Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott abruptly resigns<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nIn emails released to the AP last year as part of a records request, Walker’s wife, Donna Walker, in an email to her husband, said she thought describing the incident as “‘inappropriate comments’ is a huge understatement and you will be criticized for that. It was the conduct as well of inviting her to his room, and it sounds like there was some discrepancy as to how he greeted\/touched her. I think you need to say inappropriate conduct.”<\/p>\n
Walker said Mallott had not invited him to the meeting with Potts and said he did not know it was occurring.<\/p>\n
Potts said the meeting took place after a gathering of the governor’s advisory council on tribal relations at a state office building in downtown Anchorage, which included her boss, Mallott and, for a period, Walker.<\/p>\n
Potts said Mallott, whom she had met years earlier, during a break asked what she was doing afterward. “He said, ‘The governor and I would like to meet with you,’” she said. After the council meeting ended, she told him she was available. He invited her to a nearby hotel.<\/p>\n
“It did not even occur to me that this was unusual because I knew politicians sometimes have staff rooms at hotels and I trusted him as Lt. Governor and as an elder,” Potts said in a statement describing the encounter. Mallott was a longtime Alaska Native leader.<\/p>\n
After the meeting at the hotel, Potts wrote the power dynamic “actually scared me.” She immediately told two friends and said she told her boss, who suggested he tell Walker and she agreed. Her boss, Victor Joseph, was one of two Alaska Native leaders who called Walker’s chief of staff, Scott Kendall, the outlets reported, adding Joseph did not respond to their interview requests.<\/p>\n
Claire Richardson, then-Mallott’s chief of staff, said Mallott acknowledged telling Potts he found her attractive but seemed to think the incident ended “benignly.”<\/p>\n
In Mallott’s account to friend and colleagues, he said he intended to meet with Potts at a hotel coffee shop but it was closed, and denied deceiving her by claiming Walker would be there.<\/p>\n
“When he told us that when she came into the suite and he said, ‘I find you powerfully attractive,’ I think my jaw hit the floor,” Richardson wrote in response to questions from the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.<\/p>\n
Kendall called Walker, who, weeks before his reelection bid, was going to a debate. They agreed to talk later.<\/p>\n
Walker said Mallott, with whom he had a close bond, told him little about what happened, and he didn’t try to learn details.<\/p>\n
“It was described that things were said that made Jody uncomfortable,” Walker said.<\/p>\n
Walker suspended his re-election campaign shortly after Mallott’s resignation.<\/p>\n
Potts’ daughter, Quannah Chasing Horse Potts, 18, said she was never alone with Mallott and he never acted inappropriately toward her. The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported she was in Fairbanks the night of the incident.<\/p>\n
“I am not the victim in this case,” she said, adding she wants her mother to have peace.<\/p>\n
The outlets reported Potts signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of a civil settlement at Mallott’s request. Potts and Anthony Mallott declined to provide a copy.<\/p>\n
Anthony Mallott described it as “not your usual NDA, for any reason, as opposed to it was an agreement not to get into a ‘he said, she said.’” He described the settlement amount as “minor.”<\/p>\n
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