It’s the political equivalent of homecoming week for conservatives, a chance to revel over President Trump’s return to power and the dismantling of government institutions despised by the MAGA movement.
But as the Conservative Political Action Conference got underway outside Washington on Thursday, the group’s influential chairman, Matt Schlapp, was embroiled in another scandal involving allegations of sexual assault against him.
The convention comes a week after new accusations emerged in a report by the journalist Yashar Ali that Mr. Schlapp, a confidant of Mr. Trump, had groped a man at a bar in Virginia a few days earlier during a gathering of conservatives.
Several people have accused Mr. Schlapp of sexual assault in the past, allegations that he has denied and his allies have dismissed as an “attempt at character assassination.” Mr. Schlapp has not been charged with any crimes related to the accusations. A previous accuser received a $480,000 settlement after dropping his lawsuit against Mr. Schlapp, 57, who opened Thursday’s session with his usual conservative bombast.
“Are you glad that America is back on track?” Mr. Schlapp said. “Has it been a long, tedious four years? Are you ready to tell the whole world that America is ready to be America again?”
Mr. Schlapp appeared onstage with his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, who was Mr. Trump’s White House director of strategic communications during his first term, and has also played an outsize role at CPAC events. The next part of Thursday’s program featured Ms. Schlapp moderating a discussion with Vice President JD Vance, the first headliner at the showcase, which was expected to include speeches by Mr. Trump and the president’s billionaire ally, Elon Musk.
Mr. Schlapp has not publicly addressed the latest allegations against him. A lawyer who represented him in a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault, one that resulted in the settlement, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Neither did CPAC.
At CPAC, attendees said they had not heard about the allegations against Mr. Schlapp and were instead focused on celebrating Mr. Trump.
“I think a lot of times, you find allegations, you dig them up against people because you don’t like them,” said Antonio Chaves, 66, who said he was unaware of the claims against Mr. Schlapp. “So those things can be politically motivated, I don’t know.”
In the Feb. 13 report on Mr. Ali’s Substack site, The Reset, seven people who were at the bar with Mr. Schlapp on the night of Feb. 8 said that they saw him standing uncomfortably close to a group of men. The sources, whose names were withheld because they said that they feared retaliation, told Mr. Ali that Mr. Schlapp had followed some of the men and stood so close to them that it allowed his body to graze theirs.
The people who were interviewed said that one man’s girlfriend confronted Mr. Schlapp, who was accused by the man and several witnesses of grabbing and gripping the man’s genitals while looking directly in the man’s eyes, before Mr. Schlapp was briefly escorted out of the bar by a manager. According to the report, Mr. Schlapp returned to the bar, which led to a heated confrontation.
The report quickly ricocheted online, drawing the attention of the man who accused Mr. Schlapp in a 2023 lawsuit of “aggressively fondling” his “genital area in a sustained fashion” while the two were alone in a car.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Carlton Huffman, was working for the unsuccessful Senate campaign of Herschel Walker in Georgia at the time that he accused Mr. Schlapp of groping him.
Less than 20 minutes after the news broke that Mr. Schlapp had been accused again of sexual misconduct, Mr. Huffman chimed in on X, calling it the “least surprising headline ever.” And in another post, he said that if anyone needed a good lawyer, they should give his a call.
Mr. Huffman, 41, who dropped his lawsuit after receiving the $480,000 settlement last year, did not deny that the posts were his when reached by phone on Thursday, but declined to discuss the matter.
“We have resolved our differences,” he said of Mr. Schlapp. At the time of the settlement, Mr. Huffman said his accusations against Mr. Schlapp had been the result of a misunderstanding.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Huffman said that Mr. Schlapp had invited him for a drink in Atlanta after being assigned to drive Mr. Schlapp to a campaign event in October 2022 for Mr. Walker, the former football star who is Mr. Trump’s choice to be U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas. Mr. Huffman accused Mr. Schlapp of brushing his leg against his at one of the bars they visited. And when he drove Mr. Schlapp back to Mr. Schlapp’s hotel, the lawsuit said, the CPAC chairman grabbed Mr. Huffman’s leg and crotch inside the car.
Three people associated with Mr. Walker’s campaign told The New York Times at the time the lawsuit was filed that — after Mr. Huffman reported the episode the next morning — Mr. Schlapp was barred from future campaign events.
Before withdrawing his lawsuit against Mr. Schlapp, Mr. Huffman had accused CPAC officials of having knowledge of other previous accusations against the group’s chairman and failing to act.
On one occasion, the Washington Post reported, Mr. Schlapp was accused of stripping to his underwear and rubbing against another person without his consent, during a 2022 fund-raising trip to South Florida. In 2017, a CPAC employee accused Mr. Schlapp of trying to kiss him against his wishes, the newspaper reported, citing information from Mr. Huffman’s lawsuit.
Kellen Browning contributed reporting from CPAC.
