UPDATED WITH AUDIO | What most councilors didn't want you to hear last night
Before Vop had me roughed up by sheriff's deputies, this is what I was going to say.
Update for Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 5pm EST:
Monday night, I started a voice memo recording on my phone when I walked up the podium. In the chaos of getting assaulted by the sheriff’s deputies sent in by Vop Osili, I didn’t turn off the recording until after the assault, the descent in the elevator with my friend Elise Shrock and supporters (where you’ll hear me fall apart), the moments outside the City-County Building where I realize press has followed us downstairs and Elise wipes away the running makeup on my face, and me delivering my remarks initially intended for Council to the press.
I am working to transcribe the moments before my remarks so that there is no mistaking what I said when the cameras weren’t watching.
Please share this post so that more people hear the audio. Thank you.
Original post for Tuesday, June 10, 2025:
No, I’m not okay right now. (Mom, don’t click that link.)
But I’m not going away.
Survivors, whistleblowers, and workers demanding better are not going away.
Shame on Council Democrats. Shame on Vop Osili. Shame on Joe Hogsett. Shame on all of them.
Remarks from Lauren Roberts for the Indianapolis City-County Council (June 9, 2025)
My name is Lauren Roberts.
I worked for Joe Hogsett’s first mayoral campaign from November 2014 until I quit in June 2015, and I’m the first survivor who tried to come forward about Thomas Cook beginning more than eight years ago in May of 2017.
I live in Denver. I took time off work and crowdfunded from friends, family, and community members in order to be here today.
This moment is the first time that you, the Council, are actually listening to me.
And that’s shameful.
This Council’s Democratic caucus members—with the exception of your now-former member, Councilor Jesse Brown—have silenced and refused to listen to me outside of manipulative back-room conversations intended to manage survivors and keep us out of the way of your political agenda.
As recently as a few minutes ago, I again had to learn from the media about Council Democrats’ statement and proposed next steps.
Council President Vop Osili, Vice President Ali Brown, Ethics Committee Chairwoman Jessica McCormick, and, most recently, Investigative Committee Chairwoman Crista Carlino’s actions tell me that you have always been less interested in getting to the truth and holding abusers accountable than protecting your own power and abusers like Joe Hogsett.
Meanwhile, the Republican members of this Council continue to use survivors and our stories as a political football, exploiting us just as much as the Democrats to further your own agenda and accumulate power.
Aside from the fact that this is exploiting us, I certainly do not consent to being used as a talking point by politicians who support an adjudicated rapist in the White House.
Until you, the Republican council members, are ready to support and protect all survivors—which includes undocumented survivors, transgender survivors, Black and Brown survivors, Indigenous survivors, Palestinian survivors, survivors who need abortions, and the women raped and abused by Donald Trump, just to name a few—I disrespectfully request that you keep my name and my story out of your mouths.
I am 37 years old. I grew up in Fort Wayne, went to high school in Carmel, and graduated from IU’s Kelley School of Business in Bloomington.
As a college senior, I interned for Senator Evan Bayh in Washington, DC, and held full-time policy roles for other US Senate Democrats in my early 20s.
When I joined Joe Hogsett’s first campaign for mayor, I was 26, idealistic, and felt a sense of duty to be a positive force in my community.
Despite holding more progressive views than he did, I believed in Joe Hogsett, and I thought the work mattered.
I share these details so that you might realize that my background was not unlike many of yours when I joined Joe Hogsett’s campaign as Deputy Campaign Manager in 2014.
If I could tell my younger self what Joe Hogsett and his then-campaign manager Thomas Cook were about to put me through, I would tell her run away and don’t look back.
The abuse from Hogsett and Cook was horrific to go through.
But the aftermath is what has stolen the last 10 and a half years from me.
From the first moment I tried to report in 2017 to right now, I have been forced to carry the burden of what was done to me, of a path I did not choose.
Since going on record in the press with two other survivors last summer, at every step in this process you, the Council—even when your intentions may have been noble—have perpetuated the harm that survivors continue to experience.
I am certain that your carelessness and refusal to find the truth about our cases in a trauma-informed, survivor-centered way have discouraged other survivors from asking for help or coming forward to report.
Earlier today, for example, Councilor Barth called for the release of text messages that we survivors turned over to attorney Danielle Kays and her team at Fisher Phillips in the spring, in hopes that the firm would properly investigate.
Of course, we all know now that Council’s investigation from Fisher Phillips was a nearly half-million-dollar political performance and extension of abuse at the taxpayers’ expense.
Nevertheless, at the time, we survivors participated voluntarily, but not without sacrifice.
Over the last 10 months, we survivors have paid a price with our time, our money, our health, and our wellbeing.
It was excruciating for me to relive Cook and Hogsett’s abuse as I wrote and pulled together 49 pages of a statement and documentation, something I chose to do when it became clear that Danielle Kays and her team at Fisher Phillips would not agree to record interviews, would not agree to confidentiality, and would not answer any of the questions posed through our lawyer about the investigation’s scope or timeline.
I was also alarmed to learn that we would not be interviewed under oath.
After the report was released last month, I was even more disgusted that the committee chose not to use its subpoena power to compel Thomas Cook to testify.
As another survivor and I told the Star last week, Fisher Phillips’s report made glaring omissions in favor of the mayor’s version of events, made sloppy errors with basic facts that we backed up with overwhelming documentation, and frequently—in the most misogynistic way—characterized survivors’ statements as “claims” while the mayor’s were treated as “facts.”
It’s not lost on us that the Faegre attorney on hand for Hogsett was Matt Giffin, former Corporation Counsel to the mayor.
Hogsett’s former special counsel, Tim Moriarty, who is married to Councilor Brienne Delaney, now holds a partner stake in the firm.
Of course, Faegre enjoys plenty of public contracts with the City of Indianapolis and makes sizable political donations to Hogsett and many of you on this Council.
This is certainly not a coincidence.
So, after all this—
Why would any other survivor trust the leaders of this city after what they’ve seen my friend and I go through, especially as two white, cisgender women who at one time had direct access to the mayor?
The many survivors with less power and privilege are certainly not going to have faith in this system or process.
Survivors, whistleblowers, City workers, and campaign staff who speak out about abuse are not the problem for the Democratic Party, for this administration, or for this Council.
Abusers are the problem, and your constituents cannot afford for you to spend another moment wringing your hands or claiming that your role is limited to policymaking.
Your positions are not neutral. Had you acted on this months ago, other leaders might have felt empowered to speak up and commit to the much-needed reforms, not just in this building, but in campaign infrastructure.
Instead, we keep seeing you, the Council, make empty statements and treat us, the survivors simply trying to be heard, like troublemakers at every turn.
Shame on you.
Joe Hogsett cares only about protecting his own ego, holding onto his power to bully the people around him, and keeping his corporate donors happy.
Indianapolis deserves a mayor who will show up and fight for public schools, for unhoused neighbors, for undocumented people, for our most vulnerable community members.
But instead, he’s choosing to fight against survivors, whistleblowers, his own workers, and those who support us.
Joe Hogsett is corrupt, abusive, and unfit to be mayor in any circumstances.
But he is especially unfit at this time when every US city urgently needs leaders with strong moral character to protect us from the rising fascist takeover of our federal government.
Unfortunately for Joe Hogsett and for those of you on this Council who continue to protect him for your own benefit, our group of survivors, whistleblowers, and community members who support us is growing.
And we’re made up of seasoned communications professionals like me, community organizers, fundraisers, and activists.
We know what we are doing.
We are very good at this.
The complete inaction and acceptance of sexual assault only upholds the abusers that are taken care of in every department in this city. Too many women are abused and too many men are covering it up.
Your fellow Hoosiers are behind you!