“We expect that the Senator will be fully cleared of any wrongdoing of these bogus, financially motivated claims,” claims Alvarado-Gil’s attorney, Ognian Gavrilov.
It’s commonly said that politics makes strange bedfellows. Typically, only figuratively so…
Political media is in a frenzy over a series of lawsuits aimed at California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil (SD-4). And with headlines like State senator forced chief of staff to perform sex acrobatics that left him with back, hip injuries: suit, how could one expect any less? While Alvarado-Gil is—perhaps rightly—taking the brunt of the force from the media storm, considerably less attention is being paid to the remarkable background of the former chief of staff himself.
Chad Condit is the son of Gary Condit, a former U.S. Congressman and once-prominent Democrat from California. In the early 2000’s, G. Condit’s political career was famously destroyed by an extramarital affair with an intern, Chandra Levy, who went missing shortly after the affair began and was later found murdered. Though the two cases are vastly different, the involvement of another Condit in a high-profile political sex scandal is fascinating, to say the least.
Of the two lawsuits Alvarado-Gil was hit with this month, the far more wild and sensational of the two is Condit’s. His suit claims that while serving as Alvarado-Gil’s chief of staff, he was repeatedly pressured into performing sexual favors for the Senator. Condit asserts “he was numbed” by the relationship and “acted without thinking and it went from there with Alvarado-Gil establishing her ability to dominate him.”
“I want you to kiss it and prove your loyalty,” Alvarado-Gil allegedly told Condit with “legs spread and turned towards [Condit], exposing her vagina,” according to the civil suit. Condit then performed oral sex on Alvarado-Gil, during which he herniated three discs in his back.
Condit claims he used the back injury as an excuse to avoid further advances, which supposedly resulted in retaliation from Alvarado-Gil—a disciplinary letter accusing him of inappropriate behavior. Alvarado-Gil has fiercely denied the allegations, and her lawyer calls Condit a “disgruntled former employee [who] has fabricated an outlandish story, presented without evidence, to get a payday.”
In either case, Alvarado-Gil hired a new chief of staff, Vanessa Bravo, in December 2022. For the next year and nine months, Condit would remain quiet about the relationship with his boss. That is, until mere weeks after Alvarado-Gil switched registration from Democrat to Republican and began openly criticizing her former party.
“The status quo under a supermajority Democratic rule in the legislature is simply not working for this state,” Alvarado-Gil said in a statement. “The pendulum has swung so far to the left that this is not the Democratic Party that I recognize.”
The timing seems conspicuous to some who have speculated that the suit is politically motivated.
Condit is himself a Democrat hailing from a family of prominent and well-connected Democrats. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2012 and for State Assembly in 2022, both times as a Democrat. His son, Channce Condit, served on the Ceres City Council before being elected to the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors in 2020 as a Democrat. In so doing, he joined his first cousin once removed, Buck Condit, who was already serving on the Board. That same year, another one of Chad Condit’s sons, Couper Condit, was also elected to Ceres City Council as a Democrat. Then, last year, Chad Condit’s youngest son, Gary M. Condit was appointed to the Ceres Planning Commission and is currently running for Mayor of Ceres as a Democrat.
With that many family members, the legality of certain procedures can get dicey. For instance, in July 2023, Alvarado-Gil and Channce Condit—the son of Alvarado-Gil’s top aide and male consort—posed for a photo celebrating a $5 million state grant awarded to make infrastructure improvements in Modesto. But, according to the Ceres Courier, the two “got into a convoluted dispute over the grant funds due to questions if chief of staff Chad Condit followed legal procedure to get the grant for his son’s district.”
Then there’s Chad Condit’s father—the most well-known of all—former U.S. Congressman Gary Condit (D). You may remember the name from national headlines in the early 2000’s surrounding an affair with 23 year old Chandra Levy. The two met in Fall of 2000. Only a few months later, in May of 2001, Levy went missing. Condit denied the affair. This was a lie. Levy’s skeletal remains would not be discovered until 2002, at which point, the body had decomposed for a year.
As late as 2010—nearly a decade after her murder—Condit still refused to answer in court as to whether or not the two had a sexual relationship. Despite this, the FBI found Condit’s semen in underwear retrieved from Levy’s apartment the month she went missing.
Eventually, investigators ruled out Condit as a suspect when an anonymous informant came forward alleging that 20-year-old Ingmar Guandique, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, was the killer. However, charges would be dropped due to a failure on behalf of the prosecutors to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense lawyers; namely, that cellmate Andrew Morales was a jailhouse informant, that he had perjured himself, and that his testimony was untrustworthy. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility ruled that the prosecutors had violated bar rules, and on July 28, 2016, the prosecuting attorneys announced that they would not proceed with the case against Guandique, instead opting to have him deported.
“The government’s case against Ingmar Guandique was based on a lie,” Jon Anderson, one of Guandique’s public defenders.
23 years later, Levy’s murder remains unsolved.
Though it should go without saying, it’s important to remember that all of us from Marie Alvarado-Gil to Gary Condit are innocent until proven guilty. Condit’s closeness to the Levy case—rightly or wrongly—and, some would argue, his dishonesty when questioned, completely tanked his political career. Alvarado-Gil’s case is completely different and, somehow, not quite as messy; but it certainly has the potential to cloud her political future.
Alvarado-Gil also faces a separate lawsuit involving two individuals who alleges that during a press conference on sex predators, the Senator and chief of staff Bravo instructed the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department to remove them from the event, thereby infringing on their First Amendment rights. Alvarado-Gil has denied these allegations.
There’s little doubt that, as the lawsuits progress, the public will be closely watching to see how these developments unfold.
