have a hard time reading the report released today."

"Women who have been assaulted, felt made to be less than, or coerced into something they didn't want to do are going to remember how those terrible moments felt," she continued. "This report is so harrowing I had to step out when hearing it read aloud."

Quade characterized the description of Greitens as that of a "sexual predator."

"I cannot accept that the highest position in our state government be held by someone who would treat another person in such a horrific way, and so I feel I must call for the resignation of Eric Greitens," Quade said. "I encourage my fellow representatives to do the same."

The report comes about a month before Greitens is scheduled to go on trial in St. Louis, where a grand jury indicted him in February on suspicion of felony invasion of privacy. The committee's investigation continues.

Greitens is accused of taking a nonconsensual photograph of a partially naked woman who had been his hairdresser and of transmitting the image to a computer, according to the indictment. He also has been accused of threatening the woman with disseminating the image if she spoke about their relationship, as the woman told her ex-husband when he secretly recorded her confession about her affair with Greitens.

Greitens has denied criminal wrongdoing and said there was no blackmail threat, though he has not denied photographing the woman. Before the report was released, he called efforts to investigate him "a political witch hunt."

The report was made publicly available on the Missouri House website (house.mo.gov) Wednesday evening.

The first encounter

On March 21, 2015, the woman went to Greitens' home in St. Louis. The two had talked before she arrived because she cut his hair at a nearby salon.

She told the committee that at the time she "didn’t want to do anything physical with him" and she would not have been “okay with a normal sexual encounter with him," but that Greitens appeared to have planned "some sort of — I don’t know — sexy workout."

She told the committee that Greitens had clothes ready for her to change into — a white T-shirt and men's pajama pants — before she went into his basement with him. Here, she said, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings and blindfolded her with materials he had set on a workout bench.

After spitting water into her mouth in what she characterized as an attempt to kiss her, the woman told lawmakers Greitens ripped open her shirt and pulled down her pants without her consent.

At this point, she told lawmakers that "I hear him kind of, like, step back — take a step back and I hear — I can hear like a cell phone — like a picture, and I can see a flash through the blindfold."

She remembers Greitens saying: "You're not going to mention my name. Don't even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are."

She added that she felt like her "privacy was invaded," though she said she never saw a picture and did not recall "the first time she saw his phone," the committee noted. She added later that she knew Greitens had an iPhone capable of uploading images to the Internet.

However, "the committee does not possess any physical or electronic evidence of a photograph or its transmission," the report says.

After she got the tape off her hands and made to leave, Greitens grabbed her, laid down on the basement floor with her and told her to calm down while she cried uncontrollably, the woman told lawmakers.

She told the committee she was "bawling my eyes out" but Greitens "was still like messing with me."

She said she performed oral sex on him after he exposed his genitals near her face "while she was still crying and felt that she had no other choice if she were going to get out of the basement," the committee reported.

Asked whether she consented to oral sex, the woman told lawmakers: "It's a hard question because I did it — it felt like consent, but, no, I didn't want to do it. ... Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave. That's what he wanted — I felt that's what he wanted."

'It was forceful'

In June, the woman told the committee, she met up with Greitens for a subsequent encounter that "at first was consensual." At one point, she said, he asked her whether she had been intimate with anyone else, and she told him that she had slept with her then-husband.

"And he slapped me across my face, just like hard to where I was like, what?" she told the committee of lawmakers. "Eric, what in the heck? You're married ... And just said, 'No.' Like, that was: "You're mine."

She testified that she thought Greitens was "screwed up from being in the Navy," referring to his service as a Navy SEAL.

She also said that "she did not believe the slap was intended to physically hurt her," the committee reported. "Instead, she said, 'I felt like he was trying to claim me.' The slap did not leave a mark but 'was jarring. It wasn't sweet and gentle; it was forceful."

A friend of the woman relayed to the committee that the woman told her about the incident, saying that after the woman told Greitens she had sex with her husband, Greitens "had slapped her in the face and called her a whore."

The woman testified that Greitens spoke with her "via a burner phone" he had purchased. She noted that "we didn't ever have intercourse throughout all of the times that I saw him."

She told lawmakers she saw him one more time after that, and that while they were being intimate, "out of nowhere, (Greitens) just like, kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground."

She started crying, she told the committee, and "just laid there crying while he was just like ... you're fine, you're fine."

This incident "might have actually left a mark," she told the committee.

Other details

• All seven lawmakers on the committee signed the report.

• The committee noted in detail the numerous times Greitens has been asked whether he photographed the woman and has declined to provide a direct answer.

• The ex-husband told the committee's that "an unidentified third-party had paid at least $15,000 'to cover lawyer fees and all of these things that were about to happen to me financially because of the fallout' relating to these events."

• The woman told the committee that her ex-husband repeatedly told her, "I'm going to ruin this guy."

• The ex-husband told the committee that he wanted "somebody in law to have this recording in case I turn up dead so you guys know who to go after," noting that "things frightened me about the situation; I wanted nothing to do with (Greitens)."

The ex-husband released the recording of his conversation with the woman without her consent after telling her it wouldn't leave the car in which they talked. Asked why, the man said, "I feared for my life."

"With this man (Greitens) and his commercials with his guns and the millions of dollars going to politics and this whole game that you hear about and conspiracy this and this person ends up dead and this person is missing and all this kind of crap," the man continued. "I 100 percent feared for my life from the guy that's on TV holding guns talking about this and talking about that."

• The woman also told the committee that she cut the hair of former Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat who Greitens defeated in the 2016 Missouri gubernatorial election. She told lawmakers she is "not a very political person" and "both of them were pretty good about not asking me anything that would make me feel uncomfortable."

• A reporter for KMOV, the St. Louis television station that broke the news, "booked a fake appointment under a fake name, and … came in and announced that she wasn’t there for a haircut, that she was just working on a story about the governor" in December 2017, the woman told the committee, adding that she cried and asked the woman not to run the story.

• Speaking about her current concerns, the woman referenced her children, her reputation, her business and her continuing education. "Luckily, I’m not as fearful physically anymore, because I feel like anybody would be crazy to hurt me because they would know who it is, so — that’s one huge positive thing that’s happened," she said.

• "There is a false narrative being played by Governor Greitens lawyers in this that somehow he cannot testify," said Rep. Jay Barnes, the committee chair, on Monday. "It happens every single day in this state, in this country that there are parallel criminal and civil or administrative proceedings going on."

House clears out

Anticipating an outcry, House leaders canceled most of Wednesday's session as well as regular days of work Thursday and Monday.

House Speaker Todd Richardson announced the panel in late February, a few days after St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, a Democrat, announced that a grand jury had indicted Greitens. The committee included five Republicans and two Democrats.

Greitens, who is married with two children, admitted Jan. 10 that he had an affair. However, Greitens and his attorneys pushed back against the claim that he allegedly took a nonconsensual photo of a woman while she was partially naked in the basement of his family home in March 2015.

A few lawmakers publicly called for Greitens to resign, and several more joined this call after Greitens was indicted in February. He has not bowed to that pressure.

The indictment led Greitens to further bolster his legal counsel. He was arrested and briefly detained in St. Louis before being released on his own recognizance.

If impeachment proceedings are to occur, they would begin in the House, which has that power under the Missouri Constitution. Lawmakers could start those proceedings before the scheduled adjournment of the 2018 regular session. But to do so after May 18, it would take three-quarters of both the House and Senate for lawmakers to call themselves into a special session — unless Greitens did so himself.

Greitens has hired a high-powered legal team to fight the felony charge and a lobbyist to bolster his outreach and burnish his image with lawmakers, the media and the general public. The governor's office has said Greitens' personal battles have not deterred his continued ability to govern.

Greitens had never before held elected political office before he was elected in November 2016. The Democrat-turned-Republican campaigned in part on the notion that he would clean up corruption in Jefferson City and on his status as a husband and father — both stances that contrasted with former Attorney General Chris Koster, who served for years in various political offices.

At the time of the initial encounter, Greitens' gubernatorial campaign was in its early stages.

The News-Leader has not named the woman because she may be the victim of an alleged sex crime.