Oregon Democrat Janelle Bynum received a text message from her campaign manager in November 2022 leveling sexual harassment allegations against her top field representative. Bynum, an Oregon state legislator now running for Congress against Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, said she didn’t want to hear anything about it. "I asked you not to send me anything and I meant that," she told her campaign manager. "I really can't take anything else on my plate."
Those texts, first reported earlier this month by Fox News, prompted a Democratic operative in the state to file a complaint with the Oregon legislature accusing Bynum of a "willful coverup." Bynum has dismissed the complaint as a "smear," arguing that she responded to the allegations adequately when she "flagged" them for the employer of the accused, a political action committee known as FuturePAC, which serves as the political arm of the Oregon House Democrats and which had placed the staffer on Bynum's campaign.
Documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, however, cast doubt on that claim. They show that the staffer in question, identified in the complaint as 24-year-old Collin Ledford, landed a job in the state legislature in January of this year, roughly a year after Bynum learned of the sexual harassment allegations against him. So the allegations do not appear to have impacted Ledford's standing with Oregon House Democrats, an indication that Bynum did not actually sound much of an alarm with her colleagues, allies, and affiliated political groups—or that they ignored her warnings.
Ledford's boss, personnel records reveal, was until August Democrat Thuy Tran, a member of Oregon’s House Interim Committee on Judiciary alongside Bynum who has endorsed her congressional campaign. (Ledford requested a leave of absence in July and now works for East County Rising, a left-wing PAC that has long backed Bynum, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn page.)
Tran did not respond to a request for comment.
Private text messages and social media posts lend credence to the allegations against Ledford.
In a now-deleted 2019 tweet, a screenshot of which was obtained by the Free Beacon, a Portland-area woman shared a screenshot of Ledford's Instagram account, writing, "I know lots of girls in Vancouver have been harassed by Collin Ledford and usually I wouldn't do this but now he's hitting up my 16 year old sister offering to buy her dinner in exchange for sex. I'm livid." The woman later said Ledford was "bragging to my sister about 'the most illegal thing he's ever done' which was getting nudes from a 14 year old when he was 18."
Other women weighed in to call Ledford a "CREEP" who "tried sliding into my friends dms when he was 18 and she was knowingly 15."
Ledford, for his part, wrote in an Instagram message obtained by the Free Beacon that his "nickname in high-school was Creepy Collin, it was very Trumpian." The remark came shortly after Ledford wrote of changing his "age settings" in dating apps because "the 18 year olds were duplicitous."
The revelations could reignite the growing scandal, which has dogged Bynum's campaign against Chavez-DeRemer. Last week, the Democrat dodged reporters who asked her about the scandal, dismissing it as a "sideshow."
Bynum, Ledford, and FuturePAC did not respond to requests for comment.
Bynum faced criticism for her response to the sexual harassment allegations when Fox News initially published text messages between Bynum and her then-campaign manager, Coner Carroll.
Those messages included screenshots of the social media posts accusing Ledford of pursuing minors. Carroll confirmed the messages are authentic and said he sent them after a November 2022 exit interview with Bynum held shortly after the Democrat secured a fourth term in the state legislature.
When Carroll tried to raise the accusations with Bynum in that meeting, which was held over the phone, he says she hung up. He followed up by text message, asking Bynum whether she was aware of the inappropriate social media posts.
When Bynum dismissed Carroll, indicating that she had "asked you not to send me anything and I meant that," Carroll pressed the issue. "Well as unfortunate as this may be for you and Collin I am NOT sitting by while someone like this gets off scott [sic] free treating young women abusively like that," Carroll wrote. "If he gets a job down there this won't be the last you hear of it, I promise."
"Are you threatening me?" Bynum responded. "Woah. Easy there," Carroll said. "I am promising you and anyone else that I am not ok with someone treating young women like that."
"I'll consider reporting your actions," Bynum concluded. "Thank you for letting me know."
Bynum now says she went on to report the allegations—not to law enforcement or to the state legislative body that handles complaints of harassment, known as the Legislative Equity Office, but to Ledford’s employer at the time, FuturePAC. As Oregon House Democrats' official campaign operation, the PAC paid Ledford to work on Bynum's campaign.
Ledford then scored a legislative assistant job with Tran, requesting a leave of absence from her office in July, a month before he began working as a field director for East County Rising. It's unclear if he intends to return to Tran's office after the November elections. East County Rising did not respond to a request for comment.
One week before Ledford requested his leave, on July 15, another Democratic operative, Kelie McWilliams, filed a complaint with the Oregon legislature’s Legislative Equity Office accusing Bynum of willfully covering up the allegations against Ledford. McWilliams served as campaign manager for Bynum's Democratic primary opponent, Jamie McLeod Skinner, whom Bynum defeated by 40 points in May.
In her complaint, obtained by the Free Beacon, McWilliams said she "was not in a position to do anything" about Bynum's "coverup" during the primary race. "It has continued to weigh on my conscience," she wrote, "so I'm turning it over to the Legislature to deal with internally."
"Ledford has a persistent history of pursuing underage girls," McWilliams continued. "Bynum received credible information regarding one of her campaign staff sexually harassing and assaulting young volunteers, and not only did she fail to report it, but she also threatened to report the person who blew the whistle on Ledford's behavior."
"Given her prior behavior and my experience with Bynum personally while working in the Capitol, I'm also concerned about retaliation now that she is campaigning to be in Congress."
The Legislative Equity Office declined to take up the investigation, saying it could not do so because McWilliams "was neither the impacted party nor a witness," according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle. That reasoning suggests the office could have investigated the allegations had Bynum worked with Carroll to report them. And while the office is not investigating Ledford or Bynum, Oregon State Police Capt. Kyle Kennedy told the Capital Chronicle the agency is investigating a similar complaint.
While Carroll and McWilliams are both Democrats, Bynum has derided the complaint against her as a GOP-driven "smear." McWilliams denies that charge.
"I don't know what happened, but no, I did not go looking to shop the story around. I certainly didn't ask to be targeted in the way I'm being targeted now," she told Portland-area ABC affiliate KATU.
"All I wanted out of this was to say, hey, this thing happened. It was wrong, like we can do better, and we can support victims, and we should probably be doing that, but the truth of the matter is there was no intent here for me to take down a congressional campaign."