Back in May 2023, Mayor Muriel Bowser was nearing another showdown with House Republicans on Capitol Hill. Congress had just overturned its first District law in decades, and the GOP had called for another showy hearing to slam the overwhelmingly Democratic city as a crime-infested hellscape. This would, theoretically, be a huge moment for Bowser’s top federal lobbyist at the time, Eugene Dewitt Kinlow.
But as Bowser and her senior aides huddled up to strategize how best to parry Republican attacks on the District, Kinlow was nowhere to be found, four of his former colleagues tell Loose Lips. Instead, the head of the mayor’s Office of Federal and Regional Affairs was vacationing in Miami, these former D.C. staffers say.
“The mayor wasn’t prepared because of us,” one of Kinlow’s former employees tells LL. “He just vanished.”
Kinlow was getting paid more than $153,000 a year to be the mayor’s eyes and ears on the Hill, yet he wasn’t present for one of the office’s biggest events of the year. This frustrated his former employees, who believe they had to pick up the slack in his absence. But they also feel it was part of a broader pattern of missteps on Kinlow’s part.
“No one was really expecting him to be there,” another former staffer says.
Kinlow’s former colleagues, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects, have been thoroughly frustrated to see him launch a campaign for shadow senator on the strength of his experience working for Bowser. Two of Kinlow’s former employees reached out to LL independently not long after he published an article on the race, which has since narrowed to a head-to-head contest between Kinlow and Ward 2 attorney Ankit Jain. All four of the former staffers to speak with LL were unambiguous in expressing their dim opinion of Kinlow’s resume and his candidacy.
One former employee says he created a “toxic work environment” in the office. Another of Kinlow’s former staffers went so far as to file a complaint with the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Appointments in June 2023 documenting their concerns about the “difficulties” working for him, including a reference to Kinlow’s Miami trip. It also alleges he made a series of “inappropriate” remarks of a sexual nature, according to a copy of the complaint forwarded to LL. In one instance, this ex-staffer wrote that Kinlow asked several employees in the office if they’d seen a “commercial discussing that ‘sex is better without a condom’ in effort to create a fraternity-like culture,” which made them very uncomfortable, according to the complaint.
The complaint prompted a human resources investigation of Kinlow’s behavior, his former employees say, but it did not ultimately result in any disciplinary action against him. However, all of his former colleagues believe the incident is what led to the end of his eight-year tenure in the Bowser administration. Kinlow said at the time that he left on his own accord. The ex-staffers believe Kinlow only lasted in his role as long as he did because of his relationship with his direct supervisor, Bowser’s Senior Advisor Beverly Perry, who once worked with Kinlow’s father, Eugene G. Kinlow. The elder Kinlow was a longtime Ward 8 activist, school board member, and member of the city’s financial control board.
The younger Kinlow initially agreed to answer LL’s questions for this article, but did not respond to a detailed list of queries by press time. In a previous interview, he said that he left the administration to start a consulting firm. Kinlow argued at the time that he was instrumental in crafting statehood legislation that passed the House in 2021 and that he’s built meaningful relationships on the Hill during his years of advocacy work inside and outside of government. Tommy Wells, the longtime Ward 6 councilmember who briefly worked with Kinlow as Bowser’s top local lobbyist, recently wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Kinlow would be “ready day one” while endorsing his candidacy for shadow senator.
“What sets me apart from folks who are running right now, aside from just how long I’ve been in this, is how effective I’ve been,” Kinlow told LL in March. “No, we’re not a state. But there are things that have happened in Washington, D.C. and they didn’t happen by accident.”
Spokespeople for Bowser told LL that they “don’t comment on personnel matters” and declined to address specific questions for this story. Perry did not respond to a request for comment.
The former employees to speak with LL believe the constant staff turnover in Kinlow’s old office, commonly known as OFRA, provides clear evidence of his deficiencies as a manager.
Organizational charts submitted to the D.C. Council ahead of oversight hearings show that the entire office, generally composed of a deputy director and four associate directors under Kinlow, regularly changed over entirely from year to year during his tenure. LL counts a total of 17 different staffers that passed through the office dating back to 2017, a number that ex-employees say is unusually high for an office of its size. (The actual total may well be higher, but the Council’s records of these oversight documents are spotty, and several of the office’s responses to these yearly questions aren’t available online.)
“The turnover was just absolutely outrageous in that office,” one ex-employee says. The June 2023 complaint they filed against Kinlow attributes this to his “yelling, screaming, aggression, indignance and inappropriate open remarks,” describing a “full-fledged hostile work environment” marked by several meetings featuring outbursts by Kinlow.
Like his father, Kinlow has a long history of activism in Ward 8, and he spent eight years working with the leading statehood advocacy group DC Vote before joining Bowser’s government in 2015. But the ex-employees note that he does not have the sort of resume typical for such a position in a major city. Many of Kinlow’s employees boasted advanced degrees or years of experience at major lobbying firms when he did not. Most assumed he got the job in the first place through his connections to Perry.
The ex-staffers feel this dynamic drove what they perceived as his resentment toward them, even though Kinlow himself never seemed particularly focused on his job. All four former employees confided to LL that he was well-known around the office for running lengthy errands in the middle of the day or taking long lunches, particularly at Shelly’s Back Room, the longtime cigar bar downtown. To underscore this point, one former staffer provided LL with seven different screenshots of messages with Kinlow where he cited personal obligations to step away from work or arrive at the office late. In one instance, Kinlow wrote to his employees that he “made it downtown and realized my car registration expired” so he needed to go to the DMV before heading to work.
“He’s really good with networking and building relationships and being in the mix, and there’s value to that,” one ex-colleague says. “But the rubber meets the road when there are very serious issues on the table.”
One such issue that rankled Kinlow’s colleagues: federal relief funding for D.C. at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. As Congress hammered out how much money to hand out to each state in the early stages of the crisis, lawmakers ultimately decided to treat D.C. as if it was a territory, costing the District roughly $750 million in the process. It took the city well over a year’s worth of lobbying to finally win that money back in a subsequent bill.
This wasn’t exactly all Kinlow’s fault. Republican senators demanded this concession from Democrats as the negotiations played out and, as ever, D.C. became a useful bargaining chip. But Kinlow’s co-workers felt like he should’ve at least been “plugged in” enough to know that such a deal was coming together and “advise the mayor on a strategy on how to deal with it.” Yet he was completely in the dark, former employees say.
“I’ve never heard the mayor yell so much at a team” as when she found out about the COVID funding, recalls one ex-staffer. “The glass of the conference room was shaking. … We had to play catch up and pay lobbyists to help us for nine months to a year afterward.”
Kinlow’s former employees became particularly frustrated that he would make intense demands of their time. In one example from last year that proved particularly galling for these former staffers, Kinlow requested that someone from the office attend a congressional press conference the night of Feb. 14. The office’s employees replied that they were unavailable to do so in person and offered to watch the event’s livestream, but their responses drew Kinlow’s ire.
“If you can’t make these adjustment [sic], then I am going to make them to your time sheet,” Kinlow replied in an email forwarded to LL, which employees interpreted as a threat to dock their pay. “I know that today is Valentine’s day, but it is unacceptable that staff is unavailable for this evening.”
Several staffers wrote lengthy replies protesting his response, per the emails forwarded to LL and included in the 2023 complaint, arguing that they weren’t trying to skip an event for romantic pursuits, but rather to attend to other personal obligations. Multiple employees argued in emails and to LL that this was part of a frustrating pattern on Kinlow’s part.
“All of us work to make this office be responsive, informed, and available for immediate action at all points – including nights, mornings, and weekends,” one former staffer wrote to Kinlow. “There have been ever evolving procedures that [don’t] stay the same for everyone nor stay the same every week. Goalposts are constantly moved and more items are required then dropped … If there are to be procedures, they [must] be written, consistent, and everyone must be viewed as equals. They cannot be ad hoc, disadvantageous to some, and require constant reshuffling.” (This email was not written by one of the staffers who spoke to LL, but it was among the batch of emails provided by one of Kinlow’s ex-employees; they requested that LL not identify the author, who has not responded to a request for comment.)
The Valentine’s Day incident was one of several detailed in the ex-employee’s complaint against Kinlow, which they submitted to MOTA on June 27, 2023. The complainant wrote that they had been “targeted, bullied, lied on, smeared, and harassed” by Kinlow ever since they joined the office. They also noted that they raised these issues with Betsy Cavendish, Bowser’s general counsel.
In that same complaint, the staffer mentioned another unsettling incident. At a Dec. 7, 2022, gala celebrating Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, the ex-employee said, “Mr. Kinlow made me uncomfortable when he told me that ‘it is your job to keep me out of trouble with my wife while I’m out of town.”
“This not only made me uncomfortable due to the obvious implications of that statement, but also because his wife regularly works out of the OFRA office for hours at a time,” they added in the complaint. Kinlow’s wife, Tonya Vidal Kinlow, is well-known in D.C. political circles as a former school board member, top lobbyist for Children’s National Hospital, and chair of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
One former staffer, a woman who left OFRA last year, says she never heard Kinlow say anything inappropriate, but she still recalls one encounter in her Wilson Building office that made her uncomfortable. It was late in the day, when most people had already left, and Kinlow approached her. He said his shoe was untied and asked if she could tie it. She felt it was strange that Kinlow was asking her to bend over or otherwise get closer to him than she would like.
“I came up with some excuse like, ‘Oh, my back is hurting,’ and I wouldn’t do it,” she says.
One ex-staffer says Kinlow was known as “the cat with nine lives” or “Teflon Kinlow” for his ability to survive such controversies. Another former staffer provided LL a voice recording of a conversation with Perry from last fall where they raised some of these issues about Kinlow’s conduct. “The office is what the office is,” Perry replied on the recording, implying that Kinlow wouldn’t be going anywhere.
The city’s human resources department declined to punish Kinlow as a result of the complaint. The document does not say when the investigation was completed, but Kinlow officially left his job in December 2023, six months after it was filed. (Two ex-employees both tell LL that they believe the sexual harassment scandal involving John Falcicchio, which was coming to light right around that time, may have played a role, as the mayor couldn’t afford to have another top aide embroiled with such accusations.)
“The mayor wanted to sort of reshuffle the deck across the administration anyway,” one ex-staffer says, pointing to the raft of staff changes Bowser made as she entered her third term in office. “This had been building up for several years, and last year was just the breaking point.”
That’s why one former employee doesn’t believe Kinlow is likely to pick up much support from Bowser or her allies in his run for shadow senator. “He’s not Green Team, he’s Kinlow Team,” as the former employee put it, arguing he’s only “out for himself.” Nevertheless, LL did receive a flyer advertising an April 23 fundraiser for Kinlow’s campaign in Ward 4 with a bevy of establishment types listed among the host committee: Top Bowser pal Ben Soto, onetime Bowser boyfriend Jason Turner, and favored Bowser developer Chip Ellis are all on the list. So is the city’s other sitting shadow senator, Paul Strauss, who has been rumored to be supporting Kinlow’s candidacy.
Kinlow’s connections and long history in local politics—he has also run for the Council and state board of education seats in Ward 8—could certainly help him win in such a low-interest race. Jain, his only opponent, is a relative newcomer to D.C. politics, and, while he has picked up some high-profile progressive endorsements and raised a decent bit of money, many observers suspect that Kinlow’s decades’ worth of name ID among engaged voters will carry the day.
That is a big reason why Kinlow’s former employees say they chose to speak with LL. If Kinlow is going to run on his record in the Bowser administration, they want voters to know what they saw from him each day. One former staffer joked to LL that the behavior they described from Kinlow may not even be disqualifying for the role, considering the slew of controversies kicked up by the current shadow senator, Michael D. Brown.
