GOP Senate Candidate Reportedly Threatened, Retaliated Against Sexual Harassment Victims

It’s now less than 50 days until Election Day, and Pennsylvania is again expected to be one of several states that could determine the outcome of the presidential race. While a lot of news coverage will focus on how Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are polling in the Keystone State, there is also a key Senate contest: Incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) is facing off against former hedge fund CEO and Connecticut resident David McCormick. McCormick currently trails Casey in the polls by an average of 3.5 points and as many as 9 points.

If McCormick’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he also ran in the GOP primary in 2022. He lost to the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz by fewer than 1,000 votes; Oz then lost to now-Sen. John Fetterman. McCormick is the former president and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, located in Westport, Connecticut, where McCormick still lives. It was only a few months before announcing his first Senate run in late 2021 that he bought a house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (though he was raised in Bloomsburg). 

Stories on the culture of harassment and fear at Bridgewater were published in 2016 and 2017—years before McCormick entered politics—but McCormick’s reported role in perpetuating that environment wasn’t fully explored until New York Times finance reporter Rob Copeland published The Fund, a book about Bridgewater, in 2023. The Fund, along with reporting from the NYT, and a contemporaneous complaint filed in Connecticut allege that McCormick threatened or retaliated against three former Bridgewater employees who reported sexual harassment.

In 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bridgewater investigated McCormick’s former co-CEO Greg Jensen for conducting a consensual relationship with a junior employee. Bridgewater pushed the woman out of the company and paid her a settlement of more than $1 million. Shortly afterward, another employee reported that Jensen had groped her buttocks during a party, but chose to remain at Bridgewater. Copeland’s book reported that when the woman, Katina Stefanova, founded her own company years later, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio and McCormick asked her for a meeting, purportedly to discuss her new business. The author reports that the meeting was actually about her silence: McCormick said he’d heard reporters were looking into Jensen, while Dalio said she should deny she was groped. After Stefanova was adamant that it happened, McCormick allegedly said “maybe the issue is that you aren’t being a supportive public presence for us.”

Another employee said McCormick threatened her about breaking a non-disclosure agreement. She told Copeland that, after she began dating a coworker, her boss gave her a calendar and asked her to mark the days the couple had had sex. She left after receiving severance and a settlement that prohibited her from talking about her experience. Per Copeland’s book, McCormick tried to intimidate her to stay quiet upon her departure: “Shortly before leaving, she also received an unexpected in-person visit from Bridgewater co-CEO David McCormick. He told her that if she ever broke the agreement, she would be in litigation for the rest of her life.”

Finally, former Bridgewater employee Christopher Tarui filed a sexual harassment complaint with the state of Connecticut in January 2016 in which he alleged that his male supervisor repeatedly pursued and sexually propositioned him despite multiple rejections. In the complaint, first reported by the Times, Tarui said that management including then-president McCormick “directly participated in retaliation” against him by making him repeat his claims to his harasser’s face in a videotaped meeting, denying his request to work from home, and later placing him on a leave of absence.

Jezebel contacted the McCormick campaign for comment and did not hear back by publication time. McCormick campaign spokesperson Elizabeth Gregory told USA Today Network that the allegations from The Fund are a “retread from a year-old book” and that McCormick is proud of his tenure at Bridgewater.

The McCormick campaign has also associated itself with a Republican consulting firm that was sued over sexual harassment and retaliation. A former employee of Pittsburgh-based ColdSpark Media sued the company in federal court in October 2023, claiming that ColdSpark retaliated against her after she reported that an executive sexually assaulted her in 2021. McCormick’s campaign has paid ColdSpark more than $600,000 for political consulting since the news of the lawsuit broke, though the case appears to have been settled last month. The last recorded payment sent to ColdSpark was in May 2024, and Jezebel asked if the campaign was still working with the firm but did not receive a response.

The more you know, Pennsylvania.