i'm a long time san antonio journalist, but for 10 years, i worked at the houston chronicle i walked alongside. lisa olson lisa is the author of this book. she got under the story of at the time. i was there lisa was a top investigative reporter at the chronicle. this was one of many stories that she broke i think in a way it was the most impactful if there was one even more. i need to know about that one because this one was quite impactful. and her work because i was a columnist she gave me a lot of opportunities to express the outrage at what she was uncovering something. she's not allowed. she's supposed to remain calm and cool and objective. i i was not hampered by that and i really appreciate all those opportunities. gave me kathy mcbroom is the heroine of the book. she is the the whistleblower. this is a true crime story, but we already we already know who done it. what this is a story about is the amazing effort that it required. to not only uncover what he did but to fight the higher-ups and the judicial system to keep from from suppressing it from covering it up to let him get off with a slap in the wrist and you'll hear more about that. and then at the end kathy was not allowed to talk to anybody while she was in the process of doing the sabbath s as you will see happily in the book. she was able to to help lisa in preparing the book, which is very important part of the book in in my opinion. the book does. three important things when it's it's a great true crime story. really get dragged along as we uncover as as lisa uncovers things in it. secondly lisa puts it into a national context that this is about one man, but it's also about things that go on throughout the country. this was not the only judge who was causing problems and the third part is how bad the judicial system has been at policing itself the federal judicial system and you'll hear stories about the specifics of that in this case. so i'd like actually to begin with with lisa you doing i believe you have a reading that can help get us started. yeah, so i was kind of lured to texas. by an editor who said you know, there's a lot of things for you to investigate in houston. it's low-hanging fruit. but this was as rick said one of the most incredible stories i had ever heard and it began. for me began when i was working in the houston chronicle newsroom in downtown houston, so i want to take you there and tell you how it began. and then kathy and i will tell you where it went from there, but so houston is a humid heavy breathing city where news takes no break even as quitting time approaches on a friday. i was absorbed in notes for another investigative story in our bustling chronicle newsroom in march 2007 when deputy managing editor george hodge waved me inside his private office and shared one of the most improbable tips i had ever heard. he told me that harvey rice another senior staff reporter had just called with the tale of something strange that a source had witnessed inside the federal courthouse on galveston island that afternoon a woman had run crying from the chambers of us district judge samuel bristow kent with her clothing in disarray, the tipster identified her as the judges top assistant kathy mcbroom known as a normally unflappable. employee and judge kent's longtime assistant case manager after leaving chambers mcbroom never returned to her own office instead. she detoured to another floor apparently to hide from the judge. some co-workers believed kent had sexually assaulted her. perhaps if i worked elsewhere, i might have automatically rejected the rumor that a man sworn to uphold our laws would violate them inside a so called palace of justice, but i was an investigative reporter in texas a place where the improbable often occurs. houston is home to the moon men of nasa and to joanne herring the glittering socialite and eris who allied with the texas congressman to finance a secret cia award in afghanistan. skyscapers skyscrapers near our downtown's newsroom had formerly housed swaggering swindler king because of enron before their pipeline empire fell to fraud. focused on the story. i navigated back through a maze of metal cabinets loaded with newspapers maps dictionaries and bulging. file folders are newsroom was sort of a notorious firetrap in those days. i popped down at my desk and kept my voice low as i called rice to follow up. this was such a sensitive topic. i didn't even want our colleagues to over here. rice lived on galveston island and wells well connected there and in the federal courts, but before coming to texas he had worked for the clearing ledger in mississippi during his time in jackson rice told me he'd been assigned to investigate rumors related to another powerful judge named richard walter nixon no relation to the us president nixon rumor had it had quietly accepted a bribe to help a business associates son beat drug charges where i said track down sources in farided out documents nixon eventually beat the rap for bribery was convicted a perjury for lying to investigators and went to prison but he refused to resign and continue to collect his pay as a prisoner right said. rice had just alerted me to the unusual. level of power. we were confronting federal circuit and district judges such as kent and nixon are appointed for life under article 3 of the us constitution. they cannot be removed from office by anything less than impeachment by the us house of representatives and removal by the us senate. nixon was one of three federal judges who had been impeached and removed in the 80s. no other federal judge had been impeached or removed since even if kent had sexually assaulted one of his employees. i wondered how could we possibly possibly confirm that it was a classic? he said she said situations can't certainly wasn't going to talk and mcbroom seemed to have vanished. so that's how the story began the long journey first as a newspaper reporter and later as an author into what happened very briefly. i forgot to mention one thing the pros in the back with the cameras are sea span this be on c-span. we don't know when yet, but you can google it. i guess that find out when it's going to be kathy. i'd like to begin. with you just giving us a description of judge kent. okay physical description. yeah physical description. well, he was i would estimate him to be six foot four. he probably weighed over 300 pounds big booming voice charismatic. personality could be intimidating to most people. yeah, he called himself the king of the courthouse. yeah, this is galveston an island. it's an unusual situation where he's all by himself. there's no other federal judge. nobody there ranking above him. so he he really was kind of the king. and lisa, didn't he already earn a kind of a national reputation as being something of a bully to judge to lawyers. yes, he had been already known as being somebody who wrote. opinions ridiculing attorneys for being idiots and he find people for arriving two minutes late to his courthouse. he was known also for parading around the court house with his bulldog and smoking a cigar which of course federal courthouses are no smoking zone. so he really had this air of the rules do not apply to me kathy. let's talk about the just briefly about how you got the job and what the job meant to you. oh the job been everything to me. it was the best job i ever had and i mean, i i knew i wanted to do it when i started out with the federal district court. i worked as an assistant to another judge in houston, and i was her sort of administrative assistant, but i knew all the action was inside that courtroom and the case manager was inside the courtroom and she was the liaison between the bar the attorneys the marshall service. every she was the hub of everything and that's what i knew i wanted to do. so a position became available in galveston, and i decided to apply for it actually one of my managers suggested that i applied for it. and so i did and i found found out pretty quickly that he was dismissing his current case manager and she was being transferred back to houston. so i went ahead and applied and then spoke to the former case manager later. and what did you learn in the early process of application? did you get any kind of indications that there might be any problems? not during the initial interview. it was i had the interview first and i was extremely interested. the interview went pretty well. it was only after i came back to houston. i was waiting to hear whether or not i got the job and i talked to his former case manager and because i was curious why why did you leave? why are you not still the case manager? it looks like a fantastic job and she didn't share with me that there were problems. i kind of was suspicious that there might be but she was very hush hush about it. she was one of the first people i ended up interviewing later as a reporter felicia williams. she had been verbally abused by him at one point. he had said to her when her husband had prostate cancer. i'll service you but she was afraid of she said anything to kathy directly that she would be retaliated against and she's still worked for the courts. she was closer to retirement like closer than i was she didn't want to, you know do anything to jeopardize her retirement. so she hadn't suffered the kind of thing you suffered, but she had she knew about what was going to harassed and later became an important source for me as a reporter because i first did an investigative story about what was happening in kent's court way before i could ever talk with kathy and felicia did come forward as a whistleblower. okay, i i guess we probably just ought to go out and since really the important part of the book is what happened after you quit. i think it's probably okay a good thing for us to briefly get across as much details you feel comfortable with that going. too much into is to what developed and how it happened? just want a summary of what happened. okay, so the incident didn't occur immediately. it occurred probably within the first year. i don't remember exactly how long but months had gone by and the judge came down to my office and which he really did we were on different floors. i usually had to come to him, but he came down to my office and just had a seat in my desk and was asking me how i like the job just sort of a check in. how are you liking it? you're doing a great job glad to have you part of my team that kind of talk which really delighted me and at the end of the talk. he, you know leaving and i stood up to tell him goodbye, and he's come over here and give me a hug. and he was that kind of guy and so i thought nothing of it, you know, i went over there and gave him a hug. i really believe now that was the first step in him grooming me for later abuse. so, but that's looking back. i didn't know that at the time. then shortly after that we had a terrible experience where he came back from lunch one day and he had been drinking and i was upstairs getting paperwork from his chambers that i needed to deal with and he said he called me into the small room that the security officers had set up as sort of a workout room with weights and stuff and i would go up there sometimes at lunch and work out. he said, let me see that workout room show me where that is, kathy. and i could tell he had been drinking. so i was a little bit leery but the the room was right beside security guards office. so i went in the room and he immediately kind of closed the door and attacked me. i mean right there. put his arms around me. after that my shirt, you know. it was it was scary and i kept you know begging him the police stopped don't don't do this. i mean, it's hard to deal with the guy that big that's also drunk but i was trying and finally i said if you don't leave me i'm going to scream. and he said to me go right ahead. i'm not afraid of these guys. they're here to protect me. and sure enough they were got worse that turned out to rest after that. yeah, we're safe that turned out be the truth. well, that was the first episode. let's go ahead and after that answered anything the weekend. i just feel like it's kind of a lot to for other some people here might be upset by hearing a lot more details. i don't have to go into the yeah, but after that he did apologize which people like that frequently do and said it would never happen again. so i was hopeful that it would never happen again because i didn't want to i didn't want to leave the job. i loved the job. and that point i think and this is a really important thing for what's an ongoing national debate is she was also she went to her. female manager and said, you know this has happened. what do i do? and she was basically told federal judges do not have to abide by title seven of the civil rights act. they are not subject to the same sexual harassment rules that every other federal employer is and that is absolutely true. that's still true today, and that was very shocking to kathy. and so she didn't really know that there was really much of anything else she could do so she was hoping that that promise by the judge was good for something but it turned out it was not the worst happened and let me interrupt the rest of your narrative to get lisa as you detail in the book at some link. this is not just a problem in galveston talk a little bit about what you found when you were doing your research well, i know we i was i reported about a reporter. the months after kathy filed her complaint and then and i became aware after. kathy filed a secret judicial misconduct complaint which she couldn't talk to me about as a reporter. i've investigated that and found and road with story about that and then they're as a criminal investigation that was launched but what happened was initially with the secret investigation that the judges conducted was there was a sort of a cover-up. i mean they they initially said, i'm sorry to interrupt that we're going to get to that that's about the national system failing the national secret system that the judges have to investigate you found instances in san francisco. yeah, i found instances all over the country in san francisco in kansas in washington dc. the book has cases all over the country. and kathy, so what? what we do need to do is at least get enough to know. why you finally decided you needed not only to not work for anymore but to pursue which which was a much more courageous part to pursue charges against him. well, we had one final incident there were series of incidents like the one i mentioned but they were spread out over the course of another, you know couple of years and it would go he would sometimes go months and i wouldn't really have any contact with them at all and then all of a sudden something like that would happen, but the last incident was was way more aggressive and it was more scary to the point where i felt like if i didn't get out of there i was going to be raped so i i left the courthouse that day and that's the incident that you know, the one that she talks about where i went running from the the courtroom and then i hid from him basically until i could get a ride home my car pulled with someone that so and then i called my best friend and she called a lawyer friend. who was here in san antonio someone that we went to school with and he told me to go home and document everything? and then to request a transfer not to quit the job at request to transfer back to houston and that that was the first step. that's what i did first. at least explained to us what the system is for her to file a complaint. i do want everyone to read the book so i don't want to tell the whole story. but yeah, i want to tell you that whatever you learn in the next 40 minutes or less 25 minutes. i'm afraid there is much more in the book. yeah, well, so the book is about what i really learned later re-reporting. the entire would have kathy's experience from the inside out and at that point. i learned a lot more about what happened. but as a reporter i learned to learn that the judges were investigating each other and that was foreign to me. how could federal judges be in charge of investigating each other and unlike all other federal investigations, you know, once it's done there's never any requirement for the judges to tell you what they what their investigation found which kind of shocked me as an investigative reporter or used to records and when they finished this initial investigation of kent after three months, which was conducted by the chief judge of the circuit who's a san antonio native edith jones known nationwide as an ultra conservative judge to had already written opinions about sexual harassment cases where she basically said, she didn't think sexual harassment existed that if it wasn't rape then it wasn't sexual harassment. so she's the one who is secretly investigating what kathy complained about and and that is how the system works. judges all over the country secretly investigate other judges complaints about other judges. they do it with whoever they want. there are other judges or other lawyers. they don't have to have any documents that they share with anybody and if they decide to take action they can decide to share very little which is what she did. she should very very little can't was initially given a reprimand which is a big deal for them as judges, but for people like kathy and for felicia the woman we were talking about earlier who previously had worked for kent they felt like that was a paid vacation, you know, this guy had done something terrible and he was going to get a paid vacation under the constitution. they can't even dock their pay when they're forced to take a month or two off on a kind of a suspension. that's right. he had he had a few minutes off on and he was going to come right back to the court house and continue to work there so that that's how the system works. that's still how it works. she hired a couple of attorneys from a firm in, louisiana. that did a lot of business in his court, although those students attorneys didn't but there wasn't much evidence that they had much background in investigating. no, no, and you want me to read about that a little bit sure if you so this is this is kind of an insight into how that judicial investigation went and kathy's complaint, which i eventually read, you know, as a reporter not only talked about what happened to her and the two instances she was telling you about but she also named another woman that she thought had been a victim. and so the judges are investigating both what happened to her and to another woman whose name was donna wilkerson, who was the judge's secretary? so that summer. of 2007 judge kent leaned more heavily on wilkerson as the fifth circuit investigating committee began. h alston johnson third the third of baton rouge attorney hired by jones and her committee had already been conducted contacting court employees to interview them. all we're sworn to secrecy as witnesses in the ongoing top secret investigation of kent. kent had long been blurring the lines between his personal and professional relationship with wilkerson, and now he began calling his secretary at home at odd hours. sometimes he called her at midnight or 2 am to say his life was over and he was going to lose his bench. mixed with these oddly timed outbursts were suggestions about what wilkerson should tell the investigatory committee of judges and johnson the attorney assisting with that reprobe. can't suggest that mcbroom was a flirt and a liar. he also suggested that wilkerson might admit that he had hugged and kissed her once. in july 2007 the judges on the judicial investigatory committee and their attorney arrived in galveston to question wilkerson in person under oath. wilkerson knew many lawyers but asked none for advise before facing the c