Adelita Grijalva becomes a voice for sexual assault survivors

WASHINGTON — Most new lawmakers spend their first year, or even years, working on Capitol Hill in obscurity. Not Adelita Grijalva.

Before even raising her hand to take the oath of office, the Arizona Democrat was serendipitously thrust into the national spotlight this fall and became an unexpected but unwavering voice for sexual assault survivors.

For 50 days after Grijalva won a special election in a safe blue seat in Arizona, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., refused to seat him while the House was out.

Even though the House was absent, Grijalva and his future Democratic colleagues clashed with Johnson in the halls of the Capitol. Johnson, they argued, was keeping the House out of session to prevent Grijalva from becoming the 218th signature to force a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. The speaker denied that was her intention, insisting it would take place quickly once Democrats agreed to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

The seven-week standoff kept Grijalva and the Epstein story in the headlines and helped build momentum for the near-unanimous passage of a bill to force the Justice Department to release all of its records related to the recently convicted sex offender.

The youngest of the 535 members of Congress is now easily recognized by journalists and Capitol staffers. His colleagues only call him by his first name.

“Adelita showed courage and perseverance by fighting to take the oath of office and making it clear that she stood with survivors,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-authored the Epstein bill with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, told NBC News. “She deserves a lot of credit for our success.”

Johnson finally swore her in on Nov. 12, and she officially took the seat of her father and liberal icon, Rep. Raul Grijlava, who died in March. The Epstein bill was approved by the House and Senate six days later.

Short and stocky, the elder Grijlava was an imposing figure on Capitol Hill, serving as both chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for a decade. On the Hill, his daughter expected to follow in his footsteps, focusing on the same issues as him: education, the environment and immigration.

But the confluence of the Epstein saga and his fight for a seat has added another issue to his portfolio: defending survivors.

In an interview on Capitol Hill, Grijalva downplayed his own role in the battle over the Epstein files, instead giving credit to courageous survivors who went public with their personal stories of sex trafficking and abuse by Epstein when they were minors.

“When we look at the situation that I found myself in, it’s easy to stand up for the survivors and get justice for them,” Grijalva told NBC News. “It wasn’t even something I had to say, ‘Let me think, do I want to do this?’ It was absolutely something that, morally, everyone should do. I’m happy to join many others who have done much more work, especially survivors.

It’s a role that Grijalva, 55, a mother of three teenagers, says she feels comfortable with, given her career. For more than 25 years, she worked in the Pima County Youth Court, where she ran a diversion program that provides youth with an alternative to the formal court process. She served 20 years on the Tucson Unified School District board and the last four years on the Pima County Board of Supervisors — the same path her father took in Washington.

In all of these roles, Grijalva said, she has worked with homeless children, children in foster care, those living in poverty and with organizations like the Emerge Center Against Domestic Abuse in Tucson.

“Advocacy for people who feel like they don’t have a voice has always been something that I’m very comfortable with. I think it’s our responsibility. When people don’t feel like they have support or the ability… to raise their own voice, then that’s part of our responsibility to do that,” Grijalva said in the interview. “So, yes, I can get loud.”

She and a dozen fellow Democrats made noise on Oct. 14, as they marched arm in arm to the president’s office to demand that Johnson seat Grijalva. They repeatedly chanted “Swear her!” » and carried purple signs with the same message. The video showed them pushing past a Capitol Police officer and Johnson accused Democrats of “storming” his suite, but they appeared to turn back once they were denied access.

On November 18, Grijlava stood in front of the Capitol dome with other Democratic lawmakers, sexual abuse survivors and survivor advocates to call for unanimous passage of the Epstein legislation in the House and Senate. Later that day, it passed the House by a vote of 427-1 and was then cleared by the Senate by unanimous consent. Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., was the only lawmaker in both chambers to vote no, arguing it did not do enough to protect victims’ privacy.

“It looks a lot like advocacy work for child protection,” Grijlava said of the push to make the records public. “Because even though they are women today, this happened to them when they were children and they needed someone to stand up for them. »

She will also continue to focus on climate education and advocacy, just as her father did. She was assigned to both the Education and Workforce Committee and the Natural Resources Committee, where her father was the top Democrat from 2015 until earlier this year.

Although she is the daughter of a longtime congressman, Grijlava said, she is still learning her way around the building. “I’ve never been to the Hill before. I haven’t interned here. That’s not my lived experience,” she said.

The day after Johnson’s inauguration, Grijalva sat down for an interview alongside two Epstein survivors, Liz Stein and Jess Michaels. Hallie Jackson of NBC News asked survivors what it felt like to be in the House gallery watching Grijalva finally take the oath of office.

“Not only because of the historic moment for us as a country, but also the validation and the fierceness of the representative, her courage, is just contagious for all of us,” Stein said.

“Seeing her validate us in front of the entire House and Jess and I receiving a standing ovation from MPs when we sometimes felt so unheard by members of our government, was absolutely transformative for me. »