Matt Schlapp, president of the Conservative Political Action Coalition that will hold its annual confab outside Washington beginning Wednesday, said he’s been hounded by certain news media members since an anonymous GOP aide accused him of unwelcome sexual overtures.
The still-unnamed accuser, a man, is now suing Mr. Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, who both deny the allegations.
The accusations, Mr. Schlapp told The Washington Times, have brought reporters to his home late at night and calling CPAC staffers nonstop. He said they are “trying to find any piece of dirt that they can on the person running this organization.”
He said the drama and intrigue spurred by the lawsuit, however, will not eclipse the CPAC conference, which will be the most influential gathering of party conservatives ahead of the 2024 presidential primaries.
The conference, like past events, will showcase the emerging Republican presidential primary field, including former President Donald Trump, who leads all candidates in most early polling and will deliver the keynote address.
But this year’s CPAC, themed “Protecting America Now,” will shut out journalists whom Mr. Schlapp accuses of being unfair and unethical in their coverage of him as well as the conference.
“We’re not going to treat real journalists in the same way as the pseudo-journalists,” said Mr. Schlapp, 55. He did not detail which outlets might fall into the latter category.
Mr. Schlapp would not disclose which reporters may be refused admittance into CPAC, which returns to the Gaylord Hotel at National Harbor in Maryland after two years in Florida because of COVID-19 restrictions in the Washington area.
The event runs Wednesday through Saturday and concludes with a closely watched straw poll measuring the popularity of a field of declared and potential GOP presidential candidates.
Those candidates include former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and biotech tycoon Vivek Ramaswamy, each of whom plans to attend and speak at the conference.
Mr. Schlapp will helm CPAC weeks after news reports emerged about an anonymous accuser who claims Mr. Schlapp made unwelcome advances during a car drive in Macon, Georgia, where Mr. Schlapp was attending campaign events for GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
The accuser, a 39-year-old aide working for the Walker campaign, made the allegations in a story published in the Daily Beast, a left-leaning news site.
Other outlets reported the story and Mr. Schlapp, who denies the claims, said he’s been hounded unfairly by the press.
Reporters have knocked on his door of his home, where he lives with Mrs. Schlapp and their five children. Reporters have also shown up at the homes of CPAC staff and called them repeatedly.
“This has become an outrageous example of hate-filled politics,” Mr. Schlapp said.
He believes the media have aggressively and unfairly pursued the story to try to take him down, along with CPAC because the conservative politics they represent do not align with the ideology of some journalists.
“It’s an attempt to say, not just that you’re wrong from a policy standpoint, but to try to destroy you, destroy your family, destroy your marriage, destroy your employment situation,” Mr. Schlapp told The Times.
The CPAC convention, which Mr. Schlapp has presided over since 2014, has increasingly become a target of unfair reporting by left-wing outlets, he said.
He hopes to halt the trend this year by filtering out certain news outlets.
“They do not want CPAC to continue to go on,” Mr. Schlapp said.
In 2021, several news outlets reported that the CPAC stage design looked similar to a neo-Nazi symbol. Last year’s CPAC coverage included an article by Rolling Stone magazine about “dark militant speeches” and “thinly veiled calls for violence.”
The 2022 CPAC theme, “Awake Not Woke,” centered on a conservative pushback against cancel culture and so-called woke politics that silence conservative viewpoints.
This year, it’s Mr. Schlapp who could become the focus of negative coverage by some news outlets.
The accuser filed a lawsuit last month seeking damages from Mr. Schlapp over the alleged unwanted sexual advance and against Mr. and Mrs. Schlapp and a GOP operative for defamation related to their response to the news stories about the claim.
The suit, which seeks $9.4 million in damages, included graphic details provided by the accuser of an unwanted advance he says Mr. Schlapp made. In a legal filing in February, both Mr. Schlapp and Mrs. Schlapp denied all charges made in the lawsuit and asked the court to force the accuser to identify himself.
“Mr. Schlapp has no record whatsoever of sexual or other misconduct,” their motion states. “But by broadcasting his false allegations to the public, Plaintiff has already succeeded in dragging Mr. Schlapp’s name through the mud, to the delight of his political opponents and journalists hungry for a scandal, however frivolous.”
