How a sexual harassment scandal involving a Josh Shapiro aide could affect the Pa. governor’s VP chances

With Gov. Josh Shapiro emerging as a potential front-runner to become Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, one of the only scandals to mark his two decades in Pennsylvania politics has resurfaced.

Erin McClelland, the Democratic nominee for state treasurer in November’s election, drew eyeballs last week with a thinly veiled and unusual intraparty jab, saying in a tweet that she wanted a vice presidential pick who, among other things, “doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug.”

Though she did not identify Shapiro by name, McClelland’s pointed remarks were widely interpreted as a reference to the resignation last year of one of Shapiro’s top aides and closest allies, Mike Vereb, amid a sexual harassment investigation.

Vereb, 57, abruptly stepped down in September, three weeks after Shapiro’s administration quietly agreed to pay $295,000 to settle claims from a governor’s office employee who said he’d made repeated sexual advances toward her and often spoken openly — and lewdly — about her, other staff members, and a female state senator.

Shapiro’s administration has largely avoided discussing Vereb in the year since, describing his departure as a private personnel matter while maintaining it “takes allegations of discrimination and harassment seriously.” His silence has drawn criticism from female state lawmakers in both parties, who have called for a more transparent accounting of what Shapiro knew about his aide’s conduct and when.

Vereb most recently served as Shapiro’s legislative secretary, as a core member of his cabinet. He was one of the few people who has consistently been a part of the governor’s close personal circle of advisers over the years.

Their relationship dates back nearly two decades to when Vereb, a Republican, and Shapiro, a Democrat, served alongside each other in the state House, where they both represented Montgomery County, between 2007 and 2012. There, Vereb, who represented a West Norriton-based district, and Shapiro, who represented Abington, forged a bipartisan friendship and often teamed up together to advance legislation in the county’s interests.

When Shapiro was elected attorney general in 2016, he named Vereb — in one of his first appointments in the job — as his office’s primary liaison to the rest of state government. And after Shapiro’s election as governor, he quickly named Vereb to his cabinet post.

As Shapiro’s top liaison to the General Assembly, Vereb played a key role in guiding the administration’s interactions with the legislature, especially during negotiations over the state’s annual budget.

But he abruptly resigned in September 2023, less than nine months into the job.

Though the administration offered no explanation for Vereb’s sudden decision to leave his job, The Inquirer reported last year that his departure had followed an accusation that he’d sexually harassed a female aide.

His accuser, who worked alongside Vereb for less than two months before resigning her position in early 2023, said he’d repeatedly made suggestive comments and innuendos toward her that left her feeling uneasy, such as suggesting she wear lower-cut tops and higher-slit skirts.

“I was uncomfortable with how Mike was acting in the office — his constant sexually charged comments, and how he was addressing work-related issues,” said the woman — whose name The Inquirer has withheld because of her sexual harassment allegations — in a statement to the state Office of Equal Employment Opportunity obtained by The Inquirer.

At one point, she said, Vereb compared her to another female staffer in his office whom he said he wasn’t sexually interested in because she was a “type A personality” who would “probably make [him] iron her sheets and pillow cases before sex.”

When the accuser warned Vereb that his behavior toward her had become the subject of office gossip, he turned on her and demanded to know who was talking about them — and made another sexual pass, she said. He insisted that if they decided to have a sexual relationship “it would be our business,” she stated in her complaint.

“If you decided you wanted to do that,” Vereb allegedly told the woman, “go close the door to this office, tell me to bend you over this conference table, hike up your skirt and [have sex with you] … that would be our decision to make.”

Later, she said, he called her drunk after a reception at the governor’s mansion to again suggest a sexual encounter, saying he knew how to hide from security cameras in the tunnels under the Capitol, and again interrogated her as to who in their office was talking about them.

Days later, she was summoned to a meeting with the human resources department for the governor’s office. When she questioned Vereb about it, she said, he made vague references to “performance concerns” with her job.

After reporting her encounters with Vereb at that meeting in early March 2023 and a subsequent meeting with other Shapiro administration staffers days later, the woman ultimately decided to leave her job.

Neither she nor Vereb has publicly discussed her allegations in the months since.

Vereb’s accuser gave a statement to the state Office of Equal Opportunity, part of the executive branch, the same month she resigned. She also filed a separate complaint with the state Human Relations Commission in June 2023.

Both entities handle complaints of workplace discrimination from government employees and typically conduct their probes in secret. It remains unclear just how far the complaints against Vereb progressed through the investigative process before Shapiro’s administration agreed to the $295,000 settlement deal in September of that year.

The agreement did not include any admission of wrongdoing from Vereb or the governor’s office and required all parties to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring them from publicly discussing the accuser’s allegations.

The governor’s office has since said it cannot discuss the matter. A spokesperson for Shapiro maintained at the time that the administration has “robust procedures … in place for thoroughly investigating reports of discrimination and harassment [that] provide detailed guidance to help ensure that allegations are promptly and fully investigated and that employees feel comfortable to report misconduct.”

The timeline of when Shapiro first learned of the allegations against his aide remains hazy.

Though his accuser lodged her accusations in March 2023 — less than two months after Shapiro took over the governor’s office — Vereb continued to play a prominent role in Shapiro’s administration for months until his September resignation. By that time, copies of the woman’s supposedly confidential complaint and statement to investigators had been circulating among lawmakers and lobbyists for weeks.

Shapiro and his office have not directly commented on the allegations against Vereb or the circumstances of his resignation.

In the administration’s news release announcing Vereb’s departure, Shapiro’s chief of staff, Dana Fritz, lauded him as “a key member of our team” who had spent “decades serving our Commonwealth.” That release did not include a direct statement from Shapiro.

However, the governor defended his administration’s handling of harassment and discrimination complaints during a news conference a week after Vereb’s departure, once news of the allegations against him had emerged.

“You owe it to a victim to make sure that you have a confidential process, you have a rigorous process that’s grounded in integrity, to ensure that their voice can be heard and to ensure that appropriate outcomes are brought about,” Shapiro said. “And we are committed to doing that … in our administration.”

It’s not yet clear whether the scandal involving Vereb could prevent Shapiro from getting onto the Democratic ticket this year, but he has faced backlash over it in the last week.

Last week’s tweet by McClelland, the Democratic nominee for state treasurer, injected the Vereb episode into the ongoing debate over who Harris should pick as her running mate and could fuel a new round of demands for Shapiro to more fully explain his handling of the allegations against his adviser.

And Shapiro’s detractors in the veepstakes race have begun circulating opposition research seeking to tie him to his aide’s past conduct, hoping it will serve as a strike against him in a year in which a woman is leading the Democratic ticket — and is seeking to portray former President Donald Trump as the “womanizer” candidate.

And that criticism isn’t new. Since Vereb stepped down, female state lawmakers of both parties have criticized the Shapiro administration’s lack of transparency.

“It really makes me so angry that I have to stop talking because I’ll say things I shouldn’t,” State Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) told The Inquirer last year. “It’s so infuriating that [Vereb] stayed in that position for months, one of the highest positions in the administration.”