Carlton Huffman, the man who accused Conservative Political Action Coalition President Matt Schlapp of unwanted sexual advances, now denies allegations that he sexually assaulted two young women he lived with in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The two women, ages 19 and 22, obtained separate 10-day restraining orders from the Superior Court of Wake County, North Carolina, against Mr. Huffman in late February after Raleigh police investigated their allegations and declined to pursue criminal charges.
The women say Mr Huffman, 39, followed them into a bedroom and “enacted both of us non-consensual digital sexual acts,” according to court documents.
The women applied for the injunction less than a month after Mr Huffman sued Mr Schlapp for sexual assault, accusing him of groping his crotch during a late-night drive in October 2022.
Mr Huffman told the Washington Times that the two cases were completely different because he and the two women had been drinking tequila and the sexual contact was consensual.
Mr. Huffman is demanding $9.4 million from Mr. Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, and has accused them of “campaigning for impeachment” against him on social media and in the press after publicly disclosing his allegations against Mr. Schlapp.
Mr. Schlapp has denied the allegations of groping and defamation and last week asked the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia for a gag order to prevent Mr. Huffman from making any further public statements on the case. Mr. Schlapp succeeded in February in forcing Mr. Huffman, who had sued anonymously, to be named publicly in the lawsuit.
The incident involving the two young women, Mr Huffman said, followed a night of tequila consumption and drinking games and was entirely consensual. He pointed to the Raleigh Police Department’s decision to quickly close the case without filing charges against him.
He said he didn’t know why the women then applied for separate restraining orders against him after police refused to press charges and said he hadn’t tried to contact any of them.
“Either they wanted to feel safe because I’m a gun owner, or there was something else to it,” Mr. Huffman told the Times. “I can’t speak with that.”
The two women tell a different story in court documents filed to obtain the restraining orders.
In separate court documents, they describe that Mr. Huffman followed them uninvited into a bedroom, ignored a request for him to leave, and climbed into bed with them.
One of the women said they had previously joked with Mr. Huffman about him joining the two in the bedroom, “but there was no affirmative conversation.”
Both women said they felt unsafe around Mr. Huffman because he mentioned to them that he owned a gun. One of the women, who is black, said she was afraid to contradict his advances because she saw him put the gun on a table and Mr. Huffman “was almost 20 years my senior … and a well-known white man.” is a supremacist”.
The other woman said they were both “frozen and didn’t know what to do” by the time Mr. Huffman got into bed with them.
Mr Huffman told the Times he never threatened or intimidated the women and denied their version of the encounter.
The allegations against Mr. Huffman are the latest twist in an ongoing saga that began in January, when Mr. Huffman anonymously reported to the media that Mr. Schlapp groped him in the car in Macon, Georgia, where Mr. Huffman attended a Republican worked Herschel Walker’s unsuccessful Senate campaign.
Shortly thereafter, someone anonymously revealed to the media Mr. Huffman’s past views of the white supremacist, which he had posted on social media a decade ago, and he was forced out of his job working for the North Carolina General Assembly.
Mr Huffman told The Times that despite the difficulties caused by his decision to go public with his allegation against Mr Schlapp, he has no regrets.
The alleged encounter with Mr. Schlapp “hit me hard,” Mr. Huffman said, and that motivated him to go public with the incident and later bring Mr. Schlapp to court.
“If it means one less person to go through what I went through, then I would do it all over again, whatever I have to go through,” Mr. Huffman said.
In a statement to The Times, a spokesman for Mr. Schlapp, Mark Corallo, said the Schlapps filed the gag order “due to Mr. Huffman’s persistent efforts to publicly defame the Schlapps.”
In the statement, Mr. Corallo noted the North Carolina court’s decision to grant the injunction “for sexually assaulting two women” who “confirmed that they were intimidated by Huffman based on his age and open display of his gun.” .
Source : www.washingtontimes.com