About That Barnes Letter

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen a lot of discussion about our decision to publish the letter sent to Wisconsin Democratic Party leaders regarding Mandela Barnes. Most of it started with one question: Are the allegations true? Fair question. It just wasn’t the question we thought we were writing about.

We were asking what political parties are supposed to do when serious allegations land on the desks of party leaders. What happens when the allegations are anonymous, hard to verify, or somewhere in the foggy space between rumor and documented fact? What do voters deserve to know about a candidate’s relationships and use of power before deciding whether that person is fit for office? We tried very hard not to write an article deciding whether the allegations against Barnes were true. We encouraged readers to step around that question and engage with the institutional one.

That was optimistic.

Once allegations like these become public, they pull everything toward guilt or innocence. Either prove the whole case or shut up. That binary is useful to party leaders and to patriarchy. If a woman cannot publicly prove every detail, survive the political retaliation, and possibly blow up her career, the institution gets to carry on as if nothing happened.

That’s unacceptable. We are not neutral between relational justice and establishment self-protection. Political institutions should center the people with less power, even when doing so is inconvenient for party leaders, donors, campaigns or candidates. Uncertainty may complicate their responsibility. It does not erase it.

The quiet was not a lack of interest

Some interesting things happened after we published.

A second source sent us a different copy of the same letter. That does not make the accusations true, but it does confirm that the letter had a life beyond the person who first sent it to us. It was moving through Wisconsin political circles.

Journalist investigations accelerated and sources began talking, maintaining, but risking their privacy. Eventually, Barnes left the race rather than confirming or denying details. We also found a story about Barnes retaliating against someone questioning his treatment of younger women. 

Our website traffic went nuts. The Barnes article drew far more readers than our pieces usually do, while the public conversation stayed strangely quiet. Political operatives contacted us privately to ask whether we had more information. People were clearly paying attention. They just weren’t eager to say so publicly.

There is a lot of interest in these accusations and, we suspect, a lot of uncertainty about how to handle them. People do not know what they can responsibly say, who should act first or what might happen if they publicly acknowledge something that has apparently been discussed in private for years.

None of this corroborates the accusations. Website traffic is not evidence of misconduct, but it shows that politically connected people did not consider the letter irrelevant. It also shows the shape of the problem. Information travels privately. Women warn one another. Operatives ask questions off the record. Journalists investigate. Party leaders say nothing in public. Eventually, somebody leaks something, and then everybody argues about the leak. That is what you get when a political institution has no trusted way to address relational harm without first calculating the electoral consequences.

And now we’re in the last weeks of the campaign

When we published the letter on July 9, we said we would rather have this conversation than wait for a carefully timed, last-minute scandal drop.

That concern was partly hypothetical at the time. Not anymore.

Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor has since become a complete mess. Sara Rodriguez ended her campaign after discovering that it had hundreds of thousands of dollars less than she had been led to believe, with donations reportedly double-counted, expenses underreported and invoices left unpaid. David Crowley, who had suspended his campaign and endorsed Rodriguez, jumped back into the race the day after she withdrew, this time with Tony Evers’ endorsement.

Absentee ballots were already out. By July 30, more than 127,000 had been returned. A judge has ruled that those voters cannot retrieve their ballots and choose again, even if they voted for somebody who subsequently quit.

Obviously, botched campaign books and allegations of relational exploitation are different problems. The connection is institutional. It is what happens when people who knew, or should have known, wait until a problem explodes in public. Then campaigns collapse, endorsements get rearranged, and voters are told nobody could have done anything sooner.

So “Why publish now?” still feels like the wrong question. If information could affect how people vote, it should be addressed before they are trapped by the electoral calendar. The better question is why the people who received this letter years ago apparently let the issues it raised sit unresolved until Barnes was running for statewide office again.

What did Ben Wikler do?

Here’s where we keep landing: What did Ben Wikler do when he received the letter?

And honestly, we don’t know. Wikler may have had private conversations. He may have sought corroboration, spoken with Barnes or asked somebody inside the party to look into it.

But there is no public account of any response. No known process, finding or explanation. The writer of the letter came away believing that Wikler had refused to act. She then sent the letter to his successor, Devin Remiker, and to gubernatorial candidates Sara Rodriguez, David Crowley and Kelda Roys. It circulated widely enough that different copies reached different people, including us. Other reporting has since confirmed what we had heard about it being sent to every county party office. Maybe the writer’s conclusion about Wikler was wrong. If it was, he can clear that up.

Silence is not proof that nothing happened. It does make everyone else carry the risk. The person reporting harm is expected to identify herself, prove everything, withstand public scrutiny, and gamble her livelihood. The party can decline to explain what it did, say there was not enough evidence, and keep elevating the candidate. That is establishment self-protection, and we find it disgusting.

A political party is not a court. It is not powerless, either. It hires people, funds campaigns, controls access, offers platforms, and places its credibility behind candidates. An anonymous letter should not automatically disqualify somebody, but it should not disappear into a drawer. It should trigger a serious process: document the complaint, look for corroboration without exposing reluctant sources, find out whether there is a pattern, give the accused person a real chance to respond and get somebody independent of the candidate and party leadership to assess what can be established.

This is where relational justice matters. It asks questions the legal system often ignores. Who had power? Who controlled access to jobs, money, status or political opportunity? Were relationships described as consensual but shaped by an enormous imbalance of power? Did the institution make exploitation easier? Or does it make reporting it more dangerous?

Relational justice is not punishment with nicer branding. It is about changing the conditions that allow harm and coercion to repeat.

This is bigger than Barnes

There is another reason Democrats should stop treating this as nothing more than Republican opposition research: Barnes is not the only man people talk about.

Off-the-record conversations with women who work in and around Wisconsin Democratic politics are full of stories about men aggressively pursuing younger women, including staff members, organizers and people trying to build careers inside the party. Those stories are not automatically publishable facts, but the pattern should be enough to make party leaders look more closely.

Instead, each story gets treated as an isolated interpersonal mess. Nobody has enough evidence. Nobody wants to speak first. Nobody wants to hurt the party and everybody waits.

Meanwhile, men keep their positions and access. Women quietly tell one another whom to avoid. If no one files a formal complaint, the institution pretends it has no problem.

Relationships inside political organizations are political. Elected officials, candidates and senior operatives control jobs, introductions, endorsements, money and access. When they pursue people with much less power, the party does not get to wave the whole thing away as private life.

There is a racial dimension here, too. Barnes is a Black man who has endured years of racist attacks. Rumors involving sex, danger, and power do not attach evenly in America, and nobody should pretend otherwise. That makes a fair process more necessary, not less. Anti-racism cannot mean ignoring women’s reports. Taking those reports seriously cannot mean treating rumors as proof. A process worthy of the name has to resist racist weaponization while still investigating possible harm. Without one, Barnes is left at the mercy of a rumor network that opponents can activate whenever it becomes useful. Women are left with two choices: stay quiet or set off a public explosion. The institution survives either way.

The argument we were trying to have

The response to the article quickly broke into half a dozen arguments. People fought about timing. Some said they would rather know now than during the final weeks of the campaign. Others treated the timing itself as proof of a smear.

People argued about anonymous complaints, anonymous journalism, what a political party owes someone who reports harm and how much a journalist must establish before publishing. We had some of these arguments among ourselves.

These are hard questions, and they are much closer to the conversation we hoped to provoke than a simple vote on whether Barnes is guilty or innocent. Political parties, journalists and voters make decisions with incomplete information all the time. Waiting for absolute certainty is also a decision, and it usually helps whoever already has more power.

Relational justice asks us to notice that. Who is being protected? Who is carrying the risk? Is the institution trying to learn what happened, or is it trying to avoid a scandal?

We do not need a final verdict before we can ask those questions.

Then there’s Jessica McBride

Conservative commentators, including Jessica McBride, were the only outlets to jump on the letter, completely ignoring our framing or reasons for publishing it. They have run a full gamut of hot takes, dismissing concerns about Barnes’ behavior, attacking the journalists, celebrating his “masculinity”, and bemoaning his departure from the race, while simultaneously turning the letter into a morality play about Democratic corruption. Spare us.

Donald Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and the president of the United States after a civil jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. That judgment was upheld on appeal, and Carroll has collected the money awarded in the case. Trump is also credibly accused of sexually assaulting a teenager, and is still hiding the Epstein files.

Republicans do not get credit for discovering relational ethics when an accusation might hurt a Democrat. Democrats do not get a pass because Republicans are worse. We will consider evidence no matter who reports it. What we will not accept is a standard that applies only when accountability threatens somebody on the other team. “We are better than Trump” is not an accountability process. It is an embarrassingly low bar.

Questions that still deserve answers

So here are the questions. They are not complicated:

When did party leadership first receive the letter?

What, if anything, was done to assess its claims?

Was Barnes asked to respond?

Did anyone try to determine whether the letter described a broader pattern?

What process does the party use when staff members, volunteers or political professionals report coercive or exploitative relationships?

What protections exist for people who fear that speaking publicly will damage their careers?

Why did the writer believe that both Wikler and Remiker had refused to act?

The answers may not prove or disprove the allegations. They would tell us whether the people running one of the most powerful political institutions in Wisconsin take relational justice seriously when doing so costs them something.

That was the point of publishing the letter. We were not declaring Mandela Barnes guilty. We were asking what people with power did after receiving a serious warning, and what they owe the rest of us now.

A political party is not entitled to protect itself from accountability. Relational justice means the institution has to carry some of the risk. It has to act before a campaign implodes, before women are forced to go public alone and before voters are stuck with the consequences.