By all accounts, the 2017 Student Action Summit hosted last December by conservative college organization Turning Point USA was boisterous. During the day, more than 1,200 high school and college kids listened to speeches by big names like Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump, Jr., and Tomi Lahren. By night, some of those same students got blackout drunk.

Witnesses describe a scene reminiscent of "Animal House." Kids weren’t just drinking in their hotel rooms. They say some wandered drunk through the lobby. Students weren’t just roughhousing by the hotel pool. They say some were wasted in the water. And while many of the young conservatives proved a temperate bunch, the vomit in the bushes served as visceral testament to the appetites of the rest.

Outnumbered by the out-of-control, and worried for the safety of their charges, one staffer remembers approaching Turning Point executives Charlie Kirk and Tyler Bowyer after the first night. Could they hire West Palm Beach deputies to police the hotel lobbies? “I was scared these kids were going to die in the pool,” the staffer explains. The answer from Bowyer, the COO of the organization? “It just wasn’t worth it,” she says, “I think those were his exact words: ‘It wasn’t worth it.’”

Two boozy nights later, a college student approached a female Turning Point staffer. She told the staffer she woke up that night to a male student “groping her and shoving his hands down her pants.”

Other similar allegations have arisen regarding another Turning Point conference, and at still another event to which Turning Point brought students. None of these allegations have been either proven or disproven — the issue is how Turning Point handles these allegations. Or doesn’t.

Interviews with five female students and four former staffers paint a picture of an ambitious student group that is ill-equipped to deal with underage drinking and serious, repeated allegations of sexual harassment and even sexual assault.

In a written statement, TPUSA denied that Bowyer or Kirk ever rejected a request for more cops. They point instead to the Secret Service agents recruited to protect Trump Jr., the private security employed by other speakers, and a 12-man security team hired by TPUSA to guard the convention center. But after-hours, TPUSA noted that “the hotel itself maintained security in the lobby area.”

Turning Point USA is just six years old, and it’s unlike any other political organization. Turning Point kids don’t walk around sporting Adam Smith ties or toting Friedrich Hayek volumes. They wear T-shirts that say “socialism sucks.” They don’t knock doors for politicians. They party at conferences that feel like spring break. Most importantly, TPUSA staff aren’t old. Most are younger than Kirk, their 24-year-old CEO, who hangs out with Trump Jr. and Kanye West.

That explains the TPUSA appeal, and why more than 4,000 students between the ages of 15 and 25 applied to attend last year’s Student Action Summit. TPUSA underwrote the hotel rooms, subsidized some of the flights, and hosted what they billed as “the largest gathering of young conservatives.” Between the minimal adult supervision and the ample booze procured by the attendees, some of those gathered got out of hand.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear for legal reprisals, two former staffers say they know of “two or three” allegations of sexual assault that have occurred at TPUSA events since its 2012 founding. “Most of the incidents happen in hotel rooms, and the problem is that these are hotel rooms we pay for,” one says. “They happen at night and they happen with a lot of alcohol involved.”

The former staffers describe impromptu parties in hotel rooms rivaling those of college fraternities but without the faculty, without the campus security, and without the same accountability. “The staff cannot handle it. They’re 20 years old,” another former staffer complains, noting that some are “not even old enough to drink themselves, let alone take care of drunk students.”

They also weren’t equipped to deal with the distraught student whom one staffer says reported sexual assault last December. “I told her if she thought she was truly assaulted she needed to call the cops and, if she was raped, she needed to go to the hospital,” the staffer remembers. They didn’t even think to record the girls name because “when she came up it was so hectic that no one knew what to do.”

Turning Point USA wouldn’t confirm or deny that an assault was reported in West Palm Beach, citing privacy concerns and insisting that “without names there is no way to verify additional specifics of the specific instance.”

“While TPUSA acknowledges there have been an exceptionally small number of allegations of misconduct made,” the organization said in a statement, “TPUSA refrains from specifying any more details about timing or location in order to protect the privacy of its members and attendees.” But if anything did occur, TPUSA insists it would’ve been dealt with by the book.

The organization applies its workplace policies on sexual harassment to govern the conduct of students at conferences. The relevant excerpt of that employee handbook is full of human resources boilerplate. Alert a supervisor. Tell the offender their conduct is unwelcome. Await an investigation.

Students are made aware of these policies when they are asked to sign a code of conduct. According to an organization spokesman, participants are told that their attendance at conferences is contingent on good behavior. On the back of every badge worn by conference attendees, the organization informs students that they reserve the right to remove those “who behave in a manner that TPUSA deems disruptive.” TPUSA, in a statement, said that means blacklisting bad actors:



If someone is blacklisted they receive a written email immediately. If the individual is an attendee at a TPUSA conference and are staying onsite at the host venue or hotel, they are informed they are no longer welcome to stay at the hotel or venue, they are then asked to gather their belongings and to leave as quickly as possible. They are also notified they are no longer welcome at future TPUSA events. If they apply to attend, the application list is cross-checked with blacklist and their attendance is denied.



New TPUSA hires must sign a statement that they received an employee manual and a handbook. But four former TPUSA staffers all said separately that they weren’t aware of any organization-wide protocol for handling incidents of sexual misconduct. Several said they even asked the organization’s leadership to develop more complete guidelines.

“We were pushing and we were like, ‘We need to have a policy in place for, god forbid, whatever happens,’ and Tyler Bowyer was basically like, ‘No that’s going to have to be something that we hit when we get there,’” one claims. “He kept saying he’d have the legal team work on it. But we won’t be able do anything until something happens.’ That was basically a huge red flag.”

Things did happen, notably at the 2017 Road to Majority Conference in D.C.

Turning Point USA did not organize that conference, but the organization sponsored students, putting money down for their admission and their reservations at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. It was an opportunity, Turning Point advertised, for “200+ students” to hear from speakers like Vice President Mike Pence, to learn new skills, and to “network with other young professionals from across the country.”

Again, with plenty of alcohol and little adult supervision, the networking followed a familiar and unfortunate script. Three female college students who attended the conference claim they experienced sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to assault.

One said the perpetrator tried unsuccessfully to push her into a closet. A second said the perpetrator shoved her against the wall of an elevator and “stuck his tongue down my throat.” A third said the perpetrator “pinned” her onto a hotel bed. Alcohol was a factor in each incident and the last came at the end of a particularly wild hotel room party.

“He was pressuring me to do stuff with him and ‘I kept saying no, I want to leave,’” the woman remembers, explaining that it was hard for her to escape because “he was really drunk and he was laying on top of me.” The episode allegedly ended when another student discovered him atop her.

Turning Point USA wouldn’t say whether or not an incident was reported, but a spokesman noted that the Road to Majority conference “was not a TPUSA event.” The organization demurred further because the staffer assigned as the main point of contact, Timon Prax, “is no longer employed by TPUSA and therefore cannot be consulted on specific details.”

If an incident was reported, Turning Point’s spokesman did note, “every assumption and expectation is that any former staff would have followed protocol.”

When consulted on specific details by the Washington Examiner, Prax confirmed that he was alerted shortly after the alleged incidents occurred, that he encouraged the woman who was pinned down to consider pressing legal charges, and that he promised her that the alleged perpetrator would be blacklisted.

“After she contacted me at the event,” Prax said in a statement, “I immediately notified TPUSA's headquarters, then I was told that upper management was working hard to resolve the situation and that more experienced leadership would be taking over the issue.”

If any disciplinary action was taken by TPUSA, the alleged perpetrator in this case was unaware. He confirmed during an interview that he pursued a sexual relationship with different women at the conference and then, unprompted, produced a photo of one of the alleged victims. He denied “doing anything illegal,” didn’t remember being blacklisted, and even expressed interest in attending another Turning Point conference.

He does remember how the night ended, though. Before the end of the conference, he says was escorted from the building by D.C. Police for something other than an alleged sexual assault. Hotel security accused him of drunkenly destroying his room.

Kirk and Bowyer did not respond to an interview request for this story. But during a sit-down interview with a student contributor to Red Alert Politics, a sister publication of the Washington Examiner, the 24-year-old TPUSA CEO defended his organization’s procedures and policies.

Asked about general allegations of sexual harassment at TPUSA events, Kirk bristled. “We’ve kicked men out of events for promiscuous and nefarious behavior when it is presented to us from female students,” adding that claims of sloppiness on the issue are “fallacious lies, slanderous.”

“We have never not dealt with an issue,” he said, “I get very passionate about this because the implication is somehow I’ve swept this stuff under the rug — that’s bullshit.”

Throughout their combined years with the organization, none of the former staffers interviewed for this story could remember a single incident of TPUSA kicking students out of events because of sexual harassment or assault.