A young woman who alleges disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) once tried to lure her to a hotel room after sending her pervy messages on Snapchat says she constantly thinks about how she dodged a bullet — saying the close call left her shaken to the core.
Breaking her silence for the first time, Annika Albrecht told CBS News on Tuesday that the married congressmen started interacting with her soon after she met him on a class trip in college.
She claimed Swalwell, who initially started chatting to her under the guise of a professional mentorship, quickly asked for her Snapchat.
Eventually, she alleged, the messages crossed the line to “sexually inappropriate” before he hit her with the hotel invite.
“I keep thinking about how lucky I am that I didn’t go to that hotel,” Albrecht said, adding that she immediately stopped responding to him.
“It was very clear what the connotation was.”
Another victim has accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room in New York City in 2024.
The woman, who has not been publicly identified, claimed she was heavily intoxicated and woke up in her hotel room after a charity gala to find Swalwell assaulting her.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman, who no longer worked at Swalwell’s office at the time of the alleged assault, told CNN. “He didn’t stop.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has opened a sex assault probe into the sickening allegation.
Albrecht said she had spoken to some of Swalwell’s accusers in recent days.
“It was terrifying to get on the phone with those women and hear their stories about how they were drinking with him and suddenly woke up in bed next to him with no recollection of how they got there,” she said.
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Albrecht aired her alleged encounter with Swalwell after he abruptly resigned from Congress on Monday and dropped out of California’s gubernatorial race in the wake of the flurry of sexual assault and rape claims leveled against him.
Despite his fall from grace, Albrecht insisted that justice wouldn’t be served for her “until he can’t ever harm a woman ever again — and he has faced the consequences for the women that he has harmed.”
Swalwell’s decision to resign caps a swift political fall for the seven-term lawmaker.
A flurry of women have come forward in recent days to accuse him of various kinds of sexual misconduct stretching back years — including sending them unsolicited X-rated messages or nude photos on Snapchat.
Despite his resignation, the disgraced congressman has denied the allegations.
“I am deeply sorry to my family, staff, and constituents for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” he said in a statement on social media.
“I will fight the serious false allegation made against me. However, I must take responsibility and ownership for the mistakes I did make.”
