Mirror Indy’s Expose On Joe Hogsett’s Long-Time Right-Hand Man Thomas Cook Has Indianapolis Talking
The conversation the past couple of days has been the incredible story from Mirror Indy:
It’s a follow up piece on Thomas Cook, the former #2 and longtime right-hand man of Mayor Joe Hogsett. It is alleged by multiple women that Cook engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior. What appears to be the bigger story is Joe Hogsett’s refusal to do anything about it.
Coauthor of the Mirror Indy piece Ryan Martin joined Kendall & Casey to discuss:
Ryan Martin:
A story like this only happens with the strength and courage of women coming forward to share their stories. Publicly, and it’s often a very long process. Sometimes it takes years for people to think about what happened to them and sort of see it in a new light. Oftentimes these kinds of experiences are happening to them when they’re in vulnerable positions. A lot of that’s described in the story where the women were at those times in their lives and. Our job as journalists is to listen and to and also corroborate what they’re saying, and it’s kind of an uncomfortable process for them and truthfully. They often try to, in this case and reported on this type of behavior in the past, they often try to fix the problems from the inside 1st. And when that fails, that’s when they go to the media. That’s when they start talking to journalists. And that’s when someone like me starts working on an article like this
This is a story that is involved, that involves government officials and public money that of course makes it newsworthy, makes it concerning to people like the three of us on this call. But anytime someone is in a position of power and authority like that and they use it to. Victimize people anytime they abuse that power to create harm, that’s where that’s where we need to step in and try to find a way to stop it. And as we detailed in this story and as detailed in the Indy Star investigation a few weeks ago as well. There were efforts to try and get people in the highest levels of government to intervene to stop it, and those attempts went unheard
It’s hard to understand how something like this could happen for so long. Again, nearly a decade as his right hand, man. I mean, he came back even after he was told to resign, not fired. He was still given some sort of informal leadership role on the 2023 mayoral campaign. And that’s baffling.
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