“Don’t Say Gay” Florida Republican Accused of Sexually Harassing Two Male Staffers

Fabian Basabe used to be known as the “male Paris Hilton” in tabloid circles, a cosmopolitan socialite famous for being famous (being the son of a wealthy Ecuadorian businessman probably helped, too). Now, as a Florida state representative known for pushing anti-LGBTQ policies, he is being accused of sexual harassment by two male former staffers.

On Thursday, the Miami Herald reported on the lawsuit, which said Basabe made repeated sexual comments and advances towards a legislative aide and an intern. The suit detailed accusations including Basabe nonconsensually slapping the aide’s butt while at an elementary school career day, and groping and trying to kiss a Florida State University graduate student before then going on to hire him as an intern.

The lawsuit, filed by former intern Jacob Cutbirth, former aide Nicolas Frevola, and his mother Janette Frevola, goes into great detail of what allegedly transpired. According to the accusations, Cutbirth first met Basabe and Frevola at a Tallahassee bar in December. Later, Cutbirth was asked to drive the drunk Florida representative back to his hotel.

While Cutbirth was driving, Basabe allegedly “began to physically touch and grope him and to grab at him to try to kiss him.” Cutbirth says he “repeatedly told Basabe to stop touching him” and refused a request to come back to Basabe’s hotel room. Cutbirth accepted a part-time unpaid internship in Basabe’s office just weeks later; he saw the opportunity as an “apology.”

But things did not end there. Cutbirth alleges that Basabe repeatedly requested that he “flirt with him” while in the office, and that Basabe described him as “eye candy” in front of other people. Basabe allegedly even suggested that Cutbirth should break off his engagement with his girlfriend and instead “explore his sexuality by having sex with men.”

In a different incident, Basabe allegedly told his aide, Frevola, that he wanted “all of that butt” before slapping Frevola’s buttocks in the back of a fifth grade classroom, while another aide spoke to students during career day.

On another occasion, Basabe allegedly showed Cutbirth and Frevola a photograph of a naked man on his phone, and told the two that he was a “bottom,” while they should be “tops.”

Cutbirth says he quit in March due to “pervasive sexual harassment.”

The lawsuit also carries a previous claim made by Frevola that Basabe slapped him across the face at an event hosted by one of the largest Tallahassee lobbying firms, following Ron DeSantis’s inauguration. Allegedly, while Frevola was talking to a lobbyist, Basabe—who had apparently been drinking all day—approached and asked Frevola if the lobbyist was the woman he had “slept with” a few weeks ago. The pair were both shocked by the question and denied the inquiry. Basabe apparently grew angry, saying “Oh, so you are cheating,” before slapping Frevola and telling him to stand in the corner.

Basabe has been criticized for running as a supposed social moderate, while supporting Florida’s slate of anti-LGBTQ bills. That includes the infamous Don’t Say Gay bill, a measure that prevents teachers from asking students their preferred pronouns, and another that makes it a crime to host drag shows with anyone under the age of 18 present.

Cutbirth and Frevola said they didn’t know what they could’ve done in response to all the alleged incidents, as Basabe apparently made them both sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Asked earlier as to whether he had indeed required them to do so, Basabe simply said, “There’s an application package, whatever is in there is in there. I don’t deal with the hiring process.”

The Florida legislature doesn’t require or provide NDAs for staff. Basabe has since accepted forcing staff to sign NDAs, and defended doing so. Still, he has denied the broader allegations, even calling the accusations from Frevola a “false” one made by “lazy, entitled, unscrupulous, self-involved, ungrateful, lying scum.”

Basabe once appeared on the reality TV show Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive, which depicted privileged children of celebrities experiencing the rugged life of working on a Colorado cattle ranch. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that comes out of [Fabian’s] mouth,” one viewer remarked in an IMDB review of Filthy Rich. “He is the most disrespectful, lazy, arrogant person I have [ever] come across.”

“Every week I am amazed at what a spoiled, immature, brat Fabian is,” another said.

In 2006, he was arrested in New York for drunk driving and running a red light in his Hummer. He sued a New York nightclub $2 million after the doorman, who he called a “sand negro,” didn’t allow he and his friends to enter.

In December 2019, Basabe reportedly called a Black Miami publicist the n-word at a party at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach.

“When he’s leaving, he starts screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘peasant,’ ‘whore,’ ‘bitch’ at me … When he’s 50 yards away, he screams, ‘F–k you [n-word] bitch,’” publicist Tayo Otiti said.

Basabe has since viewed himself as a reformed man. “[Raising my son] has made me realize and focus and make up for any wrongs in my past,” he said in 2021.

Rudy Giuliani has been embroiled in scandal for years, most recently for being accused of promising to pay a woman a $1 million annual salary to be his close associate, and instead raping and abusing her over the course of two years. He also was allegedly constantly drunk, plotted to sell pardons to criminals, and regularly made racist and antisemitic comments.

And now, separately, a court panel is calling for him to be disbarred from practicing law for trying to overturn the 2020 election results.

The D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility issued a 38-page memo on Friday detailing their conclusion that the former Trump lawyer should be disbarred for his “destructive” efforts to help overthrow the election in service of the twice-impeached, now twice-indicted, and liable for sexual abuse former president.

“His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar,” the panel wrote. “The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments. It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done. For these reasons, we unanimously recommend that Mr. Giuliani be disbarred,” the panel added.

The panel, appointed by the D.C. Court of Appeals to serve as its “disciplinary arm,” had deliberated for months on the decision.

The D.C. bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel had come to the conclusion last December, saying his license to practice law should be revoked. Giuliani’s ability to practice law in the district had already been suspended by the D.C. Court of Appeals, and that same court is now tasked with deciding whether to heed the calls and indeed fully disbar him.

Giuliani had already previously been suspended from practicing law in New York for making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while trying to help overturn the election.

“The decision-makers at the DC Bar Association are nothing more than an arm of the permanent regime in Washington,” said Giuliani advisor Ted Goodman. “This is also part of an effort to deny President Trump effective counsel by persecuting Rudy Giuliani—objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history. This is the sort of behavior we’d expect out of the Soviet Union, not America.”

“I call on rank-and-file members of the DC Bar Association to speak out against this great injustice,” Goodman finished.

Giuliani may also likely face further criminal charges in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trump’s 2020 election interference, led by special prosecutor Jack Smith. Smithhas already leveled 37 felony counts against Trump for taking and mishandling top secret government documents.

She’s a Barbie comrade, in a Communist Barbie world—or so say Republicans, who are doubling down on accusations that the upcoming Barbie movie is Chinese propaganda.

The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

Senator Ted Cruz was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to weigh in, sarcastically tweeting, “I guess Barbie is made in China.…” Fox News commentators speculated outright whether Barbie was Communist or not.

More Republicans have joined them. “While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict [China’s] unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors,” Representative Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House select committee on China, told Fox News Digital on Thursday.

Representative Jim Banks, who also serves on the select committee, accused the film’s producers of “endangering our national security.”

“We defeated the Soviet Union with Coke, Levi’s and James Dean. We need soft power superiority just as much as we need military superiority to win the new Cold War with China, and that’s impossible with Hollywood working alongside the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Representative Mike Waltz accused Hollywood of “hypocrisy” and slammed Barbie as “yet another disgraceful example of Hollywood being in the pocket of communist China.” Senator Marsha Blackburn accused the movie of “bending to Beijing.”

Representative Mark Green warned Hollywood that continuing to spread Chinese propaganda would cost the industry federal support. “In no world should American films be spreading CCP propaganda,” he said. “I encourage all film studios to stand with integrity or lose support from federal entities like the DOD.”

In March, Green reintroduced the SCREEN Act, which would bar the U.S. government from helping American studios produce films if the movie is co-produced by a Chinese company.

China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea.

Hanoi has already banned the Barbie movie for its inclusion of the nine-dash line, which Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei all say violates their sovereignty. The Philippines is also considering banning the film.

For the record, here is the shot in question of the nine-dash line:

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s officials discreetly removed an entire Health Department web page listing resources for LGBTQ kids after Ben Shapiro’s media outlet inquired about a couple of items listed on the site.

In May, right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, which Shapiro co-founded, had inquired about two websites linked on the state Health Department page, reports The Virginia Mercury.

One site, Queer Kid Stuff, describes itself as “an edutainment company on a mission to spread queer joy to LGBTQ+ kids, parents, caregivers, educators, their loved ones, and allies.” The other, Q Chat Space, offers “live, chat-based discussion groups for LGBTQ+ and questioning teens ages 13 to 19 … facilitated by experienced staff and volunteers from youth programs at LGBTQ+ centers across the United States.”

Daily Wire reporter Spencer Lindquist sent an inquiry on May 31, asking about the sites. “How are resources selected by the Virginia Department of Health?” Lindquist wrote in his email at 9:12 a.m. “Queer Kid Stuff has previously promoted child transgenderism. Does the Virginia Department of Health take a stance on the medical transitioning of minors? Is the Virginia Department of Health aware that the QChat Space, which is marketed to those as young as 13 who identify as LGBT, has a special quick escape feature that allows users to swiftly exit the site?”

He had given a two-hour window for response, which apparently set off a frenzy within the state government to remove the entire LGBTQ Resources for Youth page instead.

Emily Yeatts, a supervisor for the Health Department’s Division of Child and Family Health, and Rachel Brown, the Health Department’s adolescent health coordinator, drafted a response to Lindquist’s questions, detailing their goals “to be a trusted source of public health information for all Virginians” and adding that all “Virginians includes people of all ages, races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and ability statuses.”

“VDH does not have a ‘stance’ on medical transition; as a state agency, VDH provides information, and the administration takes a position on issues.… QChat Space is not managed by VDH, but we can share that ‘quick escape’ features are typical for a variety of websites, particularly websites that could put a person at risk for violence from others. Intimate partner violence/sexual violence/domestic violence webpages often have this feature. LGBT people are at increased risk for violence,” the officials also wrote.

But the detailed statement was never used; instead Director of Communications Maria Reppas told staff she was “working with leadership on this one.” While officials never responded with comment to Lindquist’s questions about the two specific resources, it seemed that the intention of “leadership” was indeed just to quietly get rid of the entire web page.

“Did someone request this?” asked Yeatts in an email to other staff members after the web page was removed. “This request did not come from the program.”

Vanessa Walker Harris, director for the Office of Family Health Services (which manages content on the Health Department web page) expressed similar concern in a separate, concurrent email.

“I’m noticing that the referenced webpage is no longer accessible and I’m having a bad case of deja vu,” Walker Harris wrote. “What am I missing? I’m very concerned that staff were directed to remove the webpage without engaging [subject matter experts] in response to a politically motivated inquiry, yet again.”

Indeed, the Mercury revealed that the office of John Littel, the secretary of health and human resources, ordered the removal of the whole site—with little concern to inform any other relevant parties.

Youngkin’s administration has removed information from the government health website without consulting any subject-matter experts at least three times in the past year and a half, The Washington Post reports. Information on abortions, sexual health, and pregnancy, and more, all unilaterally removed at the behest of far-right interests opposed to people’s civil rights and bodily autonomy.

In this way, Youngkin—whom, like Ron DeSantis, portions of the mainstream press have professed to be a moderate vessel of the Republican Party—is in fact just a friendly Americana face masking the far-right agenda to vilify LGBTQ people and kids and make them feel as isolated and desperate as possible.

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to end birthright citizenship—a longstanding American policy codified in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution—and take away young people’s right to vote, all in one fell swoop.

The presidential candidate made the call Thursday night on CNN, after being asked about his opponents, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, vowing to end birthright citizenship. “For a period of time, I think it’s going to be necessary,” Ramaswamy said.

But the young gun was not satisfied just being in agreement with the leading duo in the Republican race-to-the-repressive-bottom.

“I’ll actually go one step further on this, Abby, is that I don’t think someone just because they’re born in this country, even if they’re a sixth generation American should automatically enjoy all the privileges of citizenship until they’ve actually earned it,” Ramaswamy told CNN’s Abby Phillip. “So one of the things I’ve said is that every high school student who graduates from high school should have to pass the same civics test that every immigrant has to pass in order to become a citizen of this country.”

Surveys in the past have shown that most people would likely fail a basic multiple choice citizenship test; one survey found just 36 percent of respondents actually passing such a test. And given Republicans’ all-out assault on public school education, it’s unclear what their plan would be to up those numbers.

After publishing, Ramaswamy senior adviser Tricia McLaughlin said the proposal refers “to civic duty voting via constitutional amendment.” According to Ramaswamy’s website, this would mean raising the voting age to 25, while still generously “allowing all Americans to vote at age 18” only if they serve at least six months in the military or as a first responder, or pass the citizenship test.

Yet another successful pair of Republican talking points: seizing the right to vote from young people, and forcing people to join a military that has used trillions of American dollars to wreak carnage across the world, and leave its foot soldiers out to dry upon their return.

Anyhow, Ramaswamy’s brilliant proposal to seemingly strip citizenship from so many Americans came after Phillip noted that both of Ramaswamy’s parents are immigrants, and so birthright citizenship “was in play” for him when he became a citizen.

Yet, instead of making the citizenship process easier to navigate, Ramaswamy instead wants to make it harder for anyone to be a citizen. More than that, the presidential candidate’s formulation lays out tiers of citizenship—a matrix in which, until one passes this test, they would be a second-class citizen. While this country already treats scores of people—immigrants, LGBTQ people, laborers, the homeless, and young people—as such, Ramaswamy thinks that unfair treatment should be legally bound.

Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction thinks that schools should teach students about the Tulsa race massacre, so long as teachers don’t actually acknowledge that the white supremacist attack was about race.

Ryan Walters took office in January, and prior to that, he served as the state’s secretary of education. Walters is anti–“critical race theory,” a Republican bogeyman used to attack critical thought about racial justice. Last month, he called for schools to promote Christianity in the classroom—including by displaying the Ten Commandments—as well as “Western heritage,” which many scholars recognize as coded language for white supremacist ideology.

Walters held a public forum Thursday night, during which someone asked him how teaching about the Tulsa race massacre doesn’t violate his ban on CRT. “I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist,” Walters said.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should. ‘This was right. This was wrong. They did this for this reason.’ But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.”

In case it wasn’t obvious by the event name alone, the Tulsa race massacre was unequivocally about race. In 1921, mobs of armed white vigilantes razed the Greenwood District in Tulsa, a thriving Black neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.

The attackers, some of whom had been deputized and armed by city officials, murdered Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses over the course of two days. The massacre is considered one of the worst incidents of racially motivated violence in U.S. history.

The rest of the forum went pretty terribly for Walters. Attendees loudly mocked him and his policies. One pointed out the irony of holding the forum in a public library after pushing book bans. He was also called out for his opposition to teachers unions.

Bidenomics continued its underacknowledged winning streak in June by creating 209,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported this morning, led by hiring by government, health care, “social assistance” (childcare workers, social workers, home eldercare aides, etc.), and construction. Unemployment ticked down from 3.7 to 3.6 percent (although seasonally adjusted, it’s the same as May).

The job-creation number was somewhat less robust than the 240,000 predicted by a team of experts surveyed by Dow Jones. But even that was a sort of triumph, because by the insane rules of economics reporting too much job creation constitutes a catastrophically tempting invitation for the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates. Even so, stock futures fell this morning in response to the good news.

Everybody should calm the hell down. Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June meeting, released earlier this week, showed, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, that the Fed intends to keep raising rates. What today’s job numbers show is that the Biden economy is proving much harder to push into recession than the Fed reckoned on. I’d like to tell you why, but I don’t know. Nobody does. But the bottom-line reality check: That is very good news.

The House of Reps caucus continues to grow.

On Thursday morning, Representative Jamaal Bowman posted a video to Twitter bench-pressing 405 pounds for three repetitions.

“Be sure to always center your health and well-being as we fight to save democracy and humanity,” the New York representative tweeted. The caption seemed to be a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interesting video posted last week, in which the presidential candidate squeezed out non–fully extended pushups and 115 pound incline bench presses while donning only a pair of blue jeans.

While Bowman has not shied away from posting videos of himself lifting weights in the past, the most recent video seemed directed at Kennedy and any individuals who view the anti-vaxxer’s muscles as reason to trust him as an authority on health and wellness. The presidential candidate has projected himself as being health-centered in a way that other politicians are not (though Kennedy and his fans readily compare him to Biden, but not to Trump or DeSantis, curiously).

Bowman’s video gestures toward what is obvious: Being physically active is not tied to one strain of politics. You can lift weights and be needlessly contrarian against vaccines, like RFK Jr. You could also lift heavier weights and embrace the rigorous scientific method that helped create such world-changing vaccines in the first place.

A fair chunk of people hailing Kennedy’s candidacy do so on the grounds of his big muscles, or his apparent willingness to stand up against the establishment. He looks healthier than other politicians. He questions their authority. He’s against the grain. He’s a free-thinking, anti-establishment maverick. In “manosphere” terms, Kennedy is perceived as an “alpha.”

No politician warrants unconditional praise or fandom. But if anyone does warrant intrigue or admiration for being a maverick who also happens to lift a lot of weight, perhaps RFK Jr. fans could mull things over. After all, Bowman—a school principal who ousted a 32-year career politician and has bothered conservative and liberal power interests alike while advocating for anti-war, pro-worker, and pro–green energy policies—might be higher up on the list than a guy whose main character trait is spreading flimsy arguments against giving people medicine for life-threatening diseases.

Months after Musk laid off most of Twitter’s staff, he is now suing Meta, accusing the competing social media giant of poaching former Twitter employees so it could create a “copycat” site.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Threads—a companion app to Instagram that is indeed similar to Twitter and many other competitor apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Post. But while the others have launched with little fanfare, Meta’s Threads has not, with more than 30 million users having already registered. And thus Twitter took immediate action.

Hours after Threads’ launch, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro issued a letter to Zuckerberg threatening to sue, accusing Meta of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.”

Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who have access to “highly confidential” Twitter information and trade secrets, as well as company documents and electronic devices, and who apparently have ongoing obligations to Twitter. Meta “deliberately assigned these employers to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app,” the letter claimed.

Twitter demanded Meta stop the apparent poaching and trade-secret exploitation operation or face legal action.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted about the legal threat Thursday.

Meta’s response to the letter was curt: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee—that’s just not a thing.”

The legal action comes after Musk repeatedly expressed nonchalance and snideness toward the competing app.

It’s unclear what “ongoing obligations” former Twitter employees would have to the company, especially if they were among the thousands victim to Musk’s mass layoffs.

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” Musk tweeted in November, in response to a report about him firing employees who were critical of him. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”

Beyond competing in the digital world, the bumbling billionaires are said to also be gearing up to duke it out in a cage match.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has officially been booted from the House Freedom Caucus for not being far-right enough.

The House of Representatives’ furthest right contingent was seriously considering ejecting her for some time, and the caucus finally voted last Friday on whether or not Greene could stay. But it was not clear at the time what the vote result was.

Well, it’s official: the QAnon-loving, conspiracy theory-spouting, potentially sedition-encouraging congresswoman is out of the Freedom Caucus, Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported Thursday. Maryland Republican Andy Harris described the vote to Beavers as an “appropriate action.”

This is the first time the Freedom Caucus has kicked out one of its own. Harris said the reason for Greene’s ouster was primarily because “the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members.”

He was likely referring to when Greene called her former work bestie Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor. Greene accused her colleague of copying her articles of impeachment against Joe Biden—and then introducing them first.

But Harris also said that another factor in voting Greene out was her decision to diverge from the Freedom Caucus on supporting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Greene seemed unbothered by the vote result, insisting in a statement, “My America First credentials, guided by my Christian faith, are forged in steel, seared into my character, and will never change.”

“I fight every single day in the halls of congress against the hate-America Democrats, who are trying to destroy this country,” she said, contradictorily adding, “I will work with ANYONE who wants to secure our border, protect our children inside the womb and after they are born, end the forever foreign wars, and do the work to save this country.”

The first signs of a rift began after Republicans took control of the House, following the 2022 midterms. Greene was vocal in backing McCarthy’s bid for speakership. She remained a staunch ally during the agonizing 15 votes for the gavel in January, despite her fellow Freedom Caucus members nominating seemingly any- and everyone to oppose McCarthy. At one point, Greene even called Donald Trump, handing the phone to other Republicans on the House floor to try to convince them to back McCarthy.

Since then, Greene has been welcomed by more establishment Republicans, receiving a seat on key committees including Oversight and Homeland Security. She also backed the debt ceiling deal, which Freedom Caucus members vehemently opposed. So while she may not need the Freedom Caucus anymore, the vote is still a stunning example of how Republicans are all too willing to eat their own.

This article has been updated.