Hey, y’all, happy Monday Tuesday! Um, I know we’ve been working hard to get back to a regular Thursday posting schedule, but sadly, ~men~ caused a series of news events to occur late last week.
So, on their behalf, thank you for your patience as I attempted to figure out the right tone to strike with this newsletter that accurately depicts the week’s news in Kentucky politics while also ensuring those who needed to be mocked are treated as such.
Ultimately, I decided that if you didn’t want me to treat you like a joke, perhaps you shouldn’t act like one.
TW: This newsletter mentions sexual harassment and creepy men drunk on power (and also just drunk).
Let’s start on the education front
Back in the olden days, before a judge was killed in his chambers and I needed to learn anything about strip club etiquette, this was supposed to be a pretty education-heavy newsletter.
Now we will have to sprint through all of that.
JCPS Task Force back again
Yet again, the JCPS Task Force met to discuss Kentucky’s largest school district. Their 2.5 hour long convo featured a few topics, including student behavior and discipline. You can watch the replay here.
Keep your prayers with Renee Shaw
Don’t worry, our queen is safe; nothing happened to her other than yet another Kentucky Tonight episode focused on school choice.
But this one (which aired last Monday and can now be rewatched on KET’s website) was the most wackadoodle Kentucky Tonight watching experience I’ve had since Eric Deters damn near derailed the 2023 Republican gubernatorial debate.
This particular panel of four white men featured some usual suspects, but also included Randy Adams, that one guy from Anderson County I told y’all about who used to be a public school educator but then went on a Facebook rant about needing to respect students pronouns. The one in the pro-Amendment 2 ad? Yeah, so he was there.
And I firmly believe Kentucky’s top 2026 budget priority should be giving a raise to any and all KET staffers involved in selecting him for the show, because that man maybe had a single ounce of media training and that was it.
For the sake of time, my full Twitter thread from the event is here, but I will highlight perhaps my favorite moment, which basically went like this:
Adams: *complaining about student behavior*
Shaw: Well, how would you handle student behavior as a former educator?
Adams: We could open charter schools specifically designed to handle those levels of behaviors.
Shaw: Isn’t that just an alternative school? … You were literally the principal of an alternative school.
Mailers starting to hit mailboxes
Heard my first report of an Amendment 2 related mailer this election cycle a few hours ago (thanks, mom). I hinted I would fact check it tonight but y’all, this newsletter is too long. Check back next time.
But if you get an Amendment 2 mailer, feel free to send it to me.
Does anyone actually want to discuss DEI?
Like, truly? Because I made an incredibly rare in-person appearance in Frankfort this week to sit through the Interim Joint Committee on Education’s second DEI in higher ed hearing of the summer for two hours, only to hear … basically nothing about DEI.
Again, for the sake of time, here’s my full Twitter thread from the meeting. Instead of me talking, I’m going to point y’all to two pieces from Black men who attended the meeting and wrote about it:
First, Dr. Ricky Jones, one of my former professors at U of L and the former Pan-African Studies chair there, who also live-tweeted the meeting: Kentucky leaders' racist attacks on DEI in education is modern-day McCarthyism.
The current PAS chair, Dr. Michael McCormack, was also there. You’ll never believe which two men U of L’s president did not acknowledge in her testimony to lawmakers. (Yes you will.)
And my friend Terrance Sullivan, who also technically has a job I’m just not sure what it is, wrote this for his Substack which y’all should subscribe to plz: DEI should DIE.
Another thing for the kids
Oh, yeah, Gov. Andy Beshear did his best to ban conversion therapy for minors in Kentucky.
He can’t like fully ban it, but he signed an executive order blocking state and federal dollars from going to conversion therapy, along with allowing licensure boards to discipline health professionals who are found to offer the discredited practice for minors.
Several Republicans are upset with this, arguing that this infringes on parents’ religious rights and that Beshear doesn’t legally have the power to do so (the latter a bit more feasible).
(I wrote about this for Queer Kentucky, but for some reason, the website won’t open on my browser, so I can’t link to my stories. Sorry.)
EKY, I love ya, but girl…
There was a point in my life that this entire newsletter was delayed because I wanted to learn more about this, but the news cycle is wild, and I fear we need to discuss strippers. A Letcher County sheriff is charged with murdering a district judge in his chambers.
Heads up: A lot of folks have sent me tips/rumors/whatnot about why this happened. I haven’t had time to look more into this due to obvious reasons. Will be keeping an eye on this.
Speaking of Eastern Kentucky, the body of the guy who fired shots onto the highway near London was found apparently by a couple on some sort of date night adventure.
Wait, that sounds wrong. To be clear, it appears they set out to find this man — they were not just Netflix and chilling in the EKY woods while a major manhunt was underway.
ALSO speaking of EKY, state Sen. Johnnie Turner drove his lawnmower into the deep end of a pool and had to be hospitalized. Last I heard he was in stable but critical condition.
Quick hits
The Kentucky Supreme Court is getting its first female Chief Justice. Deputy Chief Justice Debra Hembree Lambert will take over next year.
The deadline to print ballots for the upcoming election has passed, which means your local county clerks should be uploading your mock ballots online soon. We’ll talk more about this, but keep an eye out!
If you need an absentee ballot, your time has come. You have until Oct. 22 or so to request one. Here’s the link.
OK, yeah, so the Daniel Grossberg stripper thing
Gotta save the best for last, obvs.
So, we’ve talked about how freshman Democratic Rep. Daniel Grossberg is under multiple state-level investigations for being creepy towards women in politics, yes? Yes.
OK, so all of that has just absolutely spiraled out of control since Thursday. I highly recommend following the Lexington Herald-Leader’s coverage of this debacle — they broke the story and have been leading it ever since.
I’ve debated for days about how to tell this story because, like many other women in Kentucky politics, I, too, have been on the receiving end of Grossberg’s inability to like do his job without creeping out women.
So, I’m just gonna type and hope y’all read it all.
Basically, Thursday night, Lexington political candidate and well-known trans rights activist Emma Curtis reveals in an op-ed that she’s the woman at the center of one of the HL’s strongest examples of how Grossberg acts around women.
She was initially quoted anonymously in the story, along with a few other women in Democratic politics, all of whom I believe have since come out publicly. But Curtis was the first. Again, highly recommend reading her own words about what happened and the aftermath.
Basically, she was like, yeah that was me who watched Grossberg get drunk in his office while he pressured me to drink (she’s been sober for a hot sec) and asked a series of sexually invasive questions. And once she spoke out — even anonymously — some political retaliation began.
After reading her op-ed and thinking, I messaged a reporter at the HL whom I had talked to off the record a few weeks ago about my experience with Grossberg (which was not as serious as Emma’s). I told them if needed, I’d be willing to go on the record.
I was warned that a story was coming. So I stayed up until 6 a.m. for the story and WHAT an excellent choice that was.
The screams I scrumpt. I didn’t realize one could get banned for life from a strip club, but apparently that is something Grossberg knows quite personally.
According to the story — and I know these reporters and worked for this editor, so I trust every syllable — Grossberg tried to grope a dancer and apparently offered to pay someone $5,000 to have sex with him. That’s called um assault and soliciting prostitution.
I publicly called for Grossberg’s resignation before 8 a.m.
And I know a journalist calling for a politician’s resignation is not the most like journalistically ethically OK thing, but first of all, I don’t really care.
And second, the Frankfort press corps is increasingly female — and while I don’t know what their personal experiences are with Grossberg, I know their bosses likely wouldn’t be OK with them calling for him to resign publicly even if they had bad experiences. We all deserve to work in Frankfort without concerns of men like Daniel. I know the weight I carry, and so I carried it.
All I saw each time I refreshed Twitter for the next couple of hours was another person calling for his resignation or another woman involved in politics coming forward with their story.
And Beshear jumped in with an emergency press call Friday morning to officially say he and Lt. Gov. Coleman think he should resign. The Dems called on Grossberg to resign. His own caucus formally kicked him out.
But my focus was how many of my peers were coming forward. One former Dem political candidate said she experienced exactly what I had — a refusal to respond to him after hours, which led to him believing we hated him, and in my case, him going to a male coworker of mine and telling him he thought I hated him. During my first legislative session as a full-time politics reporter.
I remember thinking all of my coworkers must think I can’t handle the politics beat, if lawmakers would rather call up random coworkers of mine than trust me with news or have a frank chat about where we stand. It may seem small, but it wasn’t.
A different woman mentioned some creepy things he’d said to her over the years.
Wait, have we discussed this before? I asked her.
No, we hadn’t — there had just been so many stories like hers that my own memory was beginning to go haywire.
That’s the big theme here, and one I hope his (incredibly, female) attorney at some point acknowledges: It isn’t just me, or Emma, or this woman, or that. It isn’t just one or two people finding him creepy, or having an odd encounter with him. It doesn’t matter when it happened to us (but like, if we wanna establish a track record with this guy, I’ve found him off-putting in a professional capacity since at least 2021 [notice how I, someone who is neurodivergent, managed to work around that in a polite-until-now fashion]).
It is a trend. It is a culture he, whether he meant to or not, has built and perpetuated around himself for years.
And it is one he is only making worse. Grossberg has attempted to apologize (kind of) ever since the HL’s initial reporting came out weeks ago. He’s since said he’s getting help for his issues. Good, I wish him well.
But he refuses to resign — even after the last few days, which have left him without a caucus and without the support of his party. And his attorney, Anna Whites, dropped a super fun lesson in what victim-blaming looks like in real time with an op-ed in the HL Monday. (And to make matters even worse, she repeatedly namedropped Emma, who appropriately called the op-ed “horseshit.”)
Unfortunately, Whites — who is absolutely not a hot girl with this kind of attitude — like just skipped over the strip club thing. And she keeps bringing up his neurodivergence, which is a slap in the face for those of us who have been able to work in the political arena with similar issues without this level of problematic behavior.
Based on the number of tips I’ve gotten over the weekend, don’t expect this Grossberg thing to end any time soon.
Oh, and he doesn’t have a challenger in the fall, so … unless he resigns or gets impeached, he’s gonna stay in office.
Yeah, ok, so, that’s that. Honestly, thought I would make more jokes about the strip club thing, maybe next time.
OK, toodles!