LANSING – A state senator filed a sexual harassment allegation Tuesday against a state senator who is already facing investigation for recent remarks to a female Capitol reporter.

Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak,said Sen. Peter Lucido, R-Shelby Township, made her feel uncomfortable and degraded during orientation for new senators at the Senate office building in Lansing, shortly after the November 2018 election.

As first reported by Crain's Detroit Business, McMorrow said she approached Lucido, who at the time was a House member newly elected to the Senate, to introduce herself, when Lucido shook her hand while using his other hand to hold her lower back, with his fingers on her hips, grazing her "upper rear."

Lucido asked where she was from and who she ran against and McMorrow said she was from Royal Oak and defeated former Republican Sen. Marty Knollenberg.

"At that moment, still holding his hand on my low back, he looked me up and down, raised his eyebrows, and said, 'I can see why,' " McMorrow said in a statement released Tuesday.

McMorrow said that "in that moment, my heart sank," and she "felt clenched and small." She said she felt she had been reduced to an object and a "piece of meat," and the implication was that she won her hard-fought election campaign because of her appearance.

Lucido denied the allegations in a Tuesday morning text message to the Free Press.

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"I categorically deny this allegation, which I believe is completely untrue and politically motivated," he said.

The Senate is in the process of hiring an outside attorneyto assist in the investigation into the allegations against Lucido, which is being conducted by the Senate Business Office, said Amber McCann, spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake.

"Any allegation like this is taken very seriously," McCann said. "The majority leader wants to make sure the investigation is thorough."

The Senate launched a sexual harassment investigation into Lucido's conduct Jan. 15 after the Michigan Advance reported on a Jan. 14 exchange between him and Advance reporter Allison Donahue outside the Senate chamber. The incident quickly drew national media attention.

Donahue tried to question Lucido, R-Shelby Township, while he was surrounded by a group of male high school students from his alma mater, De La Salle Collegiate, a Catholic high school in Warren.

"You’ve heard of De La Salle, right?” the Michigan Advance quoted Lucido as asking Donahue.

When Donahue said she had not, Lucido said: “It’s an all-boys school,” adding: “You should hang around — you could have a lot of fun with these boys, or they could have a lot of fun with you.”

The students then burst into laughter, the online publication reported.

Contacted by the Free Press, Lucido initially did not dispute the accuracy of the quotations, but said he felt they had been taken out of context and out of proportion.

Later that day, he said he was misquoted.

McMorrow said she told her husband about the incident at the time but did not go further, partly because she felt that the incident was "relatively minor" on the sexual harassment spectrum and to complain could limit her effectiveness as a new state senator.

But McMorrow said she decided to speak up and file a complaint because of the recent incident involving Lucido and Donahue. She said she felt some guilt about what Donahue experienced and believed that if she had spoken up sooner, the incident involving Donahue might not have happened.

"As a sitting senator, I know my story will carry weight," she said. "I hope it will show that Sen. Lucido's behavior is not a one-off, misunderstood occurrence with reporter Allison Donahue, but a pattern of behavior intended to demean women at the workplace and abuse a position of power."

Sen. Rosemayer Bayer, D-Birmingham, said she noticed the interaction between McMorrow and Lucido during the orientation session last year, but didn’t think anything of it at the time.

It was Lucido’s comments during the harassment portion of the training that alarmed her, Bayer said.

“He went off on a rampage that was really appalling,” she said. “He was carrying on about this is the way it was in the Legislature and there was nothing that was going to change.” Bayer said Lucido made the comment: "All the classes in the world isn’t going to change anything and this is who we are."

No one laughed at the comments or chimed in, she said.

McMorrow said it is time to "stop excusing behavior that's done intentionally to belittle and minimize others."

Responding to Lucido's comment that her complaint could be politically motivated, McMorrow said "there is no calculus" where this is a benefit to her, in a district long held by Republicans.

"This is a risk ... but if I can make this a better place to work, I will sleep better at night," she said.

"Am I concerned about retribution? Of course. I mean, I spent a lot of time over the weekend talking to people about this and it very well may be the end of my career, but honestly, if that's the case, I'll go back to what I was doing before."

McMorrow has a degree in industrial and car design from the University of Notre Dame and has worked in the automotive industry as a designer and creative director.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter.