Rep. Matt Manweller to file lawsuit against CWU over termination

Rep. Matt Manweller (R-Ellensburg) told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that he is filing a lawsuit for potentially $2 million or more against Central Washington University for breach of contract, defamation of character, and workplace harassment. The school fired him from his position as a political science professor earlier this week for “inappropriate conduct.”

“They said I violated the conflict of interest standards and that I intentionally interfered with their investigation,” he said.

Nine months ago, CWU placed Manweller on administrative leave for sexual harassment. He believes that his firing is simply an indictment that the school drummed up when it couldn’t find evidence of sexual harassment.

RELATED: Rep. Matt Manweller placed on leave over allegations

“It’s interesting that after nine months and $120,000, they couldn’t prove sexual harassment, so they went down this path of something else,” he said.

According to Manweller, he believes that “interfering with the investigation” means that he did not obey the university’s order to not speak with any former students.

“It’s impossible for me not to interact with ex-students — there are thousands of them,” Manweller said, pointing out that his own assistant is an ex-student.

In a statement given by CWU on Tuesday, the university gave additional reasons for Manweller’s termination concerning his portrayal of the investigation in the media. The school said that it “deeply regrets that Dr. Manweller has chosen to make public statements minimizing, trivializing, even ridiculing, the female students who have come forward with legitimate concerns.”

Last December, at the height of the #MeToo movement, a Seattle Times article delved into two past sexual harassment investigations that the university had conducted on Manweller. The article stated that, according to public records that the Times obtained, female students had alleged that Manweller made sexual propositions toward them at a bar and in his office during office hours.

After this article was published, Manweller said, the newspaper received three different emails from women. One woman said that Manweller had called her voice “unique,” one said to watch out for him, and one said that she had gone out with Manweller on a date.

It was these three emails, Manweller said, that prompted the university’s newest investigation.

“They used that as a justification not to investigate those three emails, they said — and we’ve seen the contract — they said, ‘We want you to investigate everything about Matt, we want you to go into his personal life, we want you to go over to Olympia and investigate his legislative life, and we want you to investigate any and everything in his entire 16-year career,'” he said, describing the university’s budget for the process as a “Bob Mueller blank check, money is no object.”

Manweller and his team conducted a public records request of every other time a professor was accused of sexual harassment and investigated.

“I am the only professor where they have ever hired an investigator and said, ‘Budget is no object, spend as much money as you want, and you can look at everything — you are not bound by the actual allegations against him, you can go look for things,'” he said.

Manweller explained that he had gone on a date with a graduate student, but that she was not in his department, that the date had occurred many years ago before he was married, and that this is perfectly legal.

In another instance, Manweller said he had run into a former student at the Legislature. They went out for a quick glass of wine to discuss her career and job prospects. Afterward, she went back to her office and he went back to the House floor.

“At the end of the meeting, I helped her with her jacket and then I opened the door for her on the way out,” he said. “And so she went and filed a complaint saying I had turned a business meeting into a date-like meeting, because by opening the door and helping her with her jacket, that’s made it more of a romantic meeting than a business meeting.”

The top piece of evidence that the investigator is presenting, according to Manweller, is a video showing him thanking a woman — the same woman with whom he had the meeting — who handed him a file of papers at a work session. In the video, many of the people around the table can be seen thanking the woman for handing them files.

Manweller said that accusations over the last decade include looking at a student who sat in the front row more than at other students; sitting with a student in the cafeteria at lunch; giving his 23-year-old babysitter a glass of wine in his house; standing too close to a woman at a reception; and asking a student to email his Gmail account rather than his Legislative email address.

“Central Washington is not responding to allegations, they’re manufacturing allegations,” he said.

He finds the allegations ridiculous and intends to fight them with all of his power.

“I am going to stand up to these people and I am going to fight until my last, dying day,” he said.

In the meantime, Manweller is focused on November’s election, which he hopes will result in him returning to the state Legislature, where he has served since 2012. Whether or not he is re-elected is “up to the voters,” but he noted that he got 64 percent of the vote in the primary. He believes that voters are on his side in the investigation.

“At the end of the day, what I have told people is, you give in to a bully, and you just encourage them to bully someone else,” he said.