Philly mayoral candidate Helen Gym facing attack ads for 2019 pharmaceutical bill vote

UPDATE: The donors to the Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth were disclosed in campaign finance reports filed May 5. The group is largely funded by conservative Main Line billionaire Jeffrey Yass. Read more about Yass’ contribution and who else donated to the super PAC.

Mayoral candidate Helen Gym is facing renewed accusations of acting unethically when she voted against a City Council bill in 2019 that sought to regulate pharmaceutical sales representatives while her husband worked in the industry.

The line of attack, which critics have raised throughout the campaign, is now front and center because of a $200,000 TV ad campaign that began Thursday. The ads are paid for by a new and mostly unknown political group called the Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth.

The ads come less than three weeks before the May 16 Democratic primary, in which Gym is a top contender.

They focus on Gym’s vote with the majority of Council to kill a bill that would have banned sales representatives from giving gifts to physicians and required they register with the city’s Health Department. The pharmaceutical industry vocally opposed the bill.

Political opponents have said Gym should have recused herself from the vote — at the time, her husband, Bret Flaherty, was a top attorney at AmerisourceBergen, a Conshohocken-based drug distribution corporation that has come under scrutiny for its sales of opioid painkillers. And they have questioned why Gym, a progressive who was often the most vocal critic of corporate interests on Council, would vote against a bill that appeared to align with her politics.

Gym didn’t disclose her husband’s job publicly when she voted against the legislation, but it appears that she followed the city’s conflict-of-interest process for Council members by seeking advice from the Board of Ethics. In late 2018, the board’s general counsel told Gym’s office in an email obtained by The Inquirer that there was no conflict of interest that would require disclosure and recusal.

The legislation failed, 9-5.

Brendan McPhillips, Gym’s campaign manager, said in a statement that Gym supported the gift ban, but did not support requiring the Health Department to act as a regulatory agent for all drug sales representatives, not just those selling opioids.

An AmerisourceBergen spokesperson confirmed Flaherty’s employment there ended in February — about three months after Gym declared her candidacy for mayor.

It’s not clear who is funding the group paying for the ads, which are just the second instance of negative TV ads in this year’s mayoral campaign, following candidate Allan Domb’s attacks on rival Jeff Brown.

The chair of the group that placed the ads is Jabari Jones, a small-business advocate who launched a run for City Council this year but did not garner enough petition signatures to get on the ballot. The treasurer is Mo Rushdy, a real-estate developer.

They declined to name the group’s donors. In a statement, Rushdy said only that “elected officials need to be accountable for their actions and we believe it is important for voters to know about Helen Gym’s clear conflict of interest when she voted in support of prescription drug companies.”

While the group’s funders are unknown now, they won’t be for long. The current campaign finance reporting period ends Monday, and political action committees must report their donors and expenditures by May 5. The group will likely not be able to keep its donors secret like other “dark money” committees playing a role in this year’s elections due to the timing of when it was formed.

McPhillips in a statement said the ads are “plainly false” and suggested they are funded by Jeffrey Yass, a Main Line billionaire and GOP mega-donor whose groups have contributed to another super PAC tied to Rushdy.

“They want to tear Helen down because they know she stands up for public education, and for everyday people over their narrow and greedy special interests,” he said.

Three other mayoral candidates were on Council at the time of the vote. Domb, a Democrat, and David Oh, a Republican, also voted against the bill. Cherelle Parker was one of two Council members who recused themselves, citing a conflict of interest because they sat on an Independence Blue Cross advisory board.

In defending her decision not to recuse herself, Gym and her supporters have pointed to the fact that other Council members opposed the bill. While Gym did follow best practices by seeking advice from the ethics board, the eventual margin of victory of a vote is irrelevant in determining whether an official has a conflict of interest that should warrant recusal.

The city’s public integrity laws prohibit lawmakers from voting on legislation in which they have financial interests. There are exceptions for cases in which the proposal at hand is broad enough to affect large classes of people, such as a Council member who is a homeowner voting to lower the property tax.

The Board of Ethics cited the large-class exception in its advice to Gym on recusal.

Still, because Gym didn’t disclose in Council that her husband worked for a pharmaceutical company, voters had no way of knowing that because the city doesn’t require public officials disclose spousal income.

Even former Councilmember Bill Greenlee, one of the bill’s prime sponsors, said he didn’t know at the time that Gym’s husband worked for AmerisourceBergen.

“I was disappointed she wasn’t a little more forthcoming,” he said.

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Flaherty worked as an attorney in the general counsel’s office at AmerisourceBergen beginning in 2015, according to the company. State records show that he now works at a medical device manufacturer in the Lehigh Valley.

His departure from AmerisourceBergen, besides coming amid Gym’s campaign for mayor, also came less than two months after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a nationwide lawsuit against the company, claiming it failed to report suspicious drug sales to law enforcement.

In addition to linking Gym’s vote to her husband, the attack ad also says she was “rewarded” by pharmaceutical executives with campaign donations following the vote.

Gym has received nearly $50,000 in campaign contributions from John Chou, a now-retired AmerisourceBergen executive who campaign-finance records show has been one of her largest individual donors.

Those contributions include a $3,000 donation made in 2019, about a month after she voted against the legislation — a donation that online critics seized on last weekend after Philadelphia Magazine editor at large Ernest Owens tweeted about it.

Chou has donated to Gym nearly a dozen separate times since her first run for City Council in 2015, including four contributions before his 2019 check.

Chou was the chief legal officer at AmerisourceBergen until his retirement last year, and is involved in a handful of philanthropic ventures, including sitting on the board of the good-government group Committee of Seventy. He could not be reached for comment Thursday.

McPhillips said Gym and Chou have had a “personal relationship” for 15 years and “have never spoken about this bill.”

“Helen’s decades-long track record of independence and standing up for her values speaks for itself,” McPhillips said. “Individual contributors donate to her because they believe in her record of work.”

In addition to prohibiting pharmaceutical sales reps from giving gifts to physicians, the legislation would have required the representatives to register with the city, similar to how City Hall lobbyists must register with the Board of Ethics. Under the bill, the city’s Health Department would have been required to track drug sales materials and literature distributed in the city.

McPhillips said “multiple stakeholders” opposed the bill because of “a lack of public engagement and no answers to concerns that it would delay access to a range of treatments for serious illnesses unrelated to opioid addiction.”

Republican mayoral candidate David Oh, who is running in the GOP primary unopposed and also voted against the bill, said physicians told him that having lunch with sales representatives to learn about drugs is a routine practice, and that the legislation was “vilifying health professionals.”

He said he recalled being surprised that Gym voted the same way he did, given she was one of Council’s most progressive members.

“It was out of character for her to vote against it,” he said. “And I just thought either she should have recused herself or just said, ‘This is the relationship that I have.’”

Jared Leopold, a spokesperson for Domb’s campaign, said Domb opposed the bill after he suggested changes to it that would ensure it did not have “unintended consequences that would negatively impact our growing and vital life sciences industry,” but those amendments were rejected.

“Unlike others, he did not have a conflict of interest related to this vote,” Leopold said.

Inquirer staff writers Julia Terruso and Chris Brennan contributed to this article.