(uptempo music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here's what's coming up.

- Israel is a divided society.

There are those who support this government, but there's also a large size of the Israeli population growing actually who opposes.

- [Christiane] Fighting for the soul of Israel amid war against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Syria, former Knesset member and democracy activist, Colette Avital joins me.

And.

- There is this new world being born, this world in which we think differently about nature, about race, about gender in which we are much more adamant about equality in human rights, in which we understand that we were never separate from nature.

And that is actually really exciting, really transformative, and really impactful.

- [Christiane] "The Beginning Comes After the End."

A new book by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit shows where to find the light in the world today.

Then.

- The issue of sexual assault and sexual violence has no partisan boundaries.

- [Christiane] Accountability On Capitol Hill.

We hear from the bipartisan duo who pushed two congressmen to resign over sexual misconduct allegations.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) - [Announcer] Amanpour and Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment.

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Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

From Iran to Lebanon to Israel and the occupied West Bank, the Middle East really seems to be inflamed.

In Lebanon, Israel continues to pound Hezbollah in the south, despite a so-called ceasefire and ongoing talks with the Lebanese government.

Another prominent journalist, Amal Khalil, was killed on Wednesday in an Israeli strike according to authorities.

The fourth Lebanese media worker killed since Israel started its offensive there in March.

Meantime, Israeli settlers are ramping up their violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, often with the security forces looking on and even participating.

But what about life inside Israel?

Many Israelis support all this war, especially since October 7th.

They say it makes them feel safer.

But not all, one key voice of resistance belongs to 86-year-old Colette Avital.

She's a former Israeli diplomat, former Knesset member, and a Holocaust survivor.

And she's joining me now from Tel Aviv.

Welcome to our program, Colette.

- Hello.

Hello, Christiane.

Thank you for having me.

- You know, as I'm looking at you, you look phenomenal.

The background looks peaceful.

You wouldn't believe that what I've just described is actually happening.

War all over the place, just perhaps a few weeks ago, your background might have been a warscape.

What in your view is happening right now and how do Israelis look at it?

- Israel is a divided society.

There are those who support this government, but there's also a large size of the Israeli population growing actually who opposes because what we've been living through in the past few years is constant erosion of our democratic system.

It's a number of laws that try to limit the freedom of speech, the freedom, the equality of the citizens.

And altogether, since October the 7th even though this war was imposed on us and it was quite a massacre, we live in constant wars, endless wars, which we think lead nowhere with no exit strategy.

And this is in a nutshell what we're going through.

We're demonstrating, we've been demonstrating, it's now 831 days since the October war.

We haven't defeated the Hamas.

The Hamas has been taking over the Gaza Strip again.

And we have been demanding all this time an inquiry committee to go to the end of things to see what really happened.

And even today, this was brought to the High Court of Justice with violence around it, people protesting against the system of justice.

So this is where we are.

We're trying desperately to save whatever can be saved and hopefully maybe in November we'll have elections and maybe all of this can change.

- When you say an inquiry, you mean an inquiry of your own government's actions or an inquiry of the... What inquiry are you talking about?

- There are two types of possible inquiries.

There is the law which usually speaks about an inquiry committee, which is set up by the High Court of Justice.

This is the inquiry committee we want, one which is subjective and not a government inquiry committee, which would be named by politicians and which would lead nowhere.

- Okay.

Now, you're talking about protest and obviously you yourself have been taking part in some protest against the Iran War.

And at one of these protests that you were at, it appears you were, you found yourself on the ground holding your head.

We have some video, a person also in the protest around you was filming this.

Can you tell us what happened to you?

- I really am not the story and I think there have been worse cases.

I think one of the real stories is the growing violence of the police.

The police should be there to protect us, not to attack us.

They're coming with horses.

They're quite violent.

There have been cases where they've arrested women who were standing peacefully around and undressed them, and they had to be interrogated naked.

So, those are practices which never existed in our country.

And I'm sorry to say, the police receives orders.

So, this is not by chance.

- What do you think it's all for?

I mean, this is really pretty shocking given that Israel is always called, you know, the only democracy in the Middle East.

And you're talking about women being arrested, Israeli women and stripped and interrogated while naked.

I've never heard that before.

- Here you are.

Unfortunately, that was the case.

And unfortunately we are trying to see how to protect ourselves in the... I've been in one or two demonstrations since and we have civil society organizations that are there to forming a line to protect us.

- Let me write how somebody described, I know you play down what happened to you, but Noa Landau in Haaretz, the columnist wrote about your incident.

"A holocaust survivor, a former diplomat, a Knesset member, is thrown to the ground like garbage at the age of 86 in yet another display of criminal violence by the police.

This is exactly what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants, to destroy the old elite, literally.

But it is also a metaphor for what's happened to an entire generation, that's been transformed overnight from founding figures into dissidents, from ambassadors into demonstrators."

I guess she is describing what's happened to you, right?

I mean, all that you bring to this issue and as a fierce defender of Israeli, you know, democracy, here you are now a protestor and a bit of a dissident.

- Okay.

The the stakes are high.

I've served my country all my life.

I was a diplomat, as you said, and I was a member of the Israeli parliament.

And I'm proud of what this country has achieved over the years and what really is happening that everything which was good is being destroyed.

Whether it's the arts or the academia or the freedom of the press, the press is being bullied and so on and so forth.

So, I think that we are paying a high price right now and despair or not doing anything is not really a recipe.

So, we are fighting, more and more people are fighting to make Israel and normal country again.

We're also losing internationally.

I think we, as you said, we are and we are the only democracy in the Middle East.

This is something we cannot afford to lose.

I mean, in 78 years, this country has achieved more than other countries in hundreds of years.

And so, this is something we need to protect.

This is something we need to defend here.

- I wanna ask you, how much the defense of the values and the achievements of your country do you think also rests on how you deal with your neighbors, the Palestinians?

And I ask because you mentioned, you know, Hamas is still in control of parts of Gaza, the Israeli militaries in control and occupying the other part.

But most particularly what we are seeing now is a relentless drum beat of violence by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, which has been described as an attempt at ethnic cleansing.

And also we see that the, we've seen it with our own teams who've been recording it.

They are, you know, sometimes condoned or even supported by the Israeli security forces.

What is going on there and why don't more Israelis speak out about it?

- Well, first and foremost, I think the big crime is occupation.

I think the Palestinians have a right to self determination and I belong to all the groups of people in Israel who still believe in the two state solution.

And as long as we occupy the territories, more and more violence occurs.

Now, the Palestinians themselves have made their own mistakes, which doesn't condone ours, doesn't justify ours.

But what has been happening since this ultra nationalistic messianic government is in power, our two priorities, priority number one, to stay in power and priority number two is to annex territories.

And this is done actually in a deliberate way.

It's not only by passing laws that annex more and more territories by harassing the Palestinians and the Bedouins.

I've been and I've seen some of these places, and what is really happening is that there was a plan which was actually put out by the person who now is our minister of finance, Mr.

Smotrich and who has two portfolios.

He's also in charge of the civil administration.

And this plan is a deliberate cleansing of the area by first harassing the Palestinians coming, breaking into their houses.

I could describe it to you, we've been into those villages.

Some of them still exist and some of them are in the process of being wiped out.

So what is really happening is that in the past few weeks, 34 new settlements have been approved by the government, 110 outposts, which were illegal, which were like farms on the hills surrounding some of these Arab villages have been also made, you know, functioning.

And I don't believe that those are spontaneous acts by those boys that live on the hills and are actually thugs.

All of this is really a strategy and it is actually condoned from up there.

I think the orders are also coming from somewhere up in the government.

So, you see a two-pronged kind of policy, the moment you manage to get to drive the Palestinians out of their homes, out of their lands, the government is taking over those lands and expanding and making more and more building, more units and so on.

So, whereas in the past you could see though those were incidents by foolish young people.

Today it is a strategy of a government and this is what we have to fight against.

- And I just want to, you know, some other really awful evidence came up according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, which is a very well-respected international humanitarian organization, headed by a former Norwegian government official.

It reports about, you know, men and boys reporting forced stripping, sexualized humiliation, degrading treatment by settlers as Israeli forces stand by.

The official report says, "More than 70% of the displaced households interviewed identified threats against women and children, particularly sexualized violence as the decisive factor in their decision to flee."

Can you respond to that?

- We don't have very much evidence on sexual harassment.

We do know of one case in a little village called Humsa, where 30 people lived and settlers came in, tied all the women and children and took away the iPhones that were there and stripped naked one man and tied his genitals.

That's the case that we do know about.

We are starting to investigate now to see what really is the case after we saw this report, a Norwegian report.

But in any case, when the settlers come in and they break into the houses and they start actually harassing the women and the children, you don't need sexual abuse for that.

It's enough that they come in and they break everything.

This is already a kind of an abuse.

This is already a kind of humiliation certainly in the Arab society.

So, this is happening all the time and sometimes it is young boys, 14, 15 years old.

Can you imagine the kind of education they get?

- Indeed, you know, you have said some Israelis have become cold to other people's sufferings.

And I know, I know that you, when you march, you're surrounded by younger generations of Israelis.

You know that a huge majority in your country, well a significant majority, approves of the way things are going in terms of the wars, et cetera.

They think it keeps them safe.

What would you say, what do you say to the younger generation when you come up against them or with them in these protests?

- I don't mean to justify anything, but you have to understand that the situation is more complex.

I think that this country has been very deeply traumatized by the 7th of October attack, onslaught, murders, and everything that was done.

And so, when people suffer, they're thinking of their suffering before thinking of others.

And it takes a little bit more, I don't know, consideration and thinking of what is happening around us.

And I think that Israeli society for a long time has not looked into that.

But remember we were attacked.

And so, if the war was something which was justified at the beginning because we did have to go out and defend our citizens, I think more and more people understand today that there is no strategy.

That we haven't really achieved anything other than perhaps military victories, which lead nowhere, that the Gaza Strip is still controlled by the Hamas, that nothing was really achieved in terms of ending whatever threatened us in Iran.

Most people understand that.

And I think that the younger generation also, and certainly the younger generation is paying a very high price as do mothers in Israel as well.

So I think that there's a waking up, this is what I see around me and more and more young people understand that unless you lead to a political solution, there's no end to any war, any conflict, and no conflict was ever resolved by simply military means.

This is something which people understand today.

- And certainly you better than others as a former diplomat.

Colette Avital, thank you so much indeed for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- And about the issue and allegations of sexual violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians while Israeli forces standby, the IDF denies those allegations.

Now to a worrying signal from the top of the planet about the shrinking Arctic Sea ice.

Chief climate correspondent Bill Weir filed this report from a unique location on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean to mark Earth Day this week.

- Greetings from a most gorgeous corner of the top of the world.

Welcome to Svalbard, Norway.

We're about 79 degrees north, way high in the Arctic Circle in this gorgeous fjord that is framed by the Lilliehook Glacier.

Albert I of Monaco came here way early in the 1900s, took a picture of this glacier 'cause he was into ice and he used to go around the corner, he couldn't even see the under this glacier.

His grandson came back, photographed the same fjord just to show how much ice is disappearing up here as a result of manmade global warming.

And this season is emblematic of the changes when we landed in Longyearbyen, Norway, this is sort of a central town, the melt had come a month earlier than anybody had expected.

So snowmobiles, dog sleds for tourism were all parked in the mud.

Best guides could do is offer boat rides and that's sort of a trend these days as the landscape melts and changes, as the economy shift, coal mines are shutting down.

There's a lot of interest in sort of the precious minerals, rare minerals that exist in this part of the world.

And prospectors are talking about that.

Of course, when Donald Trump says he wants to take Greenland, that makes the Arctic a geopolitical hotspot.

But what's interesting is that Russia has been ejected from the Arctic League of Nations for its invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump has frozen, no pun intended, all climate science funding and research, trying to kill anything that has a whiff of climate science.

So, that's 50% of the Arctic.

Russia and the US not really at the table these days.

So you've got scientists from other countries, European countries, Japan, South Korea, doing amazing work up here trying to measure the changes at great discomfort and danger.

Luckily no polar bears up here today.

But that's another interesting story about what's happening.

10 years ago we thought the polar bears would all be starving by now because the sea ice holds ringed seals, that's their main prey.

But these bears have adapted to hunting reindeer now, or foraging along the seashore going after duck and goose eggs.

And some Svalbard polar bears are as fat as they've ever been, but there's a limit to how fast they can adapt.

And there's fear that this population could crash like the polar bears you're seeing in Canada.

But for the human population, the scientists up here that I've been talking to, there's such frustration about the politics, especially in the United States, reversing on climate change, science, adaptation, mitigation, just as this whole landscape really melts beneath their feet.

Hopefully this Earth Day is another chance for a wake up call to realize that what happens up here connects all of us.

It affects everybody from Texas to Wisconsin to other hemispheres.

And if you think the price of oil is high now, oh, as one scientist told me, just wait until the North Pole melts.

It's going to be ice-free in our lifetimes.

It could absolutely happen.

- Bill Weir reporting there.

Now it's often easy to spiral into despair thinking about the state of the world today.

Conflict spreading across the globe.

Climate as we've just heard threatening our homes and livelihoods, or AI potentially stealing our jobs.

But our next guest brings an alternative perspective in her new book, "The Beginning Comes After the End."

Writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit urges us all to see the light in the gloom.

She highlights the achievements since the 1960s, like decolonization, gender equality, and environmentalism.

I asked her how she stays optimistic in these politically fraught times.

Rebecca Solnit, welcome to the program.

- My pleasure.

Hello, hello.

- So just as we're beginning or I'm beginning to feel overwhelmed by the world around us and the incredible amount of, you know, violence and disruption and chaos, you come out with "The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change."

Tell me what you were telegraphing to all of us.

- Scientists talk a lot about baselines, which is what something was before it changed.

And people often don't have the baselines to understand that we live in a world that's changed profoundly over the last 70 years.

If you zoom out from the daily news to see that, you can see that a lot of what the right wing internationally is doing is backlash, trying to change things back, put women back into subordinate position, put people of color back into subordinate positions.

Pretend we didn't learn all this stuff that tells us we can't continue destroying the environment.

So, and just understanding the profundity of change is understanding that all the good things are, we changed it understanding how change works, understanding that all this activism, all these movements have actually been tremendously effective.

- Yeah, so you take as one of your sort of standards in this book, you take a cue from the philosopher Antonio Gramsci, you write, "The old world is dying, the new one is slow in appearing.

In this light and shadow, monsters arrive."

I think that's what he said, right?

- Exactly.

- And what does that mean?

So, I guess in your view, are we at the beginning or the end of this cycle?

- Yes is my answer to many eager.

I would say that a kind of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism, if you'll forgive my extra super left wing language on the occasion, is really flaming out and kind of supernova-ing on its way to collapsing.

And another world is swimming into being.

And that's what I love about the Gramsci quote.

I think a lot of us could have felt that way any time in history since he said it in the 1930s.

But right now I wrote this book because we talk a lot about it, the old world that's dying.

We talk a lot about the monsters and there are lots of them.

There are lots of them and they're fierce.

But there is this new world being born, this world in which we think differently about nature, about race, about gender in which we are much more adamant about equality in human rights in which we understand that we were never separate from nature.

And that is actually really exciting, really transformative, and really impactful.

And it's happening in a thousand ways all over the world with of course backlash.

- Yeah, so I wanna pick you up on this 'cause I think it's really important, especially for a lot of our viewers, and especially because of the, you know, highly polarized world we live in, the weaponization of just about everything.

You say if you'll forgive the words of a, you know, of a lefty liberal, I'm just paraphrasing you, but that's basically how you identify and you are an activist as well.

But what about people who don't identify as lefty liberals and in fact, the opposite.

You know, you talk about backlash.

How does one get to interconnectedness if it's, you know, one side wins and then the other side wins and then the other side loses and the other side loses?

How does that contribute?

- And I'm talking less about that kind of strife, which sounds like warfare or political campaigns than a lot of underlying assumptions that are radically different than they were in the world in which you and I were born into a while back.

And the interconnectedness, for example, we live in a world in which women are not assumed to be the opposite sex and so utterly different than men, that they cannot be, for example, CNN anchors or you know, public intellectuals or presidents, or you know, we live in a world in which the idea that the races are so separate and must be kept so separate and colonialism was a completely legitimate, you know, civilizing project are not the assumptions we have now.

And people understand nature in a radically different way than they did before Rachel Carson, before a lot of other things change.

People used to think nature was kind of decorative, a little irrelevant anachronistic.

Now we understand that it's the conditions of our survival and we're not separate from it.

And just understand the way poisons, pesticides and other things have downstream downwind effects that everything exists within a system and you mess with any part of it you impact the system as a whole.

Which of course is offensive to right-wing people who want unhindered ability to destroy the environment and profit from it.

But the majority of us understand that.

And climate chaos has been the last great lesson in that everything is connected to everything else.

Everything you do has an impact and you need to take that into account when you act, when you make decisions.

- It is going to be interesting to see where people land even on climate now, even, as you say, the right wing or whoever, because there has been so much evidence of climate disruption, upheaval, you know, the deathly results of climate disruption right in front of our eyes.

On the other hand, the current US administration is rolling back all the, you know, environmental protections and in fact unleashing quite a lot of the fossil fuel that can damage our climate.

So, I think weirdly, that that argument is still out there, there's still people who absolutely refuse to believe their eyes.

When you, and as you have engaged so much with indigenous activism for so many years, how should we learn?

I mean you've alluded to it a little bit, but how should we learn from them on all these issues?

- Once you acknowledge in, at least in this hemisphere in North, South, Central America that this, you know, this hemisphere was inhabited for 10,000 years and more before Christopher Columbus, you recognize that human beings are not inherently destructive of nature.

That we are not necessarily, you know, something that doesn't belong in nature because human beings coexisted with nature.

And when Europeans arrived, it was an incredibly thriving natural world.

And so I think that's been really impactful in changing our thinking.

The great majority of people on earth believe climate change is real and serious, are experiencing it, support major climate action.

We have the solutions, we have the majority of human beings behind us.

The obstacles are only political and they're only a very powerful minority.

The fossil fuel industry and things like the Trump administration that support an ally with that industry.

The fascinating thing about what's just happened with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is it's reminded people and nation states around the world that fossil fuel is volatile, unreliable, dependent on the twisted geopolitics of the countries that have it and the countries that need it.

And that the energy transition is not only good for the climate, it's good for the domestic economy, good for the domestic environment, good for global stability politically and domestically.

- You know, I'm glad you mentioned that because throughout this war in Iran and the closure of the Strait, I've wondered, wow, what if the worlds led by the United States had been so much, you know, further forward in the transition away from fossil fuels.

We literally, quote unquote, "wouldn't be over the barrel" that we are right now.

And you said don't look, I mean from your perspective, don't look for a hero on the left, but just understand change and the most important change is collective.

Do you think that is still possible in a world where the internet, as I said before, polarization, weaponization, there seems to be the opposite of collective right now.

Everybody's fragmented and definitely in their corners.

- You know, I live in San Francisco.

I have a front row seat for what Silicon Valley is doing and the first thing they're doing is isolating and alienating us, contributing to the loneliness pandemic.

But you see with No Kings, with extraordinary election in Hungary last week, with so much that's happening that actually civil society movements are important matter more than ever and have made the world we live in.

You know, we have authoritarians representing a minority, trying to push back against minority, majority gains for women, for democracy, for equality, for accountability, for environmental protection, et cetera.

And we have seen authoritarians often with the help of Silicon Valley, have gained some power in recent years.

They've also lost it.

The presidents of South Korea and Brazil who attempted coups are both in prison and you know, things are not really going that well for Donald Trump right now.

- You know what's interesting, what you mentioned at the end of a last question, talking about how a green economy would be better for people's, you know, pocketbooks and national economies.

It's interesting that for instance in Hungary, one of the things that really also led to the overwhelming defeat after 16 years of the self-styled illiberal Democrat, Viktor Orban, who's such a hero to the right across Europe and in the United States, was the economy.

He wasn't meeting the people's, you know, reasonable demands and needs.

And you can see in the United States, individuals are very upset about the rising prices, about inflation, about, you know, the consequences of war and all the other things.

You know, that's something that all sides can agree on, right?

The economy.

It's funny that they don't coalesce around that.

- It's interesting because I think a lot of people don't understand how all the things connect.

How this decision, you know, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan and this decision and this decision and this decision are why, you know, housing, healthcare, and education are so brutally expensive for people here in the US, how these things are put together.

It's often kind of wonky and technical.

In the same way renewables are kind of wonky and technical and how they could make energy so cheap that actually in Australia electricity is gonna be free in the middle of the day 'cause they don't even know what to do with all the solar power at, you know, sun is at its highest.

And that it could also produce a kind of energy security.

The climate movement has always argued, we need to do this to protect, you know, the global ecology, this the planetary health we all depend on, but we could also argue on economic and geopolitical grounds that it produces a more affordable energy system.

And it just ends a lot of the corrupted geopolitics.

- Basically, you know, your book is not a, you know, history of hundreds of years past.

It's not a world history.

You go back to, you know, essentially to the '60s where you say there was so much progress, decolonization, environmentalism, gender equality, civil rights, sexual rights, and all the rest of it.

And you talk about memory as a form of resistance and in your book you turn to the American theologian, Walter Brueggemann for a map of hope.

He has said, "Hope arises from memory.

And that if you forget that every good thing we have came about as the result of a heroic struggle, of course, you will despair."

So, give us some more of that so that we can end this on a note of hope and not despair.

- One thing I talk about a lot is I constantly see people writing obituaries for feminism saying it failed, it didn't change anything.

And oh my God, if you understand the status of women in the world you and I were born into a while ago, you understand that we have had a very successful revolution on the, you know, in both public and private life.

Women's roles are radically different.

We have so many more rights inside marriage, inside the home, in education, under the law, you know, to participate in public life, to hold powerful roles, to be treated with respect and dignity to not be degraded and objectified, manipulated, groped, harassed in the workplace.

And all that came about as a result of feminist activism.

So that's something, if you don't remember what the status of women was, say in 1965, you can't see how profoundly we've changed it in culture, in law, et cetera, by telling different stories about who we are, what our rights should look like, what's possible, you know, what gender means, what equality means.

So yeah, we have changed so many things and I could say the same thing about the environment, about race, - [Christiane] Yeah.

- About indigeneity, about disability, about queer rights.

But yeah, we have changed the world profoundly for the better and we are now defending those victories against the right wing attempt to roll it all back.

- Really interesting.

Real pleasure to talk to you Rebecca Solnit with "The Beginning Comes After the End."

That's your new book.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

A pleasure at this end too.

Take care.

- Next a look at bipartisan collaboration on Capitol Hill.

A pair of female lawmakers from across the aisle successfully pushed to congressmen accused of sexual misconduct to resign.

Republican Anna Paulina Luna and Democrat Teresa Leger Fernandez argued that all the allegations against them made it impossible for Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez to serve.

They join Michel Martin to discuss accountability and whether this signals a broader push for reform in Congress.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna and Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, thank you both so much for joining us.

- Thank you so much for having us.

- Thank you, Michel.

- How did you two start working together?

Who saw who first?

- I think, actually first we first connected during the vote by proxy and Representative Leger Fernandez have reached out during the whole efforts to expel both Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez.

And we basically decided to work together on this very important issue and I'm glad we did 'cause we both won big.

- Look, we were all hearing just how polarized things are, you know, on the Hill.

The reality of it is that we don't hear a lot of kind of bipartisan sort of working.

Representative Leger Fernandez, how did it sort of occur to you that this might be a good idea to work together?

- So I'm chair of the Democratic Women's Caucus and we are always looking for ways in which we can work on a bipartisan basis with women in Congress, period.

And the issue of sexual assault and sexual violence has no partisan boundaries.

And so, I was furious when I heard of the allegations against Eric Swalwell when I saw the evidence.

And I had also been very angry about Tony Gonzalez and the failure of Speaker Johnson, honestly, to take any action against Tony Gonzalez who had admitted six weeks earlier that he violated our code.

You saw Representative Anna Paulina Luna taking a very public stance about this was wrong with regards to Swalwell.

I called her up, I said equally it's wrong with regards to Representative Gonzalez.

And she agreed.

And so, based on that phone call we began a week-long series of communications, of work to accomplish what happened in pretty quick time, I mean from the, not for Gonzalez 'cause that went on way too long but for Swalwell it was within four days he had chosen to resign rather than face expulsion.

- The allegations against both men are disturbing.

In Representative Gonzalez's case, first he denied having an affair with a subordinate, a subordinate who later took her own life.

And then he later admitted it.

I mean, so he lied.

Representative Swalwell slightly different in the sense it was more of like a drip, drip, drip, like one woman and then another woman and then another woman coming forward with these disturbing allegations.

One of them a staffer.

So Representative Luna, what was the moment for you when you just said look, enough is enough?

I mean, 'cause the ethics committee was looking into these allegations.

- I remember hearing, you know, the rumors early on about Tony.

And then when we saw the article drop shortly thereafter, I remember telling my staff, I was like, "This is not normal that you have a staffer lighting themselves on fire.

There has to be more to this."

And I started doing my own digging and I was furious that initially after he made that admission, that he decided that he was still going to seek reelection.

We have a lot of young people that come up on here, both men and women.

And not to say that sexual harassment and assault doesn't happen to men, but specifically within this institution with younger women, it seems to be a very, very prevalent problem.

And if I had to votes to expel him right there, I would've.

And at the time I didn't feel that I had those votes possible to get it done.

But I remember it was a Thursday before stuff started breaking on Swalwell, there was another woman who came forward about inappropriate text messages and sexual harassment.

And I saw the messages from Tony and I was like, this is total predatory behavior.

I had also, in between that time period, obtained messages specifically from the widow of the woman who committed suicide and saw what was not publicly available at the request of the family not to release 'cause they had a young, there was a young child involved.

But the fact that ethics had sat on this and not made the recommendation right then and there as soon as they got those messages for him to be gone, I got really ticked off and I was like, if I have to, you know, call my own party for this, I'm going to.

And you know, that's when you kind of just saw it snowballed.

- Representative Leger Fernandez, what about you?

What was the line where you said, you know what, enough is enough, we can't wait for the ethics committee?

- Well, I think that expulsion is an extraordinary measure.

It's done very few times since our founding, but it's in our constitution.

If you can convince 2/3 of your members that the actions are so heinous and outrageous, then you can expel a member for these kinds of actions.

They had violated the code.

And so, I think that that's all you needed was they violated a code that was very clear that was meant to protect women.

- This is what Mr.

Swalwell says.

I just do need to to read it.

He says, "I'm deeply sorry to my family, staff, and constituents for mistakes in judgment I've made in my past.

I will fight the serious false allegation made against me.

However, I must take responsibility and ownership for the mistakes I did make."

He says, "I'm aware of efforts to bring an immediate expulsion vote against me and other members.

Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made is wrong.

But it's also wrong for my constituents to have me distracted from my duties.

Therefore, I plan to resign my seat in Congress."

Mr.

Gonzalez, after having acknowledged this relationship, he posted on X saying, "There's a season for everything and God has a plan for us all.

When Congress returns, I will file my retirement from office.

It's been my privilege to serve the great people of Texas."

So here's a question I have for you both.

Was the goal to force a formal vote or was it to create enough pressure that resignations became the most likely outcome?

- It was multifaceted.

So, I think, you know, deep down, both me and Leger Fernandez were hoping that they would do the right thing and resign.

And I had again posted that if they had any ounce of integrity based on what was being presented to them, that they would not force everyone through this process.

But that if we needed to, we would be willing to essentially pull the trigger and force the votes, which you saw enough people on both sides come out and say it's time for these guys to go.

And the common consensus on the Hill that week was, it's time to take out the trash.

And I don't think it just stops there though.

What I've realized is that because you have such a consolidation of power, it is really hard for some of these people to come forward if they are, you know, being sexually harassed because they are feared that A, they're gonna get blackballed within the Hill that they won't get hired.

And then also two, having to go through I think the media firestorm that's been created.

And I don't think that this is the end of what you're going to be hearing, at least from the Hill.

I think that there, you know, is some other stuff coming down the pipe.

- What about this question of due process though?

Public figures in lots of fields, they're celebrities and celebrities will say that sometimes they do attract sort of false allegations.

So I just wanted to ask how that question of due process landed with both of you.

- From my motion to expel, we had an admission.

You had a confession.

He said he did it, right?

And Americans are fed up with powerful men using and abusing women without consequence.

He admitted six weeks later, he's still voting.

And you know what?

I had to file that motion because he, what you just read, he had said he was gonna stay on maybe through May.

And I said huh-uh, that staying on through May isn't enough.

You need to resign and resign immediately and the reality to your question is why did we do it?

Because if we wouldn't have filed the resolutions to expel, they won't have resigned.

And when you think of what the evidence that came out with regards to Swalwell was overwhelming and he kept nudging, he denied it as well.

His initial denials were, "I didn't have sex."

Right?

And then his subsequent denials were "I didn't have sexual assault."

Now, our code says no sex because the reason why there is no sexual relationships with a staffer is 'cause that power relationship can never be undone.

You can never have consent when there is that power relationship because our staffers rely on us for their paycheck, for their promotions, for their, they look up to us.

And that's why I think it's important that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

It's important that if we are going to say we need to prosecute the Epstein predators, that we also need to hold ourselves to those same kind of standards.

I wanna prosecute the Epstein predators.

I wanna make sure that nobody and none of my colleagues are gonna get away with this kind of behavior either.

- Doesn't it mean that the fact that they resigned, doesn't it mean that they get to keep their pensions?

- Well, so if they have one or look into it, yes.

And that's what has to be changed now in the House rules.

And I actually have some legislation that I'm working with another member of Congress on and I think that that will be bipartisanly supported.

The last time we saw this type of resignation happening was back in 2018.

And I think up until that point it actually wasn't illegal to have an inappropriate sexual relationship with your staffer.

I think something else that can be added into that though to reform it is, you know, not having inappropriate relationships with other people's staffers.

Because what we're finding again is this culture that's created.

There's an unfair power dynamic.

We are the company that we keep and we don't wanna be associated with this type of behavior.

And when there was a failure for leadership on both sides to do the right thing, we stepped up to the plate.

But what we found after the fact is that many people were thankful for us for doing it and a lot of people had our back on it.

And so, again, you know, this code of conduct has to be assumed across the board.

It can't be biased depending on who's in power.

And so, I'm just hoping that we can continue to kind of work through this process.

It's definitely a growing pain, but I'd like to get back to the work of the American people.

- To that end though, you alluded to the fact that until 2018, Congress was actually exempt from most of the civil rights laws that applied to other places of business.

There really wasn't even any really reporting mechanism if you were experiencing sort of this kind of conduct.

Is there still a legacy of impunity from that time when Congress really literally was exempt from the same laws that attached to other workplaces?

- Yeah.

- Yes, that does exist.

And what we are working on now, 'cause we can't say, okay, we got rid of these two.

There's others.

You know, we have allegations against Cory Mills that needs to, we need to get that done.

But what we are working really hard on is what do we need to do to build on the reforms that Jackie Speier started back in 2018.

And so, we are having those meetings now.

We are looking at what are the legislative, what are the legal changes we need to do?

'Cause it needs to happen on two basis.

One is we have to reform the systems and the processes that kept these women from reporting it.

And two, we need to change the culture so the people who come here know that they can't use their power as I get to do whatever I want to my staff or anybody else's staff.

And it takes this outrage that I think percolated up with regards to these two men, the outrage that has percolated up because of the Epstein survivors.

We are done with it.

Like, I am so done with men thinking that they can take advantage of women in this way just 'cause they have power.

- You've alluded to another member, Cory Mills of Florida, who has been accused by two different women, not congressional staff, of inappropriate conduct.

In fact, one actually had a restraining order against him.

Another woman, apparently there was a police encounter in Washington, D.C.

related to him.

She didn't move forward with sort of charges.

I guess one of the things, and so that matter is also before the ethics committee as well.

I am curious if you feel as a person who's called leadership into account for not in your view, taking these matters as seriously as they should have, do you think you're paying a price for this?

- There's a couple of members to be clear.

It's not just court.

There's a couple.

- Yeah.

- One of them is a senator and I've been cooperating with some ethics over there.

I actually just wrote a op-ed in a place, I think The Spectator yesterday about the overhaul that ethics need to see.

I think ethics needs a complete gutting and I need it, I think it needs to be reappointed with people that will take these allegations seriously.

It shouldn't take, you know, three years.

People that are sitting under ethics investigations, what will typically happen is from what I gather, party in power basically will slow roll the release of certain things.

And I take abuse very seriously, right?

Like I've had friends that have been in abusive relationships and I know what that can do to people.

And so, when I hear these types of things happening, and remember, you have a sitting member of Congress that's facing these allegations, that's not a good thing.

And there's multiple things there.

And I've said very publicly, I don't care if it's a Democrat or a Republican, if there is evidence of violation of our code of conduct in the House, our rules, FEC reporting rules, FEC laws, or if someone's facing and has legal documentation showing that they've done something illegal, then they should not be serving in the House of Representatives.

And if someone calls up an expulsion vote, I will vote to expel that member.

To Leger Fernandez's point, this process has taken far too long and too many people that were guilty, okay, you had Tony Gonzalez, he should have been out.

You had Swalwell, he was out fairly quickly.

And then you had Cherfilus-McCormick who was under investigation for three years, she should have been out.

And so, that's what I'm saying is that we have to change the process.

But again, we are doing this in addition to everything else that we're doing in addition to now fighting for re-elections.

And so, I just hope that we can continue to provide the building blocks to continue to further and push this conversation.

But I do think right now big changes are happening.

And again, you saw three resignations within a week, so that tells you something.

- But I'm asking you, do you think that you are paying a price for your advocacy in this area?

Because as you pointed out, Congress is still a top down place.

- Yeah, yeah.

I've been for sure on some issues that I've advocated for.

I'll just tell you directly, I pushed for vote by proxy for new moms and I know for a fact that people in leadership planted articles about me to try to make me look bad.

So yeah, I definitely think I am.

- Hmm.

What about you, Representative Leger Fernandez?

I mean obviously Democrats are in the minority at the moment, but I do wonder whether you feel like leadership sees you as a thorn in the side?

- I will say that I am not only not a thorn in the side, I am thanked.

I mean there's a lot of gratitude coming from my leadership for the work that we have been doing, both myself personally working together 'cause we do see it as a bipartisan matter, working together with Representative Luna and saying like, how do we now begin the conversations to reframe it?

I got support from my leadership from the day I called them.

Like I was so mad Friday night and I had been talking to them about Gonzalez, about what can we do about Gonzalez.

Our problem is he wasn't a member of our party, right?

And it was a little harder for us because we didn't have the votes.

But it was that's what it took was it took Representative Luna and I teaming up knowing that we could deliver the votes on both of these men on a bipartisan basis.

But my leadership was with me.

My leadership is with me now when we look at saying how do we work together, do we frame this process?

And it absolutely must be bipartisan basis.

That has to include all of us.

- Okay, so before we let you go, let's talk about what needs to happen going forward.

- So we need to take those reforms that were began by Jackie Speier and we need to update them to reflect the moment we're in, including the moment we're in with regards to what the social media looks like, what all of that looks like.

And we need to rely on who are the experts here.

And I keep saying we know who the experts are.

They are the women who work for Congress 'cause they're gonna be able to share with us why aren't they reporting?

What do they need?

What do they need so they feel protected and respected when they file a complaint?

'Cause right now it takes so long, you're forced into mediation.

There's so many different offices.

How do we get that streamlined?

How do we make sure that we have those conversations across the line and get something done?

We can't wait till next year.

We can't say, well, we're gonna wait, right?

We're gonna wait until when Democrats get the gavels, we'll work on this, but this is a bipartisan issue.

We need to work.

I've already talked to some of the leaders on the other side.

I've been as a Democratic Women's Caucus, I've been asking to sit down with Johnson since the, basically the week I got elected.

There's 96 Democratic women in the House.

He's refused to sit down with me.

Hopefully, maybe he'll sit down with Representative Luna and I together.

Those are the next steps that then we actually, I think there's some laws we need to pass.

And then there's just some processes we need to change in addition to that idea that this is no longer guys.

It ain't an old boys' club, a young boys' club.

It is America's House.

We need more.

- Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Representative Theresa Leger Fernandez, thank you both so much for talking with us.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, Michel.

- And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at PBS.org/Amanpour.

Thanks for watching and goodbye from London.

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