The sexual harassment probe that prompted Bob Hooper to resign from his seat in the Vermont House of Representatives earlier this week dealt chiefly with a single formal complaint, filed in 2025, by an unnamed complainant.
But in a legal agreement signed by the Burlington Democrat, the House’s internal sexual harassment panel also alluded to prior allegations that indicated a “pattern of conduct,” though it offered few other details. In interviews with Vermont Public in the past week, three women said that Hooper touched them, uninvited, in ways that made them deeply uncomfortable.
One said Hooper massaged her in a committee room. Another claimed he pulled her in for a kiss at an election night party. A third said he grabbed her and began dancing with her in the Statehouse cafeteria. Hooper, a four-term lawmaker and former leader of the state employees’ union, has either denied the allegations outright or, in the case of the dance, said it was “innocent.”
Hooper told Vermont Public last week he was “sarcastic,” a “jokester” and that if he was guilty of anything, it was of being too familiar in settings that merit more formality.
The finding that Hooper had violated sexual harassment rules stemmed from an edited photograph he had sent of a fellow lawmaker to his committee, as well as “inappropriate remarks,” according to the stipulation and consent order he signed. Hooper has denied there was anything sexual about either, and argued that using the sexual harassment panel to investigate the incidents had “weaponized, to some degree,” the process.
“The House doesn’t really seem to have a convenient slot for what you would consider uncomfortable work environments,” he said last week.
Vermont Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, who filed an informal complaint about Hooper to the House Sexual Harassment and Prevention Panel in 2022, said his recent comments motivated her to speak out.
“His narrative, that he was somehow the victim here, just made me so incredibly angry, and I knew I had a story that countered that,” said Vyhovsky, a Chittenden County Progressive/Democrat.
Vyhovsky was a freshman member of the House when she said Hooper sent her a private message during a Zoom call at the start of the 2021 legislative session, which was held virtually because of the pandemic. She recalled that he told her it was “nice to finally have some pretty young faces in the body.”
The comment felt “a little gross and inappropriate,” Vyhovsky told Vermont Public this week, but she ignored it at the time.
Matters escalated, according to Vyhovsky, when lawmakers returned in person to the Statehouse in 2022. Both Vyhovsky and Hooper served on the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs, and she said one day she found herself alone with Hooper in the committee’s room. Vyhovsky said she was sitting down when he stood up, came up behind her and started massaging her as he asked whether a bill was in order.
“I leaned away from him because I was not comfortable with him rubbing my shoulders,” Vyhovsky said. “And he took that as an invitation to go further down on my back and start rubbing my lower back, which made me incredibly uncomfortable.”
Hooper denied Vyhovsky’s account.
“I do not have any recollection of anything close to this happening with anyone,” he wrote in an email, adding that he did not get along with Vyhovsky and had complained about Progressives running in Democratic primaries.
“I think Tanya is seeking some kind of revenge,” he added.
There were no witnesses to the incident, but Vyhovsky said she went to Sarah Copeland Hanzas, who was then leading the government operations committee, the following week.
"An umpteen number of inappropriate incidents may have happened between then and now, and it's taken this long for there to be any consequences."Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont secretary of state and former Vermont House member
Copeland Hanzas, who is now the Vermont Secretary of State, couldn’t remember the specifics of what Vyhovsky had alleged at the time. But she confirmed to Vermont Public that the two had spoken, and that she had encouraged Vyhovsky to report her story to the House’s sexual harassment panel. Vyhovsky, she said, was not the first young woman to have complained to her about Hooper.
“I feel disappointed that that was probably four years ago. An umpteen number of inappropriate incidents may have happened between then and now, and it's taken this long for there to be any consequences,” Copeland Hanzas said.
Vyhovsky also provided Vermont Public correspondence between her and a legislative lawyer, which confirmed she had filed a complaint with the panel in 2022 and included a copy of the written narrative of the event that she provided at the time.
Ultimately, she moved forward with the panel through its informal complaint procedure. That meant that while her report was documented and Hooper was privately spoken to by the panel’s chair, he would not be told details of the incident that could identify her.
“I was frankly afraid of what would happen to me if I named myself,” Vyhovsky said.
Like Vyhovsky, Becca White had just been elected to the Vermont House when she had an encounter with Hooper in late 2018. They were at the Statehouse for a legislative orientation ahead of the 2019 session, she said, when they bumped into each other in the cafeteria.
“He basically just kept stepping in front of me, and finally, like, grabbed me like we were fake dancing, and put his hands in, on my lower back side in a way that felt really uncomfortable,” the Windsor County Democrat, who is now a member of the Vermont Senate, said this week.
White said she laughed it off in the moment and didn’t report the incident. She was 23 at the time, she said, and didn’t want to be the lawmaker who, on “day one,” filed a sexual harassment complaint.
But Mitzi Johnson, the then-speaker of the House, had been there in the cafeteria, and pulled White into a meeting soon after to discuss the incident. Johnson told Vermont Public she couldn’t quite remember what she had seen, but that it was “weird” enough to bring it up with White and later talk to Hooper.
“It was all the stuff that was a toe over the line — that somebody with better manners or better consideration for another person's experience wouldn't be doing.”Mitzi Johnson, former speaker of the Vermont House
Johnson said she received a separate complaint about Hooper as soon as she appointed him to the House government operations committee from someone who was concerned about having to testify in front of him. And on another occasion, Johnson said she reprimanded Hooper for similar conduct.
“I don't remember the incident at all, but I do remember having another conversation in my office with him, saying: ‘Bob, we've been here before. What the hell?’” she said.
His general response, Johnson said, was that people did not understand his sense of humor, or that he hadn’t meant anything by it.
“It's that brand of not taking responsibility that makes it somebody else's fault,” she said.
Johnson recalled how the lawyer who did sexual harassment training for lawmakers often talked about the “stupid zone.” That, Johnson said, is “where Bob lived.”
“It was all the stuff that was a toe over the line — that somebody with better manners or better consideration for another person's experience wouldn't be doing,” she said.
Hooper did not address his conversations with Johnson, and said he believed the incident with White had actually taken place at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, across the street from the Statehouse. The “quick waltz move” was, he said, “as innocent as one could get.”
“At the time she was grinning, I thought nothing of it,” he said.
Kate Lapp was a 24-year-old political staffer in September of 2018 when she said she crossed paths with Hooper at a birthday party for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders held on the Spirit of Ethan Allen cruise ship.
“As I was passing him, he grabbed my butt. And at the time, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how strange. We're in close quarters — but also that felt kind of intentional,’” she said in an interview this week.
After another incident two months later at the Democrats’ election night party, Lapp said, “I was not able to sort of convince myself that nothing had happened.”
Lapp said she went to shake Hooper’s hand when his race was called and congratulate him on flipping a seat that had been held by a Republican. In response, she said he pulled her in for a kiss, which landed on her cheek.
“I was stunned at his brazenness in doing that, and also a little bit like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I didn't turn my head — I don't know where he would have kissed me,’” she said.
Hooper said that Lapp’s account was “a fabrication.” He then wrote in a subsequent message that he had actually confused Lapp with someone else, and that Vermont Public should disregard what he’d written about her.
“My interaction with Kate was very limited and further — to my mind — discounts the story,” he said.
Lapp, like White and Vyhovsky, said that the figures in authority she spoke to about Hooper were generally supportive, and sought ways to make her feel safe.
But all three also expressed frustration that such incidents had apparently continued to happen.
“I'm a good Democratic team player,” Lapp said. “I'm not saying we need to, like, take this guy down without someone in the wings. But, like, this has been an open secret for eight years. How do we not have someone in the wings?”
