Halloran Offers Apology Following Explicit Reading Targeting Fellow Senators

LINCOLN–(KFOR Mar. 19)–While he says he’s not going to resign, Hastings Senator Steve Halloran on Tuesday offered an apology for reading of a passage from the memoir “Lucky” from Alice Sebold, which talks about a rape she suffered in college.

It came up Monday evening during discussion of a bill, LB 441, which looks to remove obscene materials from school libraries. Halloran offered his apology, but said it was a transcription of the book.

“I apologize for interjecting senators’ names in the middle of reading a transcription… should I have done that maybe not, but what I was trying to do was get their attention to what I was reading from the book,” Halloran said.

Halloran appear to have invoked the name fellow senator, Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha, into the story when he said “Senator Cavanaugh” but he implied later it was to her brother and fellow Omaha Senator John Cavanaugh.

“What you did in this conversation about obscenity is you took a story and inserted your colleagues into for effect,” John Cavanaugh said. “You created a new work that is far more prurient than the original content because you in essence sexualized the people you work with.”

Republican Senator Julie Slama from Dunbar called on her fellow Republican to resign.  She said if this kind of speech occurred in any other workplace it would likely result in someone losing their job, but not in the Nebraska Legislature.

“We can’t have an HR policy because this place is special,” Slama said. “It’s special because you can get up and talk about raping a colleague and not have any professional consequences.”

Slama then said, “Halloran, you should be ashamed of yourself for being incapable of apologizing and you should resign.”

The Legislature returned to the agenda, discussing a budget bill.