Meatball Ron, His Rubber Stamp House and a Gay Fondling Cover Up

Ordinarily this would not be a surprising or especially newsworthy story, at least not at the national level. A controversy-tangled freshman Republican member of the Florida state House of Representatives, Fabian Basabe, has been accused of sexual harassment and some mix of unwanted touching and assault by two members of his staff. Basabe, 45, is billed as a former New York City socialite who appeared on a couple reality shows. He’s married Martina Borgomanero, the heiress to a lingerie fortune. (A very South Florida story as you can tell, he represents Miami Beach and environs.) He was already in some hot water in his socially tolerant, gay-friendly district for voting in lockstep with state Republicans pushing Ron DeSantis’s anti-“woke”/LGBTQ agenda. The accusers are one staffer, Nicholas Frevola, 25, and one former intern, Jacob Cutbirth, 24.

As I said, not unremarkable but bordering on a news story cliche: Apparently closeted, if in this case perhaps lightly closeted, Republican Rep accused of harassing and fondling male staffers. He denies it; news at 11.

Where it gets interesting though is that the investigation by The Miami Herald and CBS News Miami strongly suggests a cover up by the Republican leadership of the state House, specifically House Speaker Paul Renner, a key DeSantis ally.

We Did It, Folks! Actually, You Did It.

Overnight we crossed the $500,000 mark. And, as I’ve told you maybe five million times now, that was our goal. That’s amazing. We are all super pumped. We’re really grateful.

It reminds me of a central reality of this organization and this community: the sheet anchor of a robust and resilient news organization is a community of readers who are engaged with and feel personally connected to its work and existence. I wasn’t kidding when I said yesterday morning that I thought we were going to miss this milestone. Yesterday mid-morning we were at about $455,000 and we’d been averaging in the low-teens of thousands on weekdays in the final days of the drive. I figured we’d have some final surge. But the math with two more days was still a stretch. But over the whole day yesterday we ended up raising just under $50,000. So what seemed like a stretch over two days we ended up accomplishing in a single day.