INDIANAPOLIS — On Aug. 12, 2024, 13News reporter Emily Longnecker sat down for an interview with two women who say they were abused by Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett's former chief of staff.
When Lauren Roberts and Caroline Ellert met nearly 10 years ago, Roberts was working on Joe Hogsett's first campaign to be the next mayor of Indianapolis.
Ellert, still in college and majoring in political science and English, wanted to intern with the Hogsett campaign.
"I just remember you being really thoughtful and smart and that's who you want on a campaign,” Roberts told Ellert.
So Roberts hired Ellert, introducing her to Robert's then boss and Hogsett's campaign manager, Thomas Cook.
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Today, both women sit next to each other in a room to discuss a topic that still sometimes brings tears even now: what they say is the sexual harassment both endured at separate times, when Cook was their boss.
After Roberts hired Ellert as an intern, she didn't stay with the campaign long. That’s because she says Cook started sexually harassing her soon after she started working for him.
In one encounter, Roberts said she and Cook kissed, but does not remember how it started.
“In my situation, I was often intoxicated when he and I had these encounters, particularly that first one, and I was always his subordinate and he could always fire me and threatened to fire me at times. Because of those two things, the intoxication and power dynamic that was never a consensual relationship,” Roberts said, adding that after that first encounter, Cook left a letter on her desk and acknowledged he had crossed a line.
Roberts agreed and said she tried to set boundaries, but says Cook retaliated when met with her distance, sometimes belittling and screaming at her in front of co-workers.
Asked if she thought about reporting Cook’s behavior at the time, she said “Who would I have told? My supervisor who was the one harassing me and treating me poorly?” Roberts asked. “The then-candidate, who was also pretty difficult to work for and not always the kindest to me who trusted this person? It was going to be my word against Thomas. It never seemed reasonable to do at the time. My mental health took a beating. I rapidly lost weight, and I wanted to hurt myself. I decided I had to quit."
So she left the Hogsett campaign in June 2015. It was two years later, in May of 2017, when Roberts says she tried to report what happened with Cook to Mayor Hogsett and those close to him.
"Several emails over several months,” said Roberts.
“Part of why I started to try and report this in 2017 was I could no longer live with the idea I would have a role in this happening to somebody else,” Roberts said.
Roberts says she never heard back from Hogsett directly, but instead was contacted by an attorney who worked with the campaign. But Roberts says she wanted to speak to the mayor, eventually getting that opportunity when she saw him in public in 2019. That’s when Robert says she confronted Hogsett about how he had handled Cook.
According to the City of Indianapolis Office of Corporation Counsel, Cook was reprimanded in October 2017 and prohibited from having romantic relationships with any co-workers, subject to discipline, including termination. The Office of Corporation Counsel says an outside law firm specializing in employment law handled the investigation and sanctions.
In an emailed statement, the city’s Office of Corporation Counsel said:
“This reprimand and prohibition was based upon Mr. Cook’s inappropriate romantic advances to a coworker in 2014 when both were employed on the Hogsett for Mayor campaign, which were initially communicated to the administration in May 2017.”
“I do not believe there was an investigation in 2017 because I have yet to see documentation of that,” said Roberts.
“Because I wasn’t interviewed, I don’t know how that investigation had any integrity,” she added.
What Roberts didn't know at the time she first emailed Hogsett about Cook in 2017 was that her former intern, Caroline Ellert, was heading down a similar road.
Ellert had been working for the Hogsett administration since 2016 and Cook, the then-deputy mayor, was her boss. Ellert says Cook started texting her late at night, sometimes about work, but often the texts would turn personal.
“It slowly veered into him wanting to take me out for drink to talk about work and I tried to push it off many times,” Ellert recalled. “I wasn’t comfortable having drinks with him. He was older and had a lot of power."
Ellert says Cook also started sending her poems and leaving notes on her desk.
“When I first thought it started to cross the line, I said something to him and he said, ‘You’re making me feel like I’m a bad person. You’re making me feel like I’m creepy. My intentions are pure. I want to get to know you,’” Ellert said Cook told her.
According to Ellert, she saved every text. She reads them now with fresher eyes.
"What I see is me saying over and over again that I'm uncomfortable, that I don't want this and he would apologize and kind of turn it back around on me and make me feel bad because I was making him feel creepy, and that emotional tactic worked on me,” Ellert explained, saying she eventually met Cook for drinks, one on one.
At some point, their contact became physical. Ellert says, even then, she tried to set boundaries, at one point asking for space.
"When I would pull away, his response got a lot darker,” Ellert said.
“He would badger me with texts over and over again. He would call me over and over again. He would show up at my apartment and, at a certain point, to live my life and get through each day, I had to sort of give him what he wanted,” Ellert said.
“There was one instance in particular that I’m certain was sexual assault and I’m certain because I know I had said no many times and he continued anyway,” Ellert recalled.
Like Roberts had done almost four years earlier, Ellert eventually left her job too and instead went to work for the Marion County Democratic party.
“I thought I was escaping by leaving a job I really loved, but he had a lot of influence over there,” Ellert said. “He would show up at the workplace and I couldn’t do anything about it."
Ellert eventually returned to work for the city briefly in 2021, after Cook resigned from the Hogsett administration in December 2020.
According to the City’s Office of Corporation Counsel, in October of 2020, someone reported Cook for having a romantic relationship with a subordinate coworker, despite the earlier prohibition from 2017 against doing so. The Office of Corporation Counsel says both represented the relationship as consensual.
In August 2022, Ellert made the decision to leave Indianapolis and her new position with the city, she says in part, because she knew Cook would still be involved with Hogsett’s upcoming re-election campaign.
"I just knew I couldn't go through that for my mental health, so I decided to leave. It was a fresh start,” Ellert said.
By 2023, Ellert began hearing rumors that Cook was making advances to other women on the campaign. That’s when she says she made the decision to tell Hogsett about her experience with Cook.
“I knew I had to tell the mayor and do everything I could to make sure he was removed from positions of power,” Ellert said.
According to the City of Indianapolis Office of Corporation Counsel, in October 2023, Mayor Hogsett directed that Cook no longer have any association with the mayor’s re-election campaign and ended all contracts Cook had negotiated between his new place of employment and the City of Indianapolis.
In an emailed statement, the Office of Corporation Counsel said that decision by the mayor was made “based upon new allegations of inappropriate romantic conduct with a subordinate co-worker, first reported to the administration in September 2023, that had not been previously disclosed by Mr. Cook or otherwise known by the administration.”
Now both Roberts and Ellert wonder if things could have been different had Cook been let go sooner, when Roberts first raised concerns in 2017.
“He clearly kept this person around for plenty of time to take advantage of other people,” Roberts said. “And I wonder why the mayor felt Thomas was so important to his administration that he couldn’t let him go."
"She did everything she could to be heard and no one listened,” said Ellert of the woman sitting next to her, a woman, who sometimes grabbed Ellert’s hand as she spoke now.
“If people had listened to her, it could have helped me and it could have helped other women,” Ellert said.
Both Ellert and Roberts say a third woman has also come forward to them and shared that she had a similar experience with Cook while working for him. They both wonder if there are more. It’s a question that keeps them up at night.
"Lauren and I both needed someone to be advocates for us, so that's what we're trying to do for other women. We want to be the advocate for other women that we needed,” said Ellert.
That’s why Roberts and Ellert are demanding the City of Indianapolis put better protections and sexual harassment training in place for all city and county employees, along with elected officials, not just supervisors.
“It’s not just about one man, “said Ellert. “It’s about the system and this is happening at all levels of government, every industry, Democrats and Republicans and I think it’s a conversation a lot of companies, levels of government in Indianapolis and Indiana need to be having.”
“There needs to be accountability and regardless of who’s at the top of city government, the system needs to change,” said Roberts.
That's why both women say they're willing to revisit what they call a trauma they now share. One they hope speaking out about now brings change for those who come after them.
13News contacted Thomas Cook last week at his home for a comment. He did not have one. 13News contacted Cook again Monday via text message regarding this story. He did not respond.
On Aug. 12, 2024, Mayor Hogsett outlined a proposal to improve sexual harassment protections for city-county employees.