When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward

Harrell's external affairs director, Pedro Gomez was accused of raping a woman last June. Several women told us they recognized his behavior, including one who said she never reported her own assault.

A description of evidence submitted as part of Delostrinos' rape kit—an invasive, lengthy procedure that victims are encouraged to undergo to preserve DNA and other evidence immediately after a sexual assault

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor's office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city's payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor's office, prompting his resignation.

Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year, was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell's longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.

Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. "I ended up feeling very violated," one said.

Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. "I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused," she recalled. "Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, 'There's no way I can be this drunk.'"

Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city's Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor's office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.

Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. "I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me," she said.

Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez' ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.

The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn't afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated "stay in culture" ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of "cultural shame and stigma" around sexual assault.

Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn't say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.

"It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad," she said. "Because what he's saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, 'We really have to make a lane for ourselves,' and talking about what a big deal he is in the community."

One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though "the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. ... "I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous." Gomez kept saying things were "'on the house, because I take care of my people,'" she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be "sipped." As the night wore on, things got "blurry" and "kind of messy."

She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. "There was never a progression, like, 'Oh my god, I have feelings for him.' It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual."

By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time."It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, 'Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what's going on.'" When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, "this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy."

Back at her house, she thought to herself, "There's no way I can be this drunk." Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.

"I have no idea when I went to bed. I don't know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out," she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet "neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house."

"I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame," the woman said.

Apart from a text saying something along the lines of "last night got crazy," she said Gomez "pretended like it never happened." At one point, she said, he seemed to be "testing" her to see what she remembered about that night. "He was like, 'Do you remember what tattoos I have?' And I said, 'You have tattoos?"

The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have "random outburst of anger" and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn't acknowledge he had done anything wrong. "I'm pretending like this shit didn't happen. I didn't tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did."

Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. "Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car." The woman said he tried to convince her to "do what we did last time. He was like, 'I can really trust you. You're good people because you don't gossip. You don't tell other people your business." She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and "he was quick to get out of there."

Because Gomez was involved in Harrell's campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, "I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far," she said. "He said, 'Bruce is going to win and I'm going to be working for him. ... I'll be the reference of a lifetime.'"

The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District a hand asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez' work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. "This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it," she sighed.

Gomez, through his attorney, did not respond to PubliCola's questions or offer a response to detailed descriptions of all four women's allegations.

Throughout his time at the city, according to people who worked with Gomez, he talked regularly about various side businesses he was using to supplement his $153,000 city salary. Coworkers said Gomez attributed his entrepreneurial spirit to his upbringing as a migrant farm worker in Eastern Washington, where he told KUOW and the Puget Sound Business Journal he earned extra more money than his parents did in the fields by selling water and singing songs to other migrant workers starting when he was 8 years old.

Housen said Gomez was not allowed to work on his side businesses on city time. Harrell "believes being a public servant is a sacred responsibility to support the people of the City of Seattle, not for personal benefit," he said.

But several former city staffers, as well as the women who spoke to PubliCola about their own experiences with Gomez, said he freely mixed city and personal business, talking up his entrepreneurial acumen and bringing young women he was purportedly mentoring to official city events—including a Mariners game where Gomez reportedly brought a very young mentee into the mayor's official suite. Asked about this alleged incident, Housen said, "We do not have anything to share."

One woman who spoke to PubliCola was just 22 when she first met Gomez, then 37, through Seattle Restored, a city program that helps pop-up shops, art installations, and small businesses fill empty storefronts in downtown Seattle. Gomez "wrote the briefing papers" on her gallery for a Seattle Restored event, the woman said, and later approached her mother at a gallery event, saying "he would love to be of support to me."

She agreed to meet him for drinks at a rooftop bar near Pike Place Market. "In my mind, I’m building a connection with somebody who can potentially help me," she said. The pair drank and ate oysters before going to a French restaurant nearby, followed by a bar, where "the drinks kept coming" and, by the end of the night, she was "really, really drunk." The whole time, she said, she thought she was having a professional meeting with someone at the city who could help her professionally —until, as they were chatting about music at the end of the evening, Gomez suddenly "grabs my face and kisses me."

The woman said it came out of nowhere. "It felt like he was looking at me in a completely different than how I thought he was," she said. "I felt really violated, and I told him I don’t mix business and personal. And that’s when he said there was nothing that he could offer" her business, she said. That "confused me," she said—hadn't the whole night been about how he could help her business? But then, she said, "he made me feel like we had a great time and he had a bunch of feelings." He offered to get her a hotel room because she was so intoxicated, but the offer felt "weird" and she said no.

The next day, Gomez showed up at her gallery and said he wanted to pursue a relationship, but asked her to keep things quiet "because of his role in the city." In fact, she later learned, he was in a long-term relationship with another woman. "He wined and dined me at all the finest places in Seattle. I had never received that kind of treatment. It was a lot up front, and my friends were impressed"—and, at 22, "I didn’t have enough time or experience to decode that."

Over time, the woman said, Gomez started to turn on her. The woman shared an email exchange with Gomez in which she described him telling her she was stupid, calling her a bitch, and slapping one of her guests at an event at her gallery. In his response, Gomez said there was "absolutely no excuse" for his behavior. "I've always prided myself on being respectful and a protector of women," he wrote. The rest of the email amounted to a lengthy justification for his actions. "My entire life I have been drained of my energy by the people around me," Gomez wrote.

As for the altercation, he wrote, "I should make clear that it was less of a slap and more of a push. And he got in my face first and I simply pushed him away." (PubliCola was unable to directly verify with Gomez that he wrote the email, as he did not respond to requests for comment made through his attorney.)

The final straw, the woman said, came one night when she confronted Gomez inside her gallery after her friends told her they'd seen him kissing another woman at a nearby bar. "He was denying everything, and I told him, 'Please leave.'" The woman had just hosted an event, and she said Gomez started knocking over cocktail tables inside the small space. She locked herself inside a storage space, she recalled, but he broke the handle off the door, so she went into the gallery's bathroom and tried to shut the door.

"That's when he began to get more physical and I told him, 'Get off me,'" she said. "He cut his hand throwing the cocktail tables around the room, so there was blood all over my white turtleneck," Her friends, who had been talking outside, finally saw what was going on and came in to break things up. throwing Gomez on the ground. Through his attorney, Gomez did not respond to a request for comment on a detailed description of this alleged incident.

The experience left her unmoored. "After two years of being with him, I have absolutely no idea who this person is and what he’s capable of."

While he was involved with the gallery owner, Gomez was also in a long-term relationship with another woman, who became aware of his relationship with the 22-year-old after a friend saw the two of them on a date at a Belltown club. This woman originally met Gomez at a political event in 2015, but didn't talk to him at length until two years later when he invited her out for what she called "a business coffee" to discuss potential opportunities for collaboration.

Gomez was "all business" during their daytime coffee meeting, the woman recalled—so when he asked her out for another business meeting, this time at a bar, she said yes.

"He’s charming and has connections and alludes that he can get you jobs and opportunities, and so you end up thinking, 'This is good person to connect with," she said, echoing Delostrinos and the gallery owner.

Reflecting on it now, she said, "I think he uses that power to find and engage with women ... grooms them through the guise of business meetings, and turns them into drinking." During their meeting at the bar, she recalled Gomez "pushing me to drink alcohol—'drink the shot, drink the shot!'—and then he'd be laughing and I felt like I was being pushed into it."

Like the other women, she said what she thought was a professional meeting to discuss business took a sudden turn after a long night of drinking. "He started sort of forcibly kissing me," she recalled.

"I think ours was more of a consensual relationship for a time, but I feel like he did encourage a lot of drinking," she said.. Now, though, "I’m ashamed that I engaged with him in that way."

The woman said Gomez told her he was in the process of breaking off an engagement to another woman when they met, and she chose to believe him. One night, though, Gomez said he was unavailable because he had to help a young woman with her business; that woman turned out to be the 22-year-old gallery owner, who had posted on Instagram that she and Gomez were at Mercado Luna that night.

When she read about Delostrinos' allegations against Gomez, the woman who dated him for several years said, she was "not surprised at anything that she’s reported. That’s why I felt so compelled to talk" about her own experience, she said. "I just felt validated." Although her relationship with Gomez was "more consensual" than what he allegedly did to Delostrinos, she said, "I felt for her, because everything that happened to her was in line with the way he behaved with me."

"It's completely in line with his behavior around using his positions of power, through the government and his own network and business dealings, to prey on women of color"—like herself, the gallery owner, and Delostrinos.

Until recently, Delostrinos worked as the development director for the South Seattle nonprofit Young Women-Empowered, which offers mentorship and other programs for young women and trans, non-binary, and gender expansive youth. Her first meeting with Gomez came at a moment of crisis for her organization: Someone had set their van on fire, and the police department didn't seem to be doing anything about it. As a group that works with young women and trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive youth, Delostrinos said Y-WE was concerned the attack might be a hate crime, so she asked the mayor's office for help.

They sent Gomez.

During their initial meeting, Delostrinos recalled, Gomez mentioned he co-owned a creative coworking space for people of color called Kolors Studio, and the two started talking about potential partnerships. As someone who works with early-stage startups, she said, she figured, "He has connections, I have connections; if we pull our connections together, we can build something."

The two met four more times after that. Three of the meetings, Delostrinos' recalled, involved drinking—including one at Kolors, where Gomez and co-owner Armando Garzon were celebrating a business deal, according to the Seattle Police Department file on the case. "He pulled out a bottle of tequila and was like, 'Do you want to try this really expensive tequila?'"

The night Delostrinos says Gomez assaulted her, the two met for happy hour at the Charlotte Lounge inside the Lotte Hotel near City Hall, where mayoral staffers often went to drink after work, ostensibly to discuss a potential partnership between Kolors and Y-WE.

Gomez was running late after a barbecue for Harrell's office, where he had already been drinking, Delostrinos said. Before long, he was ordering shots for Delostrinos and himself while dropping "a lot of big names that he was associated with or that were associated with Kolors" and talking up his own business ventures, according to the police report.

By the time they left the bar, Delostrinos said, she didn't feel sober enough to drive home, so Gomez suggested they get food at Mercado Luna. There, Delostrinos recalled, the drinks kept flowing. Later, it occurred to Delostrinos that she didn't pay for anything that night. "I didn’t order. I didn’t even look at a menu."

According to the police report, Delostrinos ordered a Lyft three times but never got in one. Instead, she ended up in Gomez' car. The next thing she remembers clearly is waking up at Gomez' apartment in the middle of a sexual encounter to which she says did not consent. When she tried to leave, she said, she realized that she couldn't find her phone, her purse, or her keys, which she said was was completely out of character for her.

She doesn't remember much that happened after she left the restaurant, Delostrinos said. "I'm not sure how I got into his place. I couldn't tell you what the hallways look like."

The next day, "more hungover than I've ever been in my life," Delostrinos decided to go to the emergency room for a rape kit—a system for collecting and preserving biological evidence, such as hair, blood, and semen, for use in any future prosecution. As an advocate for restorative justice (and a woman of color), Delostrinos said she would have preferred a less punitive, more direct form of accountability, but she didn't want to give up any options.

After Delostrinos went public with her story, Kolors posted on Instagram that Gomez was no longer associated with the business. That post has since been removed. Garzon did not respond to questions.

A spokesman for Harrell's office, Jamie Housen, said Harrell put Gomez on leave as soon as Gomez let them know he was under investigation, but that Harrell only knew that the SPD investigation involved "allegations of improper sexual conduct on personal time—no details of the allegations were provided, including the severity of potential charges."

Housen said Harrell did not know Gomez had been accused of sexual assault until September 24, "after [Gomez] notified the Mayor’s Office that he was being investigated by SPD."

Asked why the mayor, who employs many women who would have been in frequent, direct contact with Gomez, didn't look into the allegations further or at least warn employees that Gomez was under investigation for a criminal sexual offense, Housen said he wanted "to allow the investigation to continue without an appearance of undue influence, attention, or interference."

"Our understanding is that SPD generally does not inform employers if an employee is being investigated. This preserves the integrity of the investigation, and in the case of the Mayor’s Office could create an appearance of a conflict of interest," Housen said. "This is difficult because we would have preferred to know of this allegation and details of such as soon as possible in order to make personnel decisions, but we would also not ask SPD to break their protocol creating risk for their investigation or to provide special treatment to our office."

SPD did not respond to questions about its protocol for telling city departments—including the mayor's office, which oversees SPD— about felony investigations into their employees.

In an internal email to staff the night Gomez resigned, Harrell said he took Delostrinos' allegations "incredibly seriously."

"Allegations of this nature are upsetting and can be retraumatizing," Harrell wrote. "Some of you may have had direct interactions with this person, and I recognize these allegations could further trigger intense emotional trauma."

That email, which was the first time Harrell acknowledged the allegations to his staff, came more than six months after the alleged sexual assault.

Harrell's office said there was never any indication that Gomez had any history of inappropriate behavior with women. Housen said the mayor's office found no records of any HR complaints against Gomez when they hired him in 2021, and "had not been put on notice of predatory behavior" since then However, several former colleagues, who did not want to speak on the record for fear of retaliation, said this was hard to believe, given that Gomez was a top mayoral staffer and part of his inner circle.

In a story on KUOW last week, former senior deputy mayor Monisha Harrell described this inner circle in more detail, calling the mayor's office a boys' club where she was often treated poorly by the men surrounding her uncle, Mayor Harrell.

One thing that may have helped inoculate Gomez against complaints from his coworkers is his compelling by-the-bootstraps personal story, which several former coworkers said he brought up frequently. Gomez' success despite long odds earned him local media attention, including a glowing profile on KUOW and a "40 Under 40" award from the Puget Sound Business Journal last year.

In 2022, the Seattle Times ran a feature about the "fight night" events Gomez held during big televised boxing matches at his Mercer Island apartment, where Gomez poured shots from his vast "collection of tequilas and mezcals" between boxing rounds. The article notes that Gomez and his brother "grew up fighting — sometimes for kicks, and sometimes to protect themselves."

Months after initiating the investigation into Gomez, Delostrinos acknowledges it's possible she'll never get closure. Even if victims do everything "right," including submitting to a rape kit immediately after an assault, the odds are long, and even a successful prosecution takes time. The King County Prosecutor's Office has not made a charging decision in the case, telling PubliCola they're still waiting on evidence from SPD.

But Delostrinos said she did achieve one goal already—making sure Gomez was no longer able to use his position at the mayor's office to prey on women.

"My goal was for community safety, and in order for that to happen, I knew that this person needed to be removed form this position where the mayor's office is sending him out to different community organizations," Delostrinos said. "The reason why I connected with him is because the mayor's office sent this person into the place that I worked."