The chain of events that threaten to unravel Attorney General Marc Dann's administration, and possibly his political career, appeared to start in March when Cindy Stankoski and Vanessa Stout accused their boss, Anthony Gutierrez, of sexual harassment.
In reality, things were set in motion five months earlier when Mariellen Aranda, a telecommunication assistant, complained to human resources about Gutierrez, who also was her boss.
"I hadn't been in state government for long," Aranda testified in the just-concluded investigation, "but I knew enough that this was a ticking time bomb for the office."
She was right, more than she ever could have imagined.
Stankoski and Stout's complaints -- that Gutierrez repeatedly pressured them to go out for drinks and to have sex, touched them inappropriately and made lewd comments -- first came to light in an April 6 Dispatch story .
Although the Dann administrators initially warned other news media to stay away from the story because it contained "legally actionable inaccuracies," they nevertheless decided within 36 hours to suspend Gutierrez. A week later, Leo Jennings III, Dann's communication director and another longtime friend, was suspended.
The ensuing internal investigation ultimately resulted in Gutierrez being fired for a number of reasons, including drinking on the job, sexual harassment and apparently using his state computer to run his Youngstown construction business from his office. He had his office soundproofed to prevent conversations from being overheard.
Jennings was fired because he tried to get a witness, Jennifer Urban, a staff attorney, to lie under oath in her testimony. Edgar Simpson, Dann's chief of staff, was asked to resign or be fired because he knew about the sexual-harassment complaints and failed to act.
Jessica Utovich, the woman with whom Dann was romantically linked, resigned late Thursday.
The investigation triggered Dann's emotional confession to a long-rumored romantic relationship.
Months before the drama unfolded, however, Aranda's complaint on Oct. 10 was pivotal. It put Dann's administrators on notice that they had a serious problem and contained cell-phone text messages that months later would become central to the probe.
Dann's top administrators ignored Aranda's complaint and tried to sweep it under the rug, foreshadowing the approach they tried to take, unsuccessfully this time, in dealing with Stankoski and Stout.
Female sexual-harassment complainants were told, "We have to take this to the 17th floor," where Dann and his top administrators worked. Good answers never came back.
"There was an active effort in the office by longtime friends at the administrative level to overlook the transgressions by Mr. Gutierrez over a long period of time," concluded the report by Ben Espy, executive assistant attorney general, and Julie Pfeiffer, senior assistant attorney general.
Hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews with attorney general employees released Friday point to a consistent, if bumbling, attempt to cover up complaints against Gutierrez. The solution in Aranda's and Stout's cases was to transfer the women to other jobs. To deal with Stankoski, they simply turned Gutierrez's desk so he wasn't directly facing her.
Stephanie Bostos-Demers, human-resources director, became increasingly uncomfortable with Gutierrez's antics and the complaints that inevitably followed, she told Espy and Pfeiffer.
She said she told Simpson, "If you're not going to investigate, we have an obligation to take swift remedial action to prevent direct harassment.
"Mariellen Aranda came to us back in whenever, you know, we were on notice something might be interesting then. Here we go again."
Even the human-resources director was afraid of Gutierrez.
"I thought, 'Oh, boy, this is Marc Dann's best friend' and … I had heard these stories about the Mafia, and I was afraid I was going to lose my job."
Aranda said in her testimony that she was fearful of going to HR to complain, but she decided to go "because it had finally been enough for me. That day he had told me to shut up and not speak unless I was spoken to, and that was just what did it for me.
"I mean, I couldn't handle it anymore, with the sexual inappropriateness, the ethics issues that I was concerned about, with everything."
Aranda remained worried when she was interviewed by Espy and Pfeiffer on April 17, even though Gutierrez had been suspended.
"It's just so upsetting to me that I went to the office with these concerns -- these major concerns -- and nothing was done," she said.
In her Oct. 10 complaint, handled by Molly Taylor in the human-resources office, Aranda included a series of text messages she received on Sept. 10 from Stankoski. She submitted them, without telling Stankoski, to strengthen her case against Gutierrez.
On that September evening after work, Gutierrez persuaded Stankoski to accompany him to some Downtown bars. She then accepted Dann's personal invitation to come over for pizza and more drinks to the Dublin-area condo then shared by Dann, Gutierrez and Jennings.
Shortly after Gutierrez took her there, Stankoski felt sick and on the edge of panic. In a journal that became part of the investigative record, she recalled thinking, "What the hell am I doing here? I'm drunk and I'm stuck."
She urgently text-messaged Aranda:
im at marc dann's place…
pick me up.
im here with boss and marc dann…Jessica Utavioch is here.
Girl…im in a weird situation.. iem w marc dann….
drunnnnk.
The text messages Aranda submitted never became part of an official complaint because the Dann administration decided not to investigate. However, records show they ended up in the hands of several people, including Gutierrez, Jennings, Simpson and possibly Alyssa Lenhoff, Dann's wife. More on the story.
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