Black Lawmaker Under Fire for Statement about Female Interns

Black Lawmaker Under Fire for Statement about Female Interns


After making a shocking ‘snake’ statement to a 17-year-old girl, Connecticut State Representative Ernest Hewett, who was demoted from his deputy speaker position, tried to explain himself to a newspaper and may have gotten himself into even more trouble, the Huffington Post reports.

Rep. Hewitt made reference to a ‘snake under his desk’ to a female high school senior who had told him she was afraid of snakes.

“If you’re bashful, I got a snake sitting under my desk here,” Hewett told her.

He tried to convince the Hartford Courant that his record is completely clean of inappropriate behavior with females, saying

“I purposely will not have female interns. My intern now is a male. I want to keep it like that. I’ve had female interns in the past that sit in my office all day. I thought it was totally weird and I didn’t want another. As a matter of fact, I went four, maybe six years without having an intern at all because of stuff like that. I have a male intern, the last two I’ve had were male.”

He said it’s not completely in his control the gender of his interns but that he prefers not to be assigned females because “that way that keeps me good and that keeps everybody else good.”

Do you think he has a point?


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