A Trust Fall: Eric Swalwell and the Culture of Silence

Influencers and Journalists play distinct roles in a long overdue comeuppance

The fall of Eric Swalwell was swift, yet it didn’t happen overnight.

And while the details of his misconduct and justice for his survivors are paramount, this story is also a case study in who women trust with their stories, and the sources we trust to tell their stories to us.

From a DM to a Newsroom

Five months before the San Francisco Chronicle published its investigation into Eric Swalwell, education influencer Arielle Fodor, known to more than a million followers as Mrs. Frazzled, posted something unremarkable. A former kindergarten teacher turned TikTok personality and political voice, she shared a positive reaction to Swalwell’s announcement that he was running for governor of California. “You know how I love to tell you when I meet a politician who acts like a normal human and not a robot,” she wrote. “Eric is that.”

The response she got was not what she expected. Three people messaged her privately with warnings. One told her not to give him her personal number. Another said he had slept with an intern. The third sent up a vague flare: “uh oh.”

Fodor started asking around Washington. She found that the broad contours of Swalwell’s alleged behavior were not news to people who worked in and around politics, especially those who had spent time on Capitol Hill. There was a whisper network. It had existed for years. It just hadn’t traveled outside a tight circle of political insiders, where the prevailing attitude was, as one person put it, “This is just how men are.”

Around the same time, Cheyenne Hunt, a lawyer, former Capitol Hill staffer, and executive director of the youth political engagement group Gen-Z for Change, got a call from a friend, Democratic political strategist Annika Albrecht. Albrecht had her own story. She told Hunt she had met Swalwell on a college field trip to Washington, that he had offered to stay in touch and give her career advice, and that he had added her on Snapchat, where the tone of the conversation shifted from professional to sexual. He eventually invited her to a hotel and kept pressuring her to go. She stopped responding. She said later, “I keep thinking about how lucky I am that I didn’t go to that hotel.”

Hunt had her own reason to take this seriously. She had been warned about Swalwell herself when she worked on the Hill. She knew the whisper network. She decided to make a video.

Fodor and Hunt connected, and the two began working together, building a process to consolidate women and get their stories told the right way. Hunt described it plainly: “It was really three girls in a group chat figuring out how we were going to bring this story forward.” As they posted publicly, dozens of women sent them private messages with their own accounts. More than thirty women would ultimately reach out to Hunt alone with some form of allegation against Swalwell.

What Fodor and Hunt had wasn’t a newsroom. They had community. A consistent presence, a track record of showing up for the issues their audiences cared about, and the trust that comes from that kind of relationship over time. That was enough for women to speak.

What the Women Said

When the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published their investigations on April 10, what they reported was serious and specific.

A former staffer who began interning for Swalwell in 2019, when she was 20 years old, said he sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions when she was too intoxicated to consent. “I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” she told CNN. “He didn’t stop.” Another woman, Lonna Drewes, alleged Swalwell drugged her before raping her in a California hotel room.

Two additional women described a pattern of online contact initiated by Swalwell, often via Snapchat, the platform that automatically deletes messages. Both said the conversations became sexual quickly after he made contact, and that he sent unsolicited explicit photos and messages. The approach was consistent: he would find women on social media who had engaged with his political content, follow them, send his number, and begin texting late at night. When he learned he would be traveling to their city, he would ask to meet, suggest a hotel, and press for dinner and drinks.

Ally Sammarco, one of the named accusers, said she first connected with Swalwell in 2021 when she was 24 and working in an entry-level role on a political campaign. She described feeling both flattered and unsettled by his attention. “He gave off this perception that he was a family man. That he was a fighter. That he was a defender of women,” she said. “And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The Manhattan District Attorney opened a criminal investigation into the New York allegation the following day.

Swalwell had denied the most serious allegations while acknowledging what he called “mistakes in judgment.” His campaign had initially called the entire story a MAGA conspiracy coordinated by rival candidate Katie Porter’s allies. His attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to some of the women. None of it held.

By Sunday, April 12, he had suspended his gubernatorial campaign. By Monday, April 13, he had announced his resignation from Congress, citing awareness that colleagues were preparing an immediate expulsion vote against him. The House Ethics Committee had already announced an investigation into whether he had engaged in sexual misconduct toward an employee under his supervision.

Trusted Journalism Matters

Traditional journalism didn’t start this story, but it helped finish it. And that distinction matters.

Fodor and Hunt made a deliberate strategic decision early in the process: specific allegations needed to be broken by a news organization. While reporters at the Chronicle and CNN conducted their independent investigations, the two influencers maintained a public drumbeat, signaling that a story was coming without detailing the allegations themselves. It was an unusual and controversial approach. Critics accused them of irresponsibility, of lobbing accusations without evidence. But the public pressure dried up Swalwell’s fundraising, unnerved his supporters, and prompted at least four senior campaign staffers to resign before the Chronicle’s story even published.

When journalism stepped in, it did what influencers alone could not: it independently verified the accounts of multiple women who did not know each other, corroborated their stories through messages, records and third-party interviews, and published under the institutional credibility and editorial accountability of major news organizations. That process transformed the story from a social media warning into the kind of documented public record that compels institutional consequences.

Within days of publication, Swalwell had lost two dozen congressional endorsements, the support of the California Teachers Association, and his campaign chairman. Then he lost his seat.

Hours after Swalwell announced his resignation, Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales of San Antonio announced his as well. Gonzales had admitted in March to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide, with text messages showing he had pressured her for nude photos. He had declined to resign at the time. It was the Swalwell moment, and the bipartisan momentum toward expulsion votes, that finally closed the door. Two congressmen, one from each party, out the same day.

Who Do We Trust, and Why?

All of this raises a question that extends well beyond Eric Swalwell. In a media landscape where influencers and news organizations both shape how information reaches us, and where neither operates without bias or self-interest, how do we develop the judgment to know who to trust?

Influencers build trust through community and consistency. The relationship between a creator, their platform, and their audience is inseparable. Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor were believed, in significant part, because they had shown up for the people who followed them, over time, on issues those people cared about. That’s real. That’s earned. But influencers are also advocates first, and their standards of verification vary widely.

News organizations bring editorial process, institutional resources, and professional accountability. But they also carry ownership interests, ideological tendencies, and varying commitments to accuracy that are not always visible to the reader. The same story looks different depending on where you read it. A resignation that one outlet treats as long overdue accountability is framed by another as a politically motivated takedown.

The answer isn’t to trust one kind of source and dismiss the other. It’s to build the habit of evaluating sources critically, consistently, and with eyes open. It means knowing who owns what you’re reading, understanding where a publication sits on the spectrum between factual reporting and advocacy, and seeking out multiple angles on any story that matters to you.

Women trusted two influencers with stories they had been sitting on for years. Real journalism is fundamental to a free society and ultimately helped to bring this story to its tipping point.

The rest is on each of us.

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